Voices of a city market provides a nuanced and experimental account of multilingualism and superdiversity in urban Britain. The book's original form of evocative vignettes draws readers in and highlights the wide diversity of voices at play in the market. The result is an account that demonstrates the promise of superdiversity as a theoretical approach to the increasingly complex constellations of difference both within and across migrant communities (20). The book also contributes a specific focus on practices of translanguaging in these contexts as traders and market goers improvise shared means of communication at the interstices of multiple languages.
The book's first and last chapters take the form of a dialogue between various dramatis personae. Through this staged dialogue the authors explore questions of ethnographic representation such as the ethics of research and collaboration that motivated the radically polyphonic form of the body of the book. The dialogues also provide readers with a sense of the central theoretical concerns that animate the chapters that follow, especially issues of translanguaging, superdiversity, and the role of the body and senses in communication.
The six chapters of the book centre on a couple who run a butcher stall in the market. While the husband migrated from Fujian, the wife migrated from Malaysia, although her parents had moved there from China. Across its six chapters, the authors interweave the stories and reflections of these butchers with those of other market traders, interactions with customers, conversations at home with family members, and poetic descriptions of the market hall itself. Each chapter experiments with written form. Rather than distanced description of sociological categories and linguistic practices, the chapters are written through short, evocative scenes. A short interchange between a butcher and an unhappy customer is juxtaposed against a fishmonger's reflections on changing demographics and linguistic habits of market goers. By arranging these vignettes together, the text mirrors the sensory experience of a market with its synaesthesia of objects, smells, activities, and people.
The book's themes and insights, such as the role of the body and gesture in translingual communication, are not easily locatable within particular chapters but instead emerge across vivid depictions of sights and sounds in the market. Without intricate transcriptions, the authors convey the complex ways in which bodies becomes material resources in translingual interactions. Traders and customers engage in complex and stylized gestures, producing an improvised language to facilitate exchange. These interactions are tenuous and sometimes lead to mutual incomprehension. Indeed, another emergent theme is how traders and customers establish connections and relationships despite not fully understanding or trusting one another. The market is not presented as a space of idyllic multicultural harmony. Yet the materials demonstrate that communication across difference goes beyond any simple economic imperative. Butchers and other traders develop durable social relationships with customers as they haggle over prices, learn what cuts are most desirable, and offer advice on how to prepare an item. This book illuminates this dynamic of working with and across difference without romanticizing harmony or dramatizing strife.
