Center-staging language and identity research from earthrise positions. Contextualizing Performances in open spaces

Abstract

This chapter uses the moonrise-sunrise phenomena metaphorically to explicate two perspectives that highlight the ways in which we commonly approach and/or understand communication and identity (including culture). Represented by moonrises, the first position highlights a relatively less "visible" norm that nevertheless potently shapes our understandings of communication and identity. This dominant default norm is marked by a monolingual-monocultural or monoethnic perspective. It is "naturalized" in Eurocentric global North discourses and is often not made visible in either mundane discourses or the academic literature. In other words, this position 1 is taken as the given. In contrast, the more visible second position, represented by sunrises, highlights the common human condition vis-à-vis communication and identity. This condition however, paradoxically gets marked as the deviant, marginalized, not-normal in global North discourses. Position 2 gets framed in academic discourses and commonsensical thinking through concepts like bi/multi/plurilingualism, bi/multiculturalism and multiethnicities. Recent terminology that has emerged within European literature on globalization, framed by migration flows into European geopolitical spaces (and digitalization) include concepts like super/hyperdiversity (Vertovec 2006). The author argues that the more common human condition of diversity gets deviantly framed, marking and making visible (albeit as the not-normal) multiple language varieties and membership in multiple cultures and ethnicities. These two positions represent normative global North discourses where communication, identity, including culture are approached through, as well as reduced to, technicalities and essentialist epistemologies. Such understandings are critically relevant for the organizing of institutionalized learning for children and adults across geopolitical spaces generally, and in global North contexts like those of Sweden especially. Going beyond these two hegemonic positions and informed by decolonial alternative epistemologies, this chapter center-stages a third perspective wherein language-use or languaging and identiting or identity-positionings, including culturing represent dynamically different ways of approaching and/or understanding human behavior and the human condition. Drawing upon the iconic images taken by the crew of Apollo 8 in December 1968, the author deploys the phenomenon of "Earthrise" to substantiate such an alternative position. Earthrise is a phenomenon that contrasts in significant ways with moonrise and sunrise conceptualizations of communication and identity.