Landscaping Multilingualism and Superdiversity in Bellville's CBD (Cape Town) - Quentin Emmanuel Williams - South Africa

The following study investigates how multilingual landscapes serves as infrastructures of superdiversity. "Superdiversity" is a concept designed to capture new forms of diversity, or diversity of diversities, in societal dynamics during the last 20 years. It was originally conceived as a way of theorizing the implications in the European context of new migratory waves and new forms of translocal linkage that could no longer be contained within old epistemologies of identity and principles of multicultural ism. In the present dispensation of a global we find that language, especially practices and organizations of multilingualism, offer some of the most transparent windows on the complexity and unpredictability of superdiverse moments. Thus, the specific qu estions that is posed in this project are the following: how do speakers get to grips with superdiversity in a political context, such as South Africa, that is defined by dislocation, relocation and anomie? How do forms of talk, found across a material se miotics, allow for the articulation of life-styles and aspirations that break with the historical faultlines of social and racial oppression? In order to approach these questions, I explore the discursive role that spaces of consumption play in landscapin g multilingualism; but at the same time argue that it also necessary to consider an alternative notion of language politics in the notion of linguistic citizenship and a more expansive view on what constitutes language, namely, a material ethnography of m ultilingualism.