Introduction
As mass media construct the communicative space of the nation-state, all of a nation’s languages, dialects, and language varieties, and the speech communities associated with them, are automatically drawn into relations with one another. Some languages and varieties may be dominant with a greater quantity and quality of media products, some may be represented only minimally, and still others may be completely absent, either silenced or ignored.
(Spitulnik Reference Spitulnik1992:335)I don’t understand what they say. … I often flip through the channels, and I don’t understand. And then I feel bored and no fun. I would walk outside to breathe some fresh air. Then I come back to turn on the TV again, and I don’t understand. But I just watch anyway. What else can I do? (A-ma, 86-year-old, Hoklo-monolingual speaker in Taiwan)
Television not only entertains and informs but also plays a key role in the political economy of language (Gal Reference Gal1989, Irvine Reference Irvine, Brenneis and Macaulay1996). Current studies by sociolinguistically oriented scholars have shown that media contribute to the creation and reproduction of sociolinguistic inequalities by giving preference to dominant languages over others (e.g., Garrett Reference Garrett2007; Spitulnik Reference Spitulnik1992, Reference Spitulnik2000) and by circulating, overtly or covertly, negative images associated with non-dominant languages and their speakers (e.g., Hill Reference Hill1999, Reyes Reference Reyes2007). Given the instrumental role of language in communicative practices of television viewing, one would expect minority speakers’ daily media encounters to involve an intense awareness of their sociolinguistic marginalization. However, while there is a growing body of literature on the production/reproduction of linguistic inequality in mass media (Garrett Reference Garrett2007; Hill Reference Hill1999; Reyes Reference Reyes2007; Spitulnik Reference Spitulnik1992, Reference Spitulnik2000), relatively little attention has been paid to the role played by language barriers in minority speakers’ actual engagements with and interpretations of television.
Contemporary scholars of media reception have amply demonstrated audiences’ agentive role in interpreting media messages.Footnote 1 Notably, a growing body of literature in cultural anthropology has focused on how viewers – particularly women – fashion themselves through their “negotiated readings” (Mankekar Reference Mankekar1999:244) of media messages in non-Western societies that seek to construct hegemonic notions of gender, class, and nation (e.g., Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod1993, Reference Abu-Lughod2005; Friedman Reference Friedman2006; Mankekar Reference Mankekar1999). These authors have shown how media open a space for women to reflect on their lives in relation to shifting social, political, and cultural discourses.
However, just as sociolinguistically oriented scholars have under-analyzed individual viewers’ interactions with media, scholars of media reception have rarely addressed linguistic dimensions of social actors’ encounters with media. Their focus has been exclusively on viewers’ engagement with the textual content of programming, assuming that “language operates in a strictly referential function as a transparent means of conveying content” (Spitulnik Reference Spitulnik1993:297). The fact that media provide an important site of re-creating sociolinguistic inequality begs the question of how the choice of linguistic code conveys and indexes meanings that engage viewers in processes of identity construction through media consumption.
This article explores how television viewing becomes a site of sociolinguistic marginalization experienced by minority speakers, through the examination of an elderly Taiwanese woman’s daily encounters with television. Like many Taiwanese elders, “A-ma” (a Hoklo term used to address one’s grandmother or another elderly woman) was uneducated, illiterate, and monolingual in Hoklo.Footnote 2 However, most television programs are in the high-prestige language of Mandarin,Footnote 3 whose predominance denied A-ma the right to listen to and comprehend most shows. Building on the above two strands of research, I discuss how unequal rights to understand the content of television programs mediated A-ma’s viewing experiences and her negotiations of sociolinguistic marginality over the course of her media use.
Treating television viewing as a communicative event interconnected with others in her life, I examine A-ma’s engagement within and across two communicative encounters that involve television – viewing television and family discussions of the shows. Specifically, I discuss how language regimes,Footnote 4 embodied in language hierarchy on television and within the family, shape A-ma’s television viewing practices, both solitarily and with her family. Although A-ma did not understand the referential meaning of most shows because of language barriers, she recognized socially indexical meanings about the rankings of languages and how she was positioned and excluded. The unequal participant structure in the dynamic interactions between the two overlapping communicative events of television viewing and family discussions of the shows doubly marginalized A-ma: Her limited access to the messages on television prevented her from contributing to the discussions unless family members translated into Hoklo for her. A-ma remained a peripheral participant across these communicative encounters, constantly confronted with her marginal sociolinguistic identity vis-à-vis Mandarin-dominant programming and her bilingual (Mandarin–Hoklo), literate family members. Over the course of her daily television viewing, A-ma constructed, negotiated, and resisted her identity as an uneducated and illiterate person. This study illustrates that routine discursive practices of television watching offer an optimal site for exploring individuals’ experiences and interpretations of sociolinguistic marginalization.
The structure of this article begins with the theoretical framework. Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981, Reference Bakhtin1986) notion of dialogic construction of identity offers useful analytical tools to explore how identity is constructed at the nexus between the immediate context of television viewing and the social history of linguistic inequality. To make sense of A-ma’s self-related interpretive framework, I provide a sketch of the sociolinguistic background of Taiwan, highlighting the changing vitality and ideologies of Hoklo in the past century. I then turn to A-ma herself, whose life history sets the stage for analyses of her television-watching experiences and identity construction. The centerpiece of this article is a detailed discussion of how A-ma constructs her self-identity by positioning herself against various voices evoked through her solitary and family television viewing. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic inequality as manifested in unequal rights to understand media and the linguistic dilemma for minority speakers at the interstices of media consumption and face-to-face communication.
Television-Mediated Dialogic Construction of Identity
I will explore how A-ma’s self-identity is constituted in her engagement with television viewing and family conversations about television. In particular, I will discuss how A-ma participated as a marginalized listener and comprehender of messages from and about television, and how she interpreted and responded to her peripheral participant roles. Although A-ma was also marginalized as a speaker, her marginalization as a listener and comprehender is especially poignant, given the privileging of active listening in Taiwanese ideologies of communication (Fung, Miller & Lin Reference Fung, Miller, Lin, Pratt and Fiese2004, Miller, Fung & Koven 2007, etc). Bakhtin’s notion of dialogical construction of identity offers a useful analytical tool to understand these issues.
Television viewing as a communicative event
I treat television watching as a communicative event (Hymes 1996[1962]). It is part of the social actor’s communicative encounters, which also include face-to-face communication, inner speech, and other types (Agha Reference Agha2007). As one’s life is a series of communicative events (Wortham Reference Wortham2001:146), one’s identity is inevitably constructed within and across the “communicative chain processes of diverse kinds” (Agha Reference Agha2007:69) in which, following Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981, one’s self is positioned and repositioned with respect to others (Wortham Reference Wortham2001).
Although Bakhtin does not specifically discuss television watching, the communicative process he describes in speech communication can very well be applied to it (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1986).Footnote 5 To begin with, in television-mediated communication, the viewer/listener engages with “speaking persons” (e.g., news anchormen or characters in the serials). The viewer does not just passively watch, but engages in “actively responsive understanding” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1986:68). Her active understanding is actualized in more complex forms (in what we now call a “participation framework”) than face-to-face communication. She may articulate her response immediately in the form of running commentaries to her co-viewers or even to herself when watching alone. Or she may have “silent responsive understanding” with “a delayed reaction” that occurs in “subsequent speech or behavior” (1986:69), when she discusses what she watches on television, or when she engages in an inner dialogue reflecting on the shows. In the present case, A-ma’s “actively responsive understanding” was directed predominantly to the “narrating event” of television viewing instead of the “narrated event” of the content of the shows.
Such conceptualization of television watching provides two analytical advantages. First, it allows us to consider television viewers/listeners not as passive recipients of the messages on television, but as active social agents engaging with speaking persons, and by extension, with the producers of the shows. Second, it permits us to use Bakhtin’s notion of a dialogic self to explore how one constructs identity within and across communicative encounters that involve television.
Voice, authoritative discourse, and internally persuasive discourse
Three concepts are central to Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic construction of identity: “voice,” “authoritative discourse,” and “internally persuasive discourse.” According to Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981, no utterance is neutral. Each has a history of being used by certain social groups and has thus acquired a certain “voice” or point of view. In other words, in addition to its referential meaning, any given utterance has complex social meanings that are achieved through the use of indexical devices such as intonation and voice quality, variations in fluency, phonology, syntax, shifts in pronouns, reported speech, or language choice (Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995, Koven Reference Koven2002, Wortham Reference Wortham2001). In speaking, social actors “author” themselves by orchestrating and aligning with or against certain voices. Their identities emerge through the positions or stances they take toward these voices (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain 1998). As such, one’s identity is not fixed or universal, but forever becoming in dialogic relations to a multiplicity of voices.
Moreover, Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:342) distinction between two kinds of discourse – “authoritative” and “internally persuasive” – further explicates the complex process of authoring and adds a power dimension to the process of one’s “ideological becoming” (see Mitra Reference Mitra2008, Tappan Reference Tappan2005, Tsitsipis Reference Tsitsipis2004). Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:342) argues that “the struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these [two] categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness.” Authoritative discourse is “someone else’s word” (1981:345), which is “indissolubly fused with its authority – with political power, an institution, a person” and “stands and falls together with that authority,” for example, religious, moral, and political dogma or the words of a father, adults, or teachers (1981:342–43). Moreover, Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:343) argues that “[authoritative discourse] demands our unconditional allegiance. … One must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it.” Therefore, at the social level, authoritative discourse is dominant and historically specific, and changes over time. For example, in Taiwan’s modern history, the authoritative discourse that infused Japanese with prestige in the colonial period was replaced by the authoritative voice that designated Mandarin as the only legitimate language in the postwar “KMT” period.
In contrast to authoritative discourse, internally persuasive discourse is “half-ours and half-someone else’s” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:345). It occurs when one “appropriates” or “assimilates” authoritative discourse. It is in constant dialogue or struggle with authoritative discourse and thus is historically anchored and subject to change as well. As Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:345–46) argued, “[Internally persuasive discourse] does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions, it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses.” As such, one’s identity is constructed through the struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses and in “reaccentuating” existing internally persuasive discourse. In my discussion below, I will show how A-ma’s self-identity emerged from her struggle between various authoritative voices, mediated through the languages used on television and in the family’s discourse, and her internally persuasive voices.
Voicing in the listener role
Bakhtin-inspired scholars have fruitfully used the notion of “voice” to study identity construction by tracing how speakers invoke, juxtapose, and shift among voices to “claim, comment on or disavow different identities and evaluative stances at different moments” (Keane Reference Keane2000:272; cf. Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995, Koven Reference Koven2002, Wortham Reference Wortham2001). These scholars overwhelmingly privilege the speaker role and its relationship with identity construction. However, Bakhtin’s work suggests the possibility of studying the dialogic process of the listener’s identity construction. In his discussion of the interaction between novelists’ and readers’ worlds, Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:252) writes, “[W]e not only see and perceive it [the literary work], but in it we can always hear voices (even while reading silently to ourselves).” Similarly, in media reception, when watching quietly we not only see the shows but also listen to different social voices and dialogize with them in the form of inner speech. Therefore, just as a speaker articulates her sense of self by aligning with or against voices evoked in her speech, a listener/viewer of the media constructs her self-identity by assimilating voices in the shows.
In the present case, relevant voices are largely mediated through the producers’ choice of linguistic code. Given the dominance of Mandarin programming, A-ma had limited access to the content of shows, and for that reason she had little to say when family members discuss them, albeit in her own language, Hoklo. While she could not engage fully with referential meanings within and across these two communicative encounters, she responded to interactional meanings at the level of the communicative event with a constant focus on her marginal participation, induced by language barriers, in both listening and speaking. Most work on linguistic inequality pays more attention to unequal rights to speak,Footnote 6 but this study calls for attention to unequal rights to listen and understand, and their interconnections with unequal rights to speak.
Attention to the “listener’s” identity construction is needed for television-mediated communication because viewers most often watch television silently. In this sense, they inhabit the listener role in the communicative event. Such focus is also significant – and necessary – if one seeks to understand social actors who, like A-ma, can hear strings of meaningless speech sounds but cannot listen to or comprehend the content because of lack of access to the linguistic or cultural resources necessary for the interactions in question. Such cases of marginalized listeners beg the questions: How does the listener take up voices invoked by meaningless speech? And how are the non-comprehender/non-speaker roles in the communicative encounter related to her “ideological becoming”?
Methodologically, studying the (marginalized) listener’s identity construction as enacted during the communicative encounter is challenging, because the analyst is faced with silence. In this study, I approached the task by observing how A-ma watched television and interacted with family members, as well as interviewing her about her encounters with and around television. In a sense, the format of the interview gives the marginalized listener/speaker a space to “voice” herself. Without doubt, my position as both researcher and A-ma’s granddaughter facilitated her articulation of her sense of self in the interviews. Without this relationship, it might be difficult for an analyst to reach an understanding of what the habitual hearer, who is unable to listen and comprehend, thinks, because she may not feel entitled to speak. Paradoxically, our understanding of how a person thinks about her marginalized listener role, to some degree, has to be reached by allowing her the space to “speak” about her predicament. Studying A-ma’s “silent” participation in her daily communicative encounters with television and family contributes to our understanding of the marginalized listener’s active engagement with and interpretations of such communication.
Sociohistorical Linguascape of Taiwan: the Pathway of Hoklo
Hoklo was brought to Taiwan by Chinese immigrants from Fujian Province in China in the 17th and 18th centuries. It eventually became the numerical majority language in Taiwan.Footnote 7 However, since the turn of the 20th century Hoklo has become a “minority” language as the result of two successive monolingual language policies, administered first by the Japanese colonizers (1895–1945) and then by the Chinese Nationalists (Kumintang or KMT; 1945–1987).Footnote 8
The Japanese colonial government promoted Japanese as the only legitimate language through education. Concomitantly, it progressively took control of and finally banned Hoklo education, traditionally conducted in private schools called shufang,Footnote 9 where students studied Hanwen (Classical Chinese) through reading Confucian classics using Hoklo pronunciation. By the end of Japanese colonization, a great majority of Taiwanese school-aged children were literate in Japanese (Chou Reference Chou2003)Footnote 10 and some adult males were literate in Hanwen. However, a majority of female adults (and some male adults), having been denied the opportunity to receive either Hanwen or Japanese education, remained illiterate and monolingual in Hoklo. A-ma is an example of this cohort.
Following Japan’s 1945 defeat in World War II, Taiwan was handed over to the KMT in China. In 1949, after losing a civil war to the Chinese Communists, the KMT and its troops retreated to Taiwan. These new immigrants came from all parts of China, but most of them spoke or at least understood Mandarin (Young Reference Young1988). To establish a national identity tied to China, the KMT soon forcefully promoted Mandarin (or ‘national language’, guoyu) as the only legitimate language, through state-controlled education, media, and cultural production. All non-Mandarin languages in Taiwan – Hoklo, Hakka, and aboriginal languages – were relegated to the status of fangyan ‘dialects’ and banned in public domains, despite the fact that these languages are in fact as different from Mandarin as English is from Spanish. The colonial language and printing materials were also severely sanctioned, thus turning the Japanese-literate into “illiterates” overnight (Lin Reference Lin2005). In addition to Mandarin education at all school levels, adult Mandarin classes were provided nationwide in the postwar period. These Mandarin classes yielded limited results for various reasons.Footnote 11 The prewar generations thus largely remain non-Mandarin-speaking. According to Huang Reference Huang1995, an estimated 17.5% of the total population (equal to 3.5 million people) cannot understand Mandarin.
Since the late 1980s, along with the island’s democratization and a concurrent localization movement (bentuhua yundong), the newly legalized opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), local activists, and social elites have revalorized Hoklo as a symbol of Taiwanese solidarity (Dreyer Reference Dreyer, Brown and Ganguly2003). However, this and other positive new re/presentations of Hoklo disguise the enduring legacies of the KMT’s Mandarin-only policy: linguistic hierarchy and language shift. Hoklo continues to be associated with rurality, vulgarity, backwardness, illiteracy, and low class, while Mandarin retains its status as the language of urbanity, education, literacy, and high class (Baran Reference Baran2004, Su Reference Su2008). There is also a continuing language shift toward Mandarin with each succeeding generation (Huang Reference Huang2000, Sandel Reference Sandel2003, Sandel, Chao, & Liang Reference Sandel, Chao and Liang2006, Tse Reference Tse2000, Young Reference Young1988). Thus, it is typical to see a Hoklo extended family in which the older generation is Hoklo monolingual, the middle generations Hoklo–Mandarin bilingual, and the children Mandarin monolingual.
Television programming has also reflected the dominance of Mandarin. For most of Taiwan’s television history since the 1960s, the three stations, all state-owned, limited the airtime and genres of Hoklo programming. In 1972, the Bureau of Culture in the Ministry of Education mandated that Hoklo programs that included only “entertainment” (e.g., soap operas, traditional Taiwanese puppet shows, and traditional Taiwanese operas) be limited to less than an hour per day on each channel (Hsiau Reference Hsiau1997, Su Reference Su1993). Hoklo news was later added to promulgate government policies, with broadcasts lasting no more than 10 minutes per day (Su Reference Su1993). Although restrictions on the use of Hoklo in the media were lifted in 1993 and the amount of programming has since increased along with the establishment of cable television systems, Hoklo programs are still far fewer in number and variety than Mandarin ones. In 2002, in the town where A-ma resided, only seven of the 87 channels offered a significant number of Hoklo programs. And even on these seven channels, programming in Hoklo made up less than 50% of the broadcasts. All the other channels chiefly aired Mandarin programs, with few to no hours of programming in Hoklo. In addition, official discourses that celebrate the “increased” offerings of Hoklo programs (and the establishment of Hakka and aboriginal channels) as an indication of ethnolinguistic equality risk masking social inequalities mediated through hidden messages in the programming that have tended to reproduce negative stereotypes of Hoklo and its speakers.
The Study
This study was conducted for six months in the summers of 2001 and 2002 in Taiwan. The primary participant in this research is my maternal grandmother, whom I call A-ma, a Hoklo form of address for one’s grandmother or another elderly woman. Perhaps because I am A-ma’s first grandchild and she was my caregiver while my mother worked, she and I developed a more intimate bond than she had with her other grandchildren. Other participants in this study include A-ma’s youngest sister (Meichi), eldest daughter (Bidi), and daughter-in-law (Heling). They are all Hoklo speakers. Heling, with an elementary education in the KMT period, also speaks Mandarin, while Bidi and Meichi have only receptive skills in Mandarin. Meichi is also fluent and literate in Japanese.
All the participants lived with or in the same neighborhood as A-ma, who lived with her son’s family. Bidi lived across the street, and Meichi’s house was only a five-minute walk away. During the study, I paid frequent visits – an average of two or three per week – to A-ma’s house to observe her television watching habits and interactions with family members. Some of these observations were conducted in Bidi’s house as I accompanied A-ma in her daily routines. Each visit lasted from 30 minutes to three or four hours. I participated in ongoing activities – watching television, drinking Chinese tea, chatting, eating dinner, and so on. After each trip, I wrote detailed field notes. To complement the data I collected, I have also drawn on my memories of past interactions with and observations of A-ma before the study.
I conducted seven semi-structured interviews with A-ma. Each interview lasted 40–60 minutes. Meichi was interviewed six times in her house. Each interview lasted 40–90 minutes. I also interviewed Bidi and Heling, once each for 40 minutes. The interviews with the participants were conducted in a “conversing style” (Miller, Wang, Sandel & Cho Reference Miller, Wang, Sandel and Cho2002), in which I worked my questions into our casual conversations. If the participants detoured to long narratives about events in their lives, which happened frequently, I let them control the topics as they wished and found a suitable break to insert my questions. This interview style accommodated my dual roles as family member and researcher.
Content areas for A-ma’s and Meichi’s interviews included their experiences with and reflections on (il)literacy, monolingual and multilingual history, television-watching habits, and attitudes toward the linguistic gap between them and their great-grandchildren. Interview questions for Bidi and Heling were designed mainly to triangulate A-ma’s memories of the major events in her life and to elicit their perception of A-ma and her speech style. All interviews were conducted in Hoklo, the language I normally speak with them, and were audio-recorded. The interviews were then transcribed verbatim.
Data analysis is divided into two parts. The first concerns how A-ma positioned herself in relation to multilingual television programs when she watched them alone. The second examines her peripheral participation during family television viewing, exploring how the dynamic interactions between television watching and family conversations doubly marginalized A-ma.
A-ma’s Life Story
Born in Taiwan during Japanese colonization, A-ma (1917–2007) lived through many of the changes mentioned above. Like many girls at that time, A-ma was given up for adoption.Footnote 12 While her adoptive mother wanted to send her to the Japanese elementary school, her adoptive grandmother objected, refusing to allow A-ma to study those Japanese “stinky dog books.”Footnote 13 Instead, A-ma was to study at home with her cousin, who, being the only boy in the family, was sent to shufang to study Hanwen. This “home schooling” was short-lived, lasting only three days.
At age 16, A-ma was sent to work in southern Taiwan to pay back a family debt. In her mid-twenties, she married a government winery worker; they subsequently had two daughters and one son. The political transition in 1945, when A-ma was 28, did not produce any significant discontinuity in her life. With three children to raise and the hardships of life during the war and postwar era, A-ma worked hard at home, raising pigs and chickens to make ends meet. She did not attend adult Mandarin classes, claiming she was not even aware of them. Besides, Hoklo was sufficient for her daily use at the market, with neighbors and family. A-ma later picked up a few Mandarin words from television and her family, but remained predominantly Hoklo monolingual and nonliterate.
Identity-Construction in Solitary Television Watching
The majority of A-ma’s television viewing was solitary. This section explores how A-ma engages in her one-on-one communication with television, given the limited number and variety of shows she can decode referentially, and what aspects of her self-identity are constructed through these television-mediated communicative encounters.
“I don’t understand what they said. I don’t recognize words either.”
For A-ma, television viewing was not necessarily “recreation,” but a painful reminder of her sociolinguistic marginalization. As shown in the opening quote, A-ma described and interpreted her dilemma as a marginalized listener and comprehender of messages on television. Presented with limited choices, she watched television anyway, for lack of other leisure activities (such as reading) that could be engaged in alone. She flipped through the channels, only to be reminded time and again that she ‘did not understand what they say’ and ‘did not recognize words, either.’ The pronoun ‘they’ refers to the Mandarin speakers in the television shows; the phrase ‘recognize words’ (shi zi) approximates the notion of “being literate.” That is, in A-ma’s mind, there were two routes for decoding Mandarin programs: by listening to the Mandarin sound and reading the Chinese subtitles, which appear in all local and imported programs in Taiwan.Footnote 14 To A-ma’s dismay, neither was accessible to her, so watching television became a constant confrontation with her monolingual and illiterate status.
Moreover, A-ma’s keen awareness of her linguistic limitations evoked during television viewing led her to reflect on her uneducated history. In an interview about her childhood, A-ma spoke at length about how she was denied the opportunity to receive an education. Switching suddenly from the past to the present, A-ma linked her uneducated history to her present television viewing, lamenting, ‘Now when I watch TV, I feel distressed. In the past, when my grandma did not let me attend school, I just listened and did not go. I regret how stupid I was!’ She continued to emphasize that her feeling of regret for not having attended school grew more acute as she grew older, especially when she was watching television alone:
(1) Lin: A-ma, why did you say that when you watch TV now, you wonder why in the past you listened to your grandmother, and did not go to school?
A-ma: Before, I did not think of going to school. Now when I watch TV by myself, I think I don’t understand the programs. I don’t recognize words either. If I recognized words, I could know the meanings. And now, I think, why was I so stupid in the past, not to think of going to school?
Lin: In the past, didn’t you understand TV programs?
A-ma: The older I get, the more I feel regret. How can I not feel regret? I can’t understand. How can I not feel regret?
As A-ma saw it, if she had gone to school, she would have been literate and would now have access to Mandarin programs via reading subtitles. Note that A-ma professes no regret for not speaking Mandarin, but expresses profound disappointment at being uneducated and illiterate: ‘If I recognized words, I could know the meanings. And now, I think, why was I so stupid in the past, not to think of going to school?’ Ostensibly, A-ma’s monolingual status does not disturb her as much as being uneducated and therefore illiterate. This emphasis on education and literacy has to be understood in light of the prewar generations’ diverse linguistic repertoires. Although under the linguistic regime of Mandarin dominance elders are conflated as “illiterate” in the mainstream discourse, among themselves they distinguish “literate” from “illiterate” – the literate being those who received Japanese colonial education and/or those who received Hoklo education in the traditional shufang (Lin Reference Lin2007).
A-ma’s youngest sister by birth, Meichi, serves as a constant reminder to her of the literate and educated. Born 13 years after A-ma in 1930, Meichi received eight years of Japanese education. Her Japanese proficiency facilitated teaching herself basic Chinese and English, because Japanese uses kanji (Chinese characters) and contains many English loan words. Thus, although Meichi has difficulty decoding Mandarin programs through spoken Mandarin, she nonetheless is able to read the subtitles. As Holland et al. (Reference Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain1998:183) maintain, voices can be associated with “socially marked and ranked groups” or even with “particularly potent individuals (Mom, one’s brother, a hated classmate).” In lamenting her uneducated past, A-ma positions herself in relation not only to the educated, but also to her own sister.Footnote 15
As we see, in the communicative event of television viewing A-ma is engaged in what Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin1986:68) called “actively responsive understanding.” However, unlike women in Egypt (Abu-Lughod Reference Abu-Lughod2005) or New Delhi (Mankekar Reference Mankekar1993, Reference Mankekar1999), who engage exclusively with the referential meanings of television serials, A-ma responds primarily to interactional meanings at the level of the communicative event, with a constant focus on her marginalized listener role. In the participation framework of A-ma’s solitary television viewing, “speaking persons” on most channels speak Mandarin, resulting in A-ma’s inhabitance of the non-comprehender role if she chooses to watch Mandarin shows. Thus, watching television became an experience of encountering the boundary between languages. While bilingual speakers can easily cross that boundary and Mandarin-monolingual speakers can afford to ignore the boundary, for a Hoklo-monolingual speaker like A-ma, the boundary has significant consequences. Not only did she have limited access to the content of the programs, but in choosing a channel/language that she can comprehend, she was constantly reminded that she was illiterate and uneducated. Just as the speaker Don Gabriel (Hill Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995) chose between Mexicano and Spanish to voice his identity when narrating his son’s murder, A-ma, as a silent television viewer, also “voiced” her sociolinguistic marginal identity through choosing which language to watch.
Note that rather than complaining about the unequal allocation of Hoklo programming, A-ma blamed her own lack of abilities in Mandarin language and literacy. By not challenging or questioning the dominance of Mandarin in the programming, A-ma appropriated the authoritative voice of Mandarin.Footnote 16 Her self-identity as an uneducated and illiterate person emerged as a dialogical relation when she made the authoritative voice her own, or part of her internally persuasive discourse.
Importantly, A-ma’s status as an uneducated and illiterate female is hardly unusual among older Taiwanese. But this linguistic and literacy status is of different import across various contexts and sociopolitical times. Since Mandarin became the authoritative voice in the second half of the 20th century, Hoklo monolinguals’ linguistic status has become increasingly marginalized. As Mandarin gains symbolic power in the new, state-created “linguistic market” (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1991; see Sandel Reference Sandel2003 for a detailed analysis of the changing linguistic market in Taiwan), a field is presupposed in which Hoklo monolinguals are sociolinguistically marginalized. This marginality had the strongest personal impact on A-ma after television was brought into her home. Most often television broadens a person’s life, as Abu-Lughod (Reference Abu-Lughod2005:45) writes about an Egyptian woman’s (Zaynab’s) daily encounters with it: “[T]elevision is an extraordinary technology for breaching boundaries, and intensifying and multiplying encounters among life-worlds, sensibilities, and ideas. Television brings into Zaynab’s home … a range of visions, ideas, perspectives, and experiences originating outside her community.…” But A-ma’s encounters with television in her later years made her feel sharply the boundaries between the worlds of Mandarin and Hoklo as well as her position as a marginalized listener and comprehender. In other words, A-ma’s internally persuasive voice regarding her linguistic status “enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts” (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin1986:346): Her uneducated past is reexamined and reaccentuated in the new context of television viewing, translating her uneducated experience into regret.
“Real life is not like this.”
Although Mandarin still dominates television programming, there has been a noticeable increase in Hoklo shows during recent years, in particular, the rise of the genre ben-tu-ju (literally ‘local-soil soap operas’),Footnote 17 in addition to news broadcasts and traditional Hoklo operas. In theory, Hoklo monolingual speakers have more shows to watch than before. But how does A-ma perceive Hoklo programming? Given the limited airtime enjoyed by traditional Hoklo operas and news broadcasts and the fact that the Hoklo register in the news is peppered with Mandarin expressions to make up for the lack of Hoklo words for contemporary events,Footnote 18 A-ma could comfortably relate only to the ben-tu-ju genre. However, although she could listen to and comprehend “speaking persons” in ben-tu-ju, she also recognized socially indexical meanings (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Basso and Selby1976) mediated through their speech and the production of these shows. Ironically, the availability of Hoklo programs deepens her sense of sociolinguistic marginality.
Hoklo soap operas are hardly a new invention. In the past, however, they often depicted people “of low socio-economic status: illiterate, peasants, workers, fishermen, elders, especially old women and the like” (Hsiau Reference Hsiau1997:308). Although ben-tu-ju often portrays successful modern businessmen or political figures, the genre is still characterized by its poor production quality and by the violence, superstition, and vulgarity of its story lines (Guan Reference Guan2006). It continues to target Hoklo-speaking elders as its main audience (Chang Reference Chang1999). Although intimately engaged in ben-tu-ju, A-ma was also able to critique it: ‘It’s always this kills that, that hurts this’; ‘They could have ended the show earlier, but they just dragged on and on’; ‘They speak vulgarly’; and ‘Real life is not like this’.
By contrast, A-ma spoke highly of a Hoklo serial, Lang tao sha, which was adapted from an epic novel by a modern Taiwanese novelist: ‘This one is better. More refined. They talk more gently’. Unfortunately, this kind of quality Hoklo product is scarce while ben-tu-ju is produced in quantity.Footnote 19 Taken together, we see that A-ma’s viewing of ben-tu-ju was arguably the product of language choice rather than content or thematic choice. Moreover, we see A-ma’s struggle with and resistance to the authoritative discourse of the KMT era, which designated Hoklo and its speakers as lower-class. While the current competing discourse may claim that the increased number of Hoklo programs indicates ethnolinguistic equality, for A-ma these shows, far from having the positive connotation of ethnic pluralism or local pride, appeared negative and undesirable. Instead of identifying with the programs, A-ma wanted to dissociate herself from their negative portrayals of Hoklo speakers.
The following incident further supports A-ma’s frustration at her limited choices and disalignment with the negative socially indexical meanings of ben-tu-ju. One afternoon when my mother and I visited her, A-ma was watching the second airing of a ben-tu-ju episode that had just been broadcast the previous evening. While watching reruns of an old series seems normal, watching the same episode on two consecutive days is probably not. No other family member besides A-ma routinely engaged in such a practice. So my mother commented, ‘Mom, you watched this already. And now you are watching it again’. As if defending herself, A-ma replied, ‘I did watch foreign programs’. Then she switched to the National Geographic channel to show us what she had watched, adding, ‘There is nothing else to watch. I don’t understand [those programs]’.
It is possible that A-ma understood that her ability to watch/understand only ben-tu-ju indexes her sociolinguistic marginality. Therefore, presenting herself as someone who also watches ‘foreign programs’ seemingly works to deflect her marginal identity by positioning herself as one who can switch to more “cultured” programs. Additionally, we see that the gap between the producers of ben-tu-ju and its targeted audience is enormous. Positioned by the producers as one who will appreciate these low-quality dramas, A-ma activated her critical defense of such positioning. In other words, she resisted her linguistic marginalization by switching channels to align herself with the voice of English, a global language that enjoys more prestige than Mandarin in Taiwan. More details about A-ma’s viewing of ‘foreign programs’ are discussed in the following section.
“Watching people fish is fun too.”
Even though A-ma could understand only Hoklo, she did not dwell just in the world of Hoklo programs. At times, in her room with the remote control in her hand, she ventured into the worlds of Mandarin or even English by watching nature programs such as those on the Discovery or National Geographic channel. Not only did she enjoy these programs in her solitary viewing, but she also relayed what she watched to others. She often shared with me in her usual brief, halting sentences: ‘Oh, they just had a show about a volcano eruption. It’s so horrible’, or ‘I like to watch those animals. Those animals look so cute’. Although she could not even name the channels or the programs, nor understand the Mandarin or English voice-over, she nonetheless appreciated the beautiful scenery, exciting adventures, and exotic cultures these shows portray.
Still feeling that A-ma had a limited choice of television shows to watch, I volunteered to show her how to use a radio in her room so she can listen to Hoklo broadcasts. When it turned out the radio belonged to a granddaughter who needed it back, A-ma then rejected the idea of having a radio at all, and, as if comforting both herself and me, again narrated the joy of watching nature programs:
(2) A-ma: Ah… Now I just watch TV. That’s enough.
Lin: Yeah. When watching TV, you can see people and stuff. You understand more.
A-ma: Yeah. Watching TV is enough. I watch those animals, or watch people climb mountains. ((In a gleeful tone)) Oh, that was very interesting. They walked, climbed. I watch those,
Lin: Um.
A-ma: I watch those with people climbing mountains or I watch those animals. Watching people fish is fun too. ((laughs happily))
Lin: Um.
A-ma: I watch these.
Lin: You watch [those.
A-ma: [I watch those with mountain climbing, Oh, the scenery, Oh, that was,
Lin: Beautiful, right?
A-ma: VERY beautiful. It’s like, you see. It feels so good to watch that.
Lin: Those programs are alright in Mandarin? It’s good enough [to see the scenery.
A-ma: [Yeah. Yeah.
If, from my perspective, radio presented an option for A-ma to expand her access to the media, what A-ma was perhaps telling me is that she has already done so via watching nature programs. When watching these shows, A-ma may have felt empowered by her ability to break down language barriers and, later, play the role of information-giver, telling me and possibly others what she saw on those programs. By appreciating the images and ignoring the linguistic code, A-ma found her own way to align herself with literate or Mandarin speakers. To put it differently, much like bilingual speakers who negotiate their identities by code-switching in interpersonal conversations (Baran Reference Baran2004), A-ma negotiated her identity by channel switching in the communicative event of television viewing. That is, although she could not access the referential meanings of Mandarin or “foreign” programs, she could appropriate the indexical meaning of cultural prestige associated with these programs. As previously noted, she forcefully resisted my mother’s questioning of her repeated viewing of ben-tu-ju saying, ‘I did watch foreign programs!’ By viewing and interpreting otherwise linguistically undecodable nature shows, A-ma both resisted and negotiated her sociolinguistically marginal position.
Identity Construction in Family Television Watching
Except for watching cartoons with her great-grandchildren or occasionally viewing entertainment shows, A-ma mainly watched ben-tu-ju and Mandarin news with adult family members. When watching ben-tu-ju, A-ma could understand the content and occasionally contributed verbally to family discussions on the shows. However, when family members chose to watch Mandarin news, A-ma’s participation was marginalized because of language barriers. This section focuses on A-ma’s peripheral participation in watching Mandarin news with family members, exploring how the dynamic interactions between television viewing and family discussions about the news doubly marginalize her and how she interprets and negotiates that marginality.
A-ma’s marginalization
Although A-ma was always physically seated in the best seat reserved for her as a respected family elder, she sat symbolically on the periphery of participation. The following example paints a vivid picture of A-ma’s predicament of inhabiting the role of a marginalized listener through the eyes of one of A-ma’s great grandsons, Shengwen. One day when four generations of the family were watching Mandarin news at A-ma’s place, this ten-year-old boy whispered to me, ‘Aunt, quick, look, look, great-grandma is so interesting. Let me tell you, every time she sits there in silence. But she gazes at the screen, and sometimes her eyes follow the actions in the room, following anyone who is speaking, or someone who is standing up to walk to the bathroom. And she has no expressions on her face, but sometimes she smiles. Aunt, look, she is smiling now. Isn’t great grandma cute?’ It turned out that Shengwen had been quietly observing great-grandma many times during family television watching. Perhaps to a ten-year-old, A-ma’s behavior looked particularly amusing and even ‘cute’ (ke-ai, a term that is often used to describe children’s innocence and loveliness). But what he saw was essentially A-ma’s predicament being denied the right to listen and understand.
A-ma’s predicament was even more poignant because no one in the family interpreted or summarized the programs for her. Occasionally, seeing all the agitation, laughter, or comments from the family about certain news, A-ma asked what was going on, and only then would someone briefly summarize for her. When I was present, I sometimes tried to give her a very brief summary of the news, but providing every detail was an impossible task. The family’s overall passivity toward her linguistic difficulties reveals the twin dilemmas most elders face in contemporary Taiwan: Their linguistic marginality is unique to their generation as a product of past language policies, and traditional practices of filial piety have been transformed in modern society. Whereas traditionally respecting and obeying elders’ wishes was important in the cultural notion of filial piety, today caring for the material and physical needs of elders has subsumed other needs, such as communication, which is particularly pertinent for Taiwanese elders who are “left behind” speaking only Hoklo or other minority languages.Footnote 20
Moreover, A-ma’s need to reach out and participate in the world of Mandarin was veiled by her quiet presence. As long as she did not voice her need for help, her linguistic dilemma was not visible to the family, who thought A-ma was naturally “quiet,” especially in contrast to the great family storytellers like Bidi, Heling, and Meichi.Footnote 21 However, A-ma’s largely silent stance was co-constructed. Being deprived of the right to understand, she did not have much to say in family conversations, and she gradually lost confidence in speaking. At the same time, she was often relegated to the role of non-speaker when her speech was not attended to or others took the floor from her.
Goodwin’s (Reference Goodwin and Goodwin2003, Reference Goodwin2004) study of an aphasic elder, Chil, serves as an interesting point of comparison. After a stroke, Chil could produce only three words (yes, no, and and) and gesture with one hand. Even though Chil was “communicatively impaired” in terms of producing speech, his listening and comprehending were not impaired and he could assume the role of a competent speaker in his family conversations. Goodwin cogently shows that this positioning was due to extensive collaborative work between Chil and his family members. The family invested so much time communicating with him that his wife complained that her own voice was being neglected! In contrast, A-ma was first communicatively impaired by the sociolinguistic history of Taiwan that denied her the right to listen and comprehend. She was then further marginalized by her family’s collaborative negligence of her need to both listen and speak, the interconnections of which will be analyzed in detail below. Thus, the simultaneous disabling of her listening and speaking is both a historical and interactive product.
A-ma’s double marginalization
A-ma’s participation became further marginalized and complicated when television watching was accompanied by running commentaries or heated discussion during commercials, that is, when two communicative events – television watching and family conversations – were going on at the same time. Even though these discussions among adults were mainly in Hoklo, A-ma remained a marginalized listener and comprehender because most of the conversations went on around, not with, her, and because she had only fragmentary knowledge of the issues in question owing to her inability to understand Mandarin news reports. As family members integrated prior or ongoing narrated news events into their discussion, they effortlessly switched from the role of listener during viewing to speaker during running commentaries or discussions. In contrast, A-ma’s participant role was confined to that of a marginalized listener in either communicative event, aggravating her peripheral position.
The following example illustrates how A-ma was consistently marginalized across a series of communicative events that involve four different configurations of family conversations and television viewing, each corresponding to a distinct participation framework. Note that the tension of A-ma’s marginalized participation builds progressively until she finally displays an act of resistance. In the summer of 2002, a sex scandal involving a female politician was a huge media event in Taiwan. One evening, A-ma, Meichi, my mother, and I had dinner at Bidi and her husband, Taijong’s, place. At the dinner table, a heated discussion about the scandal erupted. Before this discussion, we had been talking about family matters and A-ma had joined in the conversation in her usual way, listening attentively and occasionally contributing one or two brief relevant utterances. When we switched to the sex scandal, however, A-ma was immediately marginalized as a listener. Noticing that A-ma was utterly lost, I told her we were talking about the sex scandal, which I had briefly described to her a few days ago. The dinner ended when it was time for the evening news report, and we all moved to the living room to watch the Mandarin evening news, anticipating more stories about the scandal.
After a few other news events came the much anticipated update about the sex scandal. Ongoing commentaries on the latest developments came from every family member except A-ma, with a heated discussion again erupting during the commercial that followed. When the news was back and the subject changed, everyone stopped talking and watched quietly. Right then, A-ma walked up to the television set and stopped at about arm’s length from it, as if the proximity would enhance her understanding. As Taijong’s view was now partially blocked, he jokingly said to A-ma, ‘Why do you stand there blocking my view?’ On hearing this, A-ma turned to leave the house without a word, despite Taijong’s efforts to explain: ‘Come on, I was just joking, now you want to leave like this.’ A-ma did not come back later, and everyone else continued watching the news.
Four distinct participation frameworks alternate in the example: two during the dinner-table conversations, and two while watching television. The participation in the dinner table conversation is bifurcated according to the subject of the conversation. The two participation frameworks are similar in that A-ma is predominantly a listener while other family members are predominantly speakers. The only difference is that A-ma’s participant role changes from an included listener to a marginalized one when family members change the subject to the sex scandal. Throughout the dinner conversation on either topic, Bidi occasionally “digresses” to earnestly ask her guests, especially A-ma, to eat more. Although A-ma cannot participate as an equal speaker in the conversations, her marginality in the verbal communication is mitigated by her relationship with the family members at the dinner table.
The television-watching phase of this example also involves two participation frameworks. The first one is less complicated: everyone engaging quietly with the speaking person (the anchorman) in the news, A-ma continuing to be a marginalized listener, and all the other family members switching from their speaker role at the dinner table to that of listener during television viewing. With the role change of family members, A-ma is further marginalized because no one interacts with her and she is the only one who cannot understand the news.
The second participation framework during television viewing, wherein A-ma is both a marginalized listener and speaker, is more complicated. This involves the dynamic interactions between two communicative events: television viewing and family discussions of the scandal. All the other family members can switch between listener and speaker roles, listening to the news and talking at the same time, or talking exclusively during commercials, while A-ma remains a marginalized listener in both communicative events, unable to capture what is covered in the update of the sex scandal, nor fully understand the family discussions. In a sense, A-ma is doubly marginalized when television viewing is layered with family discussions because she cannot participate as a speaker.
In addition to demonstrating A-ma’s exacerbated linguistic marginalization in the context of television viewing, this example also illustrates a rare case of A-ma’s resistance, albeit brief. A-ma’s silent exit from Bidi’s house right after Taijong’s remark was extremely unusual behavior. However, no one seemed concerned about her abrupt departure. Perhaps because A-ma was considered amiable and kind, they assumed that she could not possibly have been upset. But each successive framework advanced and complicated A-ma’s peripheral participation until it culminated in an unbearable point, at which she simply walked out of the house. Her feeling of isolation finally outweighed her sense of intimacy and connection with family members. The complicated act of television watching with her family sharpened the boundary between the two language worlds. It sent a clear message to A-ma that a Hoklo monolingual is excluded not only from viewing Mandarin programs, but also speaking with her bilingual family members. Her choice to leave is a form of “symbolic resistance” (Gal Reference Gal and Heller1988:259) to her marginalized position in these linguistic power relations.
Except for this lone case of resistance, A-ma continued quietly watching news with the family. A number of serious questions beg an answer: What did A-ma think about her habitual marginalization as a listener and speaker? What impact did these roles have on her self-identity? In other words, how did A-ma position herself vis-à-vis others over the course of television watching?
A-ma contextualizes her marginalization
An overseas phone conversation that I had with A-ma not long after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 reveals how she contextualized her marginalized listener and speaker roles. I asked whether she knew about the tragedy, but instead of responding to my question, she said, ‘I don’t understand what they said. They sometimes told me a sentence or two. I don’t know what exactly happened’. The pronoun ‘they’ appears twice in her answer. In the first sentence, ‘they’ could refer to either the anchorwoman or to family members, who must have all watched and had heated discussions about the reports. But ‘they’ in ‘They sometimes told me a sentence or two. I don’t know what exactly happened’ clearly refers to family members. Instead of sharing what she knew, however small or fragmentary, or simply asking me what happened, A-ma voiced her discontent and frustration about the language barrier of the news and the failure of family members to translate for her. She contextualized the communicative event of television watching with her family based not primarily on the texts/content of the narrators (i.e., news anchorwomen, family members), but instead on the unbalanced participation framework that locked her in the non-comprehender role.
Moreover, A-ma explicitly linked her roles as non-comprehender and non-speaker in the overlapping communicative events of television watching and family discussions of the shows. When asked what she thought about watching television with family members, A-ma said, ‘I think about why they can talk about this and that and why I have nothing to say. Then it’s not interesting to have me in the group. … I think if I had gone to school, I would know some words, and when others say something, I could talk with them’. We see A-ma express a strong desire to communicate – both to understand and speak, but being denied the right to understand, her speaking is compromised as well. Although she does not understand the content of the talk, she actively “listens to” the narration and understands the socially indexical meanings of the unequal participatory roles and how she is positioned and excluded. The able listener and speaker roles that family members inhabit mediate an authoritative voice that indexes education and literacy; they have access to the news, either through listening to Mandarin, or through reading subtitles, and they can therefore use the information they acquire to have a lively discussion. By contrast, the non-comprehender and non-speaker roles that A-ma constantly and reluctantly inhabits point to uneducatedness and illiteracy. Thus, no matter whether watching television alone or with family, A-ma actively engaged in a constant dialogue and struggle with the authoritative discourse of Mandarin dominant programming. Her self-identity as an uneducated and illiterate person emerged in her internally persuasive discourses as she assimilated the authoritative discourse.
A-ma speaks up
In a computer telephone conversation during the summer before A-ma passed away, I witnessed her strongest act of resistance: She contradicted her sister, Meichi, by claiming the speaker role to vehemently assert her experiences of sociolinguistic marginalization during television watching.Footnote 22 I had intended for A-ma to come alone to my mother’s place to chat with her over the computer phone. But my mother and she thought I was going to interview her about the Japanese colonial period for my research, so they called up my great-aunt Meichi to join the conversation.Footnote 23 Fortunately, I had a few minutes alone with A-ma before my great-aunt arrived. A-ma was in high spirits and we chatted about her health and other things. After great-aunt entered the room, A-ma immediately became peripheral in the participation framework. After brief greetings, great-aunt initiated an “interview” ‘So, Shumin, you have some questions for me?’ I complied and she responded enthusiastically, with A-ma nodding and smiling beside her.
To change the participation framework that cast A-ma as a non-speaker, I strategically created and sustained the floor for A-ma by asking questions only she could answer. At one point, I asked A-ma why her grandmother hated the Japanese so much, and she launched into a long story about how her grandmother was mistreated by the Japanese police who falsely accused her of hitting a neighbor. ‘That’s why she did not allow me to go to school,’ she concluded. I followed with ‘Do you still feel bad that your grandmother forbade you to attend school?’ But before A-ma could utter a word, great-aunt answered for her, ‘No, how would she feel regret? Her life is very good now. Look at the blouse she is wearing now. It’s so pretty. It’s very nice material. Very expensive! Her life is very good now.’ Upon hearing this, A-ma lightly hit great aunt on the arm, retorting in a strong, firm voice, ‘How can I not feel regret? Now when I watch television, I don’t understand anything. How can I not feel regret?’
In this vocal act of resistance, A-ma forcefully took the floor back to contradict her sister, vehemently claiming her subjective experiences. This act carries great weight in that A-ma made two breakthroughs concurrently: Not only did she assertively claim the speaker role for herself, but she related her dilemma during television viewing to her lack of education in front of a family member other than me. I resisted as well, by holding the floor for A-ma – a deliberate act resulting from my research on this project. Ordinary dynamics of family communication would not have supported A-ma’s developing her voice, nor would they have allowed me any chance to defy great-aunt’s respected role as speaker. Using the context of an “interview,” I was able to rework the dynamics to foster and support A-ma’s speaker role in the presence of great-aunt.
The impact of this incident remains a question. Did A-ma reconstruct her identity with regard to her participatory role in television watching and family communication? Did the family start to meet A-ma’s needs for assistance in mediating the overlapping communicative events of television viewing and family discussions? I did not have a chance to ask A-ma before she passed away peacefully in October 2007 at the age of 91.
Conclusion
This article uses Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to examine how a monolingual minority speaker appropriates, resists, and negotiates her linguistic marginal identity in two intersecting communicative events: television viewing and family discussions of the programs. While this is a study of a single individual, the dilemma that A-ma faced is not atypical in Taiwan or elsewhere in the world.Footnote 24 As such, this study has demonstrated that television watching is an optimal site to study individuals’ experiences and interpretations of sociolinguistic marginalization.
In addition, by treating television viewing as part of a web of the social actor’s daily communicative encounters, this study illuminates broader and more nuanced understandings of media reception. By showing A-ma’s identity as constituted within and across communicative encounters that involve television, this article demonstrates that media reception should involve not only audience engagement with media, but also a consideration of media as part of the social network of communication.
With an emphasis on the (marginalized) listener’s dialogic construction of identity, this study makes a significant theoretical contribution to the study of “voice” in communicative encounters. Whereas most Bakhtin-inspired scholars use the notion of “voice” to study the question “Who is speaking?” (Keane Reference Keane2000), this study investigates “Who is listening?” by examining how a marginalized listener negotiates her identity through a constant struggle between authoritative voices and internally persuasive voices. This shift of focus to the (marginalized) listener is important and necessary because minority speakers are often denied the right to listen and understand, and by implication, to speak. This study is a vital intervention in the study of linguistic inequality and how it translates into unequal rights to listen.
A related theoretical contribution of this study is that it adds multiple layers of complexity to Bakhtin’s (Reference Bakhtin, Holquist, Emerson and Holquist1981:68) emphasis on “actively responsive understanding” in speech communication. In arguing that “any understanding [of the listener] is imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or another: the listener becomes the speaker” (1981:68), Bakhtin assumes that listening and understanding are automatic. This assumption naturalizes the ability to switch between listener and speaker roles. This study shows that the simultaneous inhabitance of these two roles by each interlocutor is not a given. In contexts where one is denied the right to listen and understand, one is also very likely to be marginalized as a speaker.
Moreover, this study expands Bakhtin’s notion of the listener’s “actively responsive understanding” to include the listener’s understanding of the interactional or metapragmatic meanings of speech. I have shown that although A-ma was denied the right to understand the textual content of television shows and the family’s discussions of news, she actively engaged in the indexical meanings of her marginalized listener role and interpreted this role inhabitance as indexical or reflexive of her uneducatedness and illiteracy. This study, then, lays a foundation for future research that engages in the complex and multifaceted processes of listening.
This shift of focus from speaking to listening is of utmost importance in contexts where “historically displaced” populations (e.g., elders in indigenous communities or those who live through different language regimes and whose language is not valued and/or spoken by younger generations) or “geographically displaced” populations (e.g., immigrants, refugees) are “communicatively impaired” by sociolinguistic inequality (see Blommaert Reference Blommaert2005). These populations can be marginalized not only as speakers but also, and more poignantly, as listeners in a new language regime that discriminates against their language. Their linguistic dilemma can be embodied in such mundane daily practices as television viewing and can occur in such intimate private arenas as the home.
Last, but perhaps most important, the examination of A-ma’s linguistic impediment vis-à-vis television viewing as an individual and interactive experience brings into sharpened focus the dilemma faced by many monolingual elders who are “left behind,” speaking a language of “the past.” The findings of this study challenge future research to adopt a critical perspective in positioning elderly minority speakers. Given the tendency of many scholars of language and culture to treat elders as the repositories or transmitters of a minority or dying language, the endeavor to uncover their linguistic dilemmas in a society dominated by a language they do not speak is imperative. I advocate a shift in focus from understanding elders’ linguistic ability as a means to preserve their traditional heritage to examining the identity challenges brought about by elders’ participation in contemporary communicative milieus.
