The context of superdiversity: being ‘enough’ or ‘too much’

Vertovec (2007) uses the word “superdiversity” to describe our contemporary context of high mobility, fluidity, and multiple intersections of identity. Superdiversity is used for the sake of brevity. Superdiversity refers to a “multiplication of significant variables that affect where, how and with whom people live” (p. 1025). These variables are “mutually conditioning”, and it is the “interplay” of these variables that is indexed by the term “superdiversity” (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1025). It is not just that these axes of difference intersect, but that, like a chemical reaction, they change the nature of difference itself. Meissner and Vertovec (2015) remark that the term has erroneously come to be used simply to refer to “more” ethnicities or categories of difference. When in fact what is crucial to the context of superdiversity is not just that there are more, or new forms of identity, but that the way they intersect (Crenshaw, 1993, Yuval-Davis, 2006) requires new forms of analysis. The term superdiversity may seem similar to the concept of intersectionality, however I choose to use superdiversity here as it

refers more to the context in which subjects find themselves, as opposed to the intersecting axes of difference that comprise an actual subject position.

These new forms of complexity point to new and complex patterns of inequality, prejudice, and segregation (Vertovec, 2007). As there are “new experiences of space and ‘contact’”,

“new forms of cosmopolitanism and creolisation” (Vertovec, 2007, p. 1045), there are also new competitions for power, money and prestige. These types of conglomerates of power might look quite different to what they did in the past. However, this does not mean we cannot trace the genealogies and histories of power, inequality and so forth. It just means that we need to be alert to how, within categories of difference, it is not enough merely to claim that there are different expressions of identity, but also to trace how these are connected to issues of access, power, resources and inequality.

The local and global are constitutive of each other through novel flows of people, capital, ideas, cultures, and languages. I argue that much of the research conducted within a post-structural framework on language and identity in South Africa implicitly references aspects related to the context of superdiversity. This research however, would be much more

productively analysed if the concept of superdiversity was brought more explicitly to bear on our context. This is because although the epistemological orientation of this research is supposedly toward openness and fluidity, fluidity or openness is still treated as a variance within categories.

Superdiversity points to the need to use categories as terms under erasure (Hall, 1996), as outlined in the previous chapter, by attending to modes of self-styling, where people “orient towards entirely different logics in different segments of life” (Blommaert & Varis, 2015, p.

4). This means that no one category of identification holds across contexts in the same way.

People’s experiences can be explained in a more nuanced manner than is possible with the broad strokes of oppressor/oppressed, local/global, mother-tongue/colonial language binaries.

We see that positioning takes place continuously, and is always contingent on a range of factors. For example, how I feel about English in one context may be entirely different to how I feel about it in another. It is for this reason that Blommaert (2012) emphasises the need to analytically engage with complexity rather than with plurality or multiplicity. This is

because the idea of the plural can imply a completeness within a category, as opposed to complexity within a category.

An example that illustrates the context of superdiversity can be found in Stroud (2001)’s research on language in Mozambique. Stroud (2001) distinguishes between language citizenship and language human rights when thinking through challenge of a monolingual ideology. The latter, he argues, is a product of a neoliberal agenda, while language

citizenship aims to engage with social categories of language and identity much more critically. He argues that there should not be a false dichotomous relationship between learning a “global” or “metropolitan” language (the colonial language in our case), and sacrificing one’s home or indigenous language. Both should be able to co-exist. He thus makes a move against the zero sum game between indigeneity and assimilation of the colonial language and culture. Situating this research in the context of superdiversity, we are able to trace the complexity of attachment to both the indigenous and the metropolitan language within one subject. By troubling our understanding of the competition between the colonial and metropolitan language and the home-language and culture, and how both may exist within one subject, we enter directly into the debates on identity and authenticity presented in chapter 3.

In the context of superdiversity, where nuanced responses to differing contexts are

articulated, one can appreciate how reading other identities becomes a project of assessing individuals in terms of “‘degrees’ of authenticity” (Blommaert & Varis, 2015, p. 6).

Blommaert and Varis (2015) use the idea of “enoughness” to articulate this measuring up to imaginary categories of belonging. If one has enough of the “emblematic features” of a particular group, then one might be characterised as an “authentic member of an identity category” (Blommaert & Varis, 2015, p. 6). Of course, what these emblematic features may be is a slippery business, constructed out of ideological bits and pieces about what identity category “X” should look like. Bourdieu’s work in Distinction (1984) illustrates this point about “enoughness”. One has to display belonging to a group with an effortlessness that characterises one as being “‘enough” of X. As soon as some kind of effort is identified in the performance of being a member of that category, one’s authenticity is called into question.

Blommaert and Varis (2015) call this a “fluency” (p. 7) that must be part of one’s habitus.

Developing this fluency is to be au fait with the rules of the game. However, the rules of game, the boundaries and judgments of “enoughness” themselves, are constantly shifting.

In the context of superdiversity, it is not the broad differences between people that are used to qualify a person as authentic or inauthentic. Rather, because of the diffuse modes of

constructing the self, it is the minutiae of our choices that become important in positioning us in particular ways. Accent (as a social marker) is read off the body with attention to fine-grained differences in modes of speech that weigh-in on judgments of authenticity.

Blommaert and Varis (2015b) accurately note that, “details are metonymically inflated so as to stand for something far bigger and more profound” (p. 23). This means that small details of the habitus are used to refer to fairly broad categories of difference, to locate people socially, and potentially indenture them in ideological categories. For instance, Yagman and Keswell, (2015) found that in the South African context “accentedness is a statistically significant predictor of trust” (p. 4) with varying implications for those of difference race, class and gender backgrounds.