Language, Place, and Authenticity among K-pop Fans
Elaine Chun
University of South Carolina
The language of K-pop fans, or enthusiasts of Korean popular music, seemingly blurs modern boundaries between distinct nation-states. Crucially, producers of K-pop invite its consumers to orient to ‘places well beyond one’s own’. Not only does its musical aesthetic draw heavily on globally circulating genres such as hip-hop and R&B (Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook 2008), but K-pop’s carefully commodifed orientation to ‘other places’, most saliently through hybridities of Korean and English (e.g., Lee 2004; Starr, Moon & Lee 2012), arguably serves economic interests by catering to a global consumer base. This spirit of transnationalism may be further amplified in spaces such as YouTube, where K-pop fans communicate and share videos, despite living in disparate geographical places and, typically, never having met face-to-face (cf. Anderson 1983). In this paper, I explore the extent to which transnational K-pop fan discourses, replete with hybrid forms, challenge ideologies of authenticity with respect to how languages are mapped onto places (Johnstone 2014).
In particular, my analysis examines how language and place came to be represented in a video genre called K-pop reaction videos (Chun 2017), in which fans record their real-time reactions to K-pop music videos, and in response to which other fans post comments. Specifically, I explore fans’ representations of places across three embedded frames (the music video, the fan reaction video, and fan comments) and show how languages and their associated places are necessarily contextualized in relational terms. For example, fans interpreted K-pop performers’ language hybridities not necessarily as indexes of ‘blurred boundaries’ between places but as indexes of performers’ ‘outward orientation’—that is, a relation between ‘distinct’ and ‘ordered’ places, namely, as indexes of being ‘from Korea’ while aspiring to places ‘outside Korea’. Similarly, fans contextualized the hybrid language of reaction video creators (also fans) as indexes of their being ‘from the United States’ while orienting ‘to Korea’. In other words, I show how K-pop’s hybrid language, despite its transgressive appearance, largely became contextualized in fan discourses in relational ways, maintaining an ideology of authenticity with respect to language and place.
Elaine Chun
University of South Carolina
The language of K-pop fans, or enthusiasts of Korean popular music, seemingly blurs modern boundaries between distinct nation-states. Crucially, producers of K-pop invite its consumers to orient to ‘places well beyond one’s own’. Not only does its musical aesthetic draw heavily on globally circulating genres such as hip-hop and R&B (Alim, Ibrahim, & Pennycook 2008), but K-pop’s carefully commodifed orientation to ‘other places’, most saliently through hybridities of Korean and English (e.g., Lee 2004; Starr, Moon & Lee 2012), arguably serves economic interests by catering to a global consumer base. This spirit of transnationalism may be further amplified in spaces such as YouTube, where K-pop fans communicate and share videos, despite living in disparate geographical places and, typically, never having met face-to-face (cf. Anderson 1983). In this paper, I explore the extent to which transnational K-pop fan discourses, replete with hybrid forms, challenge ideologies of authenticity with respect to how languages are mapped onto places (Johnstone 2014).
In particular, my analysis examines how language and place came to be represented in a video genre called K-pop reaction videos (Chun 2017), in which fans record their real-time reactions to K-pop music videos, and in response to which other fans post comments. Specifically, I explore fans’ representations of places across three embedded frames (the music video, the fan reaction video, and fan comments) and show how languages and their associated places are necessarily contextualized in relational terms. For example, fans interpreted K-pop performers’ language hybridities not necessarily as indexes of ‘blurred boundaries’ between places but as indexes of performers’ ‘outward orientation’—that is, a relation between ‘distinct’ and ‘ordered’ places, namely, as indexes of being ‘from Korea’ while aspiring to places ‘outside Korea’. Similarly, fans contextualized the hybrid language of reaction video creators (also fans) as indexes of their being ‘from the United States’ while orienting ‘to Korea’. In other words, I show how K-pop’s hybrid language, despite its transgressive appearance, largely became contextualized in fan discourses in relational ways, maintaining an ideology of authenticity with respect to language and place.
How Geographic and Social Mobility have Shaped the Meanings of Pittsburgh Speech
Barbara Johnstone
Carnegie Mellon University
“Pittsburghese” is a set of linguistic forms and practices that have been enregistered as a “dialect” associated with the US city of Pittsburgh (Johnstone, 2013). Pittsburgese started to emerge in the Pittsburgh imagination when Pittsburghers, once relatively isolated geographically and culturally, became mobile and thus in a position to notice that they spoke differently than people elsewhere and that the way they talked could be linked with where they were from (Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson, 2006). One particularly important cause of geographic mobility was the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when many thousands of young Pittsburghers were forced to move away to find work. In earlier research, Dan Baumgardt and I noted the important role played by members of this diaspora in discourse about Pittsburghese (Johnstone & Baumgardt, 2004).
This paper continues the project of exploring the role of economically-driven mobility in creating and circulating ideas about what local speech sounds like and what it means, ideas that shape who uses Pittsburghese for what purposes. Now, however, I focus on the role of young people who have stayed in or moved to Pittsburgh. In-migration of well-educated young people has increased over the course of the 21st century as a consequence of Pittsburgh’s economic revival, and more young Pittsburghers are finding it possible to stay in the city rather than moving away for work. On the basis of multi-modal semiotic analysis of a number of artifacts representing Pittsburgh speech that are marketed to this demographic, as well as interviews with members of this group, I explore the historical, ideological, and material factors which have led these Pittsburghers to re-imagine Pittsburghese as a marker of urban hipness. I focus in particular on the role of changing ideas about social class in this process.
Barbara Johnstone
Carnegie Mellon University
“Pittsburghese” is a set of linguistic forms and practices that have been enregistered as a “dialect” associated with the US city of Pittsburgh (Johnstone, 2013). Pittsburgese started to emerge in the Pittsburgh imagination when Pittsburghers, once relatively isolated geographically and culturally, became mobile and thus in a position to notice that they spoke differently than people elsewhere and that the way they talked could be linked with where they were from (Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson, 2006). One particularly important cause of geographic mobility was the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when many thousands of young Pittsburghers were forced to move away to find work. In earlier research, Dan Baumgardt and I noted the important role played by members of this diaspora in discourse about Pittsburghese (Johnstone & Baumgardt, 2004).
This paper continues the project of exploring the role of economically-driven mobility in creating and circulating ideas about what local speech sounds like and what it means, ideas that shape who uses Pittsburghese for what purposes. Now, however, I focus on the role of young people who have stayed in or moved to Pittsburgh. In-migration of well-educated young people has increased over the course of the 21st century as a consequence of Pittsburgh’s economic revival, and more young Pittsburghers are finding it possible to stay in the city rather than moving away for work. On the basis of multi-modal semiotic analysis of a number of artifacts representing Pittsburgh speech that are marketed to this demographic, as well as interviews with members of this group, I explore the historical, ideological, and material factors which have led these Pittsburghers to re-imagine Pittsburghese as a marker of urban hipness. I focus in particular on the role of changing ideas about social class in this process.
Images of Masculinity and Territoriality surrounding candidate Trump’s visit to Mexico
Norma Mendoza-Denton
University of California, Los Angeles
In August of 2016, ten weeks before the United States presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump visited the presidential palace in Mexico City at the invitation of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN). In the wake of his visit, a barrage of images, memes and video clips were produced to mock and comment on his visit. This paper analyzes the semiotics of those images and their metonymic relation wherein Trump and EPN respectively stand for their countries in scenarios as abusive and jilted lovers, as iconized Mexican toys such piñatas and baleros, and as the dicent-interpretant protagonists of popular movies such as Dumb and Dumber. A recurrent anxiety in these images involves the territorial and political humiliation of Mexico at the hands of the United States, in addition to the gendered humiliation of EPN at the hands of Trump. Possible gendered rescues include turning Trump over to megacriminal El Chapo or to megamillionaire Carlos Slim, calling respectively on figure/ground (Peirce 1982-1984) relations of sociosexual capital of masculinity and of monetary capital. The relations involved are considered in light of recent semiotic-theoretical advances in theorizing iconicity, and rhematicity (Gal 2013).
Norma Mendoza-Denton
University of California, Los Angeles
In August of 2016, ten weeks before the United States presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump visited the presidential palace in Mexico City at the invitation of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN). In the wake of his visit, a barrage of images, memes and video clips were produced to mock and comment on his visit. This paper analyzes the semiotics of those images and their metonymic relation wherein Trump and EPN respectively stand for their countries in scenarios as abusive and jilted lovers, as iconized Mexican toys such piñatas and baleros, and as the dicent-interpretant protagonists of popular movies such as Dumb and Dumber. A recurrent anxiety in these images involves the territorial and political humiliation of Mexico at the hands of the United States, in addition to the gendered humiliation of EPN at the hands of Trump. Possible gendered rescues include turning Trump over to megacriminal El Chapo or to megamillionaire Carlos Slim, calling respectively on figure/ground (Peirce 1982-1984) relations of sociosexual capital of masculinity and of monetary capital. The relations involved are considered in light of recent semiotic-theoretical advances in theorizing iconicity, and rhematicity (Gal 2013).
Differential Language Evolution Between Disempowered Diasporas: The Colonial vs. the Post-World War II Periods
Salikoko Mufwene
University of Chicago
I focus first on diasporas that were formed by European indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and East Indian contract laborers in plantation settlement colonies of the Caribbean, North America, and the Indian Ocean. I compare their acculturation and experiences of language shift with those of immigrants from former European exploitation colonies and plantation settlement colonies to the European metropoles and to North America since after World War II. Interpreting the (partial) acculturation experiences of the latter through the identification of places such as Little India (in London), les banlieues (in France), Petit Sénégal (in Harlem), Little Haiti in Miami, and Matonge in Brussels, I propose an ecological account of their heritage language retention and why it is contrary to the language loss experiences of their earlier counterparts. I show how local factors such as population structure, the interaction patterns that ensue, and unequal economic power interact with differences in the local consequences of world-wide globalization to explain differential language evolution in diasporic populations. I extrapolate from these case studies to argue that the subject matter of language endangerment and loss is more complex and diverse than assumed in the current scholarship, which has capitalized excessively on population size and political power.
Salikoko Mufwene
University of Chicago
I focus first on diasporas that were formed by European indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and East Indian contract laborers in plantation settlement colonies of the Caribbean, North America, and the Indian Ocean. I compare their acculturation and experiences of language shift with those of immigrants from former European exploitation colonies and plantation settlement colonies to the European metropoles and to North America since after World War II. Interpreting the (partial) acculturation experiences of the latter through the identification of places such as Little India (in London), les banlieues (in France), Petit Sénégal (in Harlem), Little Haiti in Miami, and Matonge in Brussels, I propose an ecological account of their heritage language retention and why it is contrary to the language loss experiences of their earlier counterparts. I show how local factors such as population structure, the interaction patterns that ensue, and unequal economic power interact with differences in the local consequences of world-wide globalization to explain differential language evolution in diasporic populations. I extrapolate from these case studies to argue that the subject matter of language endangerment and loss is more complex and diverse than assumed in the current scholarship, which has capitalized excessively on population size and political power.
“Se me traba la lengua” (“I get tongue-tied”): proficiency, identity, and the second-generation dilemma
Amelia Tseng
Georgetown University
American University
Smithsonian Institution
This paper addresses the relationship between language and diasporic place by examining the ways in which ideologies about heritage languages, culture, and identity are understood across immigrant generations by Latinos in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and the consequences of this understanding for identity construction and linguistic behavior (Potowski & Carreira, 2004; Tseng, 2017). I demonstrate that prescriptive attitudes about proficiency, shared ideologies of good bilingualism, and a symbolic one-to-one relationship between heritage language, cultural identification, and group membership function as focal points of identity construction. Identity construction and language negotiation are also affected by dynamics in the broader social environment, in particular ethnoracial coding (Bailey, 2000). The essentialist constructs underlying these language ideologies cause tension and linguistic insecurity for second-generation immigrants and erase the reality of diverse multilingual competencies and hybridity. By integrating fine-grained insights into language ideology and identity construction into the broader context of community bilingualism and heritage language maintenance in a diverse global city (Tseng, in preparation), the paper sheds new light into the mutually referential relationship between language and identity under conditions of mobility, contact, and change.
Amelia Tseng
Georgetown University
American University
Smithsonian Institution
This paper addresses the relationship between language and diasporic place by examining the ways in which ideologies about heritage languages, culture, and identity are understood across immigrant generations by Latinos in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, and the consequences of this understanding for identity construction and linguistic behavior (Potowski & Carreira, 2004; Tseng, 2017). I demonstrate that prescriptive attitudes about proficiency, shared ideologies of good bilingualism, and a symbolic one-to-one relationship between heritage language, cultural identification, and group membership function as focal points of identity construction. Identity construction and language negotiation are also affected by dynamics in the broader social environment, in particular ethnoracial coding (Bailey, 2000). The essentialist constructs underlying these language ideologies cause tension and linguistic insecurity for second-generation immigrants and erase the reality of diverse multilingual competencies and hybridity. By integrating fine-grained insights into language ideology and identity construction into the broader context of community bilingualism and heritage language maintenance in a diverse global city (Tseng, in preparation), the paper sheds new light into the mutually referential relationship between language and identity under conditions of mobility, contact, and change.