The hyper-circulation of people under contemporary globalism presents liminality as a sociocultural fact of our time—a situation that does not only necessitate a rethinking of contemporary sociolinguistic theory but also raises critical questions about identity, space/place, and their interconnections. Roberta Piazza's edited collection furthers this discussion in twelve chapters—some of which were presented at the 2016 conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics—that explore the complex construction of place-identity in narrative. The collection's interdisciplinary, multithematic, and transcontextual approaches are its main strengths.
The collection makes two main interventions. First, while extant discussions emphasize place-identity in relation to migration, this collection captures a diversity of contexts in highlighting social inequalities that accompany processes of displacement. It includes analysis relating to tourism, heritage, and business (chapters 4, 10), mental health (chapter 11), language learning (chapter 8), media (chapter 12), mobility and diasporic identities (chapters 1, 2, 3, 5), geospatial/geopolitical peripherality (chapter 6), and urban/language policy and planning (chapters 7, 9). Besides ideology and power, affect, memory, and economics are recurring themes in many chapters. Second, the collection's exploration of place-identity through the conceptual lens of ‘liminality’—an emphasis that has also not been explored in existing scholarship—provides new ways of discursively examining the dynamism of identity in late modernity.
It comprises two main sections. The first (chapters 1–5) explores the connections between identity, place/space, and liminality through Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope. Here, chronotope becomes a resource for discursively constructing and negotiating identities, as in the case of Mapuche migrants in (urban) Santiago who deploy ‘a chronotope of the South’ to ‘authenticate’ their (rural) Mapuche ethnic identities (chapter 1), or that of a Portuguese returnee who expresses desire for relocation and association with her homeland pre- and post-return through deployments of ‘narrating’ and ‘narrated’ chronotopes (chapter 2). The second section (chapters 6–12) explores liminal place-identity in the context of institutional power. Many of the chapters here have implications for policymaking and implementation. This is evident in Judith Yoel's (chapter 9) discussion on road signage in Israel as a dimension of Zionist-informed language policy and planning that marginalises Arabic.
The collection reimagines sociolinguistics research beyond immediate locality and temporality, typified in Tope Omoniyi's & Lukasz Daniluk's analysis of ‘off-shore’ liminality in media representations of the Panama Papers and its implications for articulations of a ‘postnational’ sociolinguistic paradigm (chapter 12), and Marc Scully's analysis of Celtic-Cornish narratives of place (chapter 6) which, besides highlighting the ‘multivocality’ of present Celtic-Cornish identities—against a historical backdrop of Cornwall's three stages of peripherality—speculate about a possible complication by Brexit in the future.
The collection's truly transcontextual emphasis—also exemplified by its coverage of research subjects linked to a wide range of geographical contexts (Middle East, Europe, Africa, South America, North America)—not only provides varied perspectives on liminal place-identity but also performatively reinforces the validity and urgency of a ‘postnational sociolinguistics’ for our present moment. This book will be useful for scholars of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, decolonial linguistics, and transnational studies.
