[Linganth] SLA Conference LATE BREAKING PANEL: investigating the metapragmatics of South Asian publics

[Kristina Nielsen]

Dear All,

Please see the abstract for our panel below. We still have a few open
spaces, so you if you are interested, contact us as soon as possible (
kniels at sas.upenn.edu). We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Kristina Nielsen
PhD Scholar
University of Pennsylvania

Title: Investigating the metapragmatics of South Asian publics:

Discussant: Llerena Searle, Assistant Professor University of Rochester

The analytic tool of “publics” has been widely used in the field of South
Asia Studies to think about the emergence of national and linguistically
bounded communities. Building on classic works on the notions of print
capitalism (Anderson 1983) and the public sphere (Habermas 1989) a number
of influential works have developed these themes in new directions in the
context of South Asia and South Asian languages (Chatterjee 1993,
Chakrabarty 2001, Orsini 2002, Mitchell 2010). These works have tended to
focus on the emergence of vernacular language ideologies and the role of
the printing press in affecting national and state group identities along
linguistic lines. Other scholarship by feminist and subalternist scholars
have challenged the idea that publics coincide with national or state
projects, and instead show how they can be fragmented along various social
axes (Nijhawan 2012, Cody 2013, Ingram 2014). At the same time, these
accounts continue to privilege print media as the mode of constructing
public identities, foregrounding technology and the ideology of languages
at the expense of attention to everyday interactions.

The notion of publics has been used in the context of colonial South Asia,
and these analyses remain important and influential. However, in line with
the topic of this year’s meeting of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology
“Media, Meanings, Messages, E-Motions”, we are interested in investigating
how analyzing metapragmatic discourse across new forms of media and new
social contexts in South Asia might challenge us to look at “publics” in
new ways.  a new set of discourses around ideas of New India, around the
neo-liberal push to open economic frontiers while consolidating nationalist
and religious boundaries, notions of “post-truth” and the circulations of
“fake news” on social media, and changing ideas of the nation, present us
with new challenges in thinking about publics, particularly in a context
like South Asia where right-wing nationalist regimes polarize everyday
political discourse.

Linguistic anthropology and theories of metapragmatics (Silverstein 1976)
provide an alternate method of analyzing the quotidian social interactions
that underlie ideologies of publics across different mediatized
interactional spheres. Paying attention to the metapragmatics (i.e.
discourse surrounding the use of language itself) of publics raises the
following questions: How are publics enacted through mediatized
interactions and discourse? How do mediatized construals of publics
constitute emblems that are available to be taken up as individuals
negotiate membership within larger communities? Further, how might an
attention to metapragmatic discourse shed light on publics that have been
previously ignored and challenge ideas of publics that have been taken for
granted?

This panel on “Investigating the metapragmatics of South Asian publics,” by
looking across different mediums of interaction, such as books, film,
government orders, social media, chai shops and corporate training, seeks
to attend to how individuals engage with talk about publics as they
negotiate their own social positions. We welcome scholars to submit
abstracts that intersect with our interest in how linguistic practices help
us think with and beyond traditional accounts of “publics” in South Asia.


-- 
Kristina Nielsen
Graduate student
Department of Anthropology
University of Pennsylvania
kniels at sas.upenn.edu
(608) 206-9681
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