See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/318204468

Aesthetics, politics, and sociolinguistic analysis

Article  in  Language Sciences · July 2017

DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2017.02.005

CITATION READS
1 84

1 author:

Mary Louise Pratt

New York University
133 PUBLICATIONS   8,596 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

sociolinguistics View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Mary Louise Pratt on 14 August 2022.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 AESTHETICS, POLITICS, AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC
ANALYSIS

Mary Louise Pratt, New York University

INTRODUCTION
In 2004, the Afro-CubanAmerican writer H. G. Carrillo published a novel
titled Loosing My Espanish. The three-word sequence performs a delightful
and complicated play between Spanish and English, between orality and
writing, and between writer and reader. The word ‘Espanish’ melds the
English term ‘Spanish’ with its Spanish equivalent, ‘Español’, and
reproduces a common interference feature of Spanish-accented English
speech: the insertion of the /e/ sound before initial consonant clusters,
following Spanish phonology. This is English written with a Spanish
accent. But much more is going on. ‘Loosing’ plays on the phonological
fact that in English the sounds s/z are separate phonemes, while in Spanish
they are not. It plays on the graphological facts that (a) in English both the
/s/ and /z/ sounds can be carried by the letter s; while the phoneme /u/ can be
carried graphically by both oo and o. Hence, in English, loose and lose are a
minimal pair both graphically (o/oo) and phonemically (s/z). In Spanish the
sound /z/, i.e. the voiced fricative, does not exist, though the written letter z
does.1 Hence native Spanish speakers speaking English typically pronounce
the /z/ sound as the /s/ sound– turning ‘lose’ into ‘loose.’ This phonetic
generalization is another common marker of a Spanish accent in English,
and Americans are very familiar with it. Carrillo reproduces this Spanish
interference graphically in the title by adding in the letter o which changes
/z/ to /s/, and ‘lose’ to ‘loose.’ The change produces, as if through magic, an
additional set of meanings, a semantic pun: the book is about both losing and
loosing Spanish. The pun is perceptible only by combining audio and visual
cues. The reader sees the extra o but also has to hear it in order to figure out
the phonological play and the double meaning. That can happen only if the
reader also knows that two graphic and phonological systems are interacting
here using the same alphabet: the Spanish system where s/z are not
phonemically distinguished and written oo does not exist, and the English
system, where s/z are phonemically distinct and written oo does exist. This
requires a reader with a degree of competence in both languages. That
reader figures it all out quite instantaneously and, presumably appreciates (or
knows s/he is intended to appreciate) the artfulness, playfulness,
inventiveness and intentionality of Carrillo’s construction, its aesthetic
dimensions.
Loosing My Espanish defamiliarizes English by enmeshing or
infiltrating it with Spanish. The phrase intensifies and estranges linguistic
experience by placing two languages in play at the same time, at the levels
of sound, meaning, and graphics, skillfully entangling them so they cannot
be deciphered separately but must be grasped simultaneously. These
aesthetic dimensions carry the politics of Carrillo’s project. ‘Loosing’ and
‘losing’ have distinct, partly contrasting meanings: loosing implying
centrifugal expansion, losing implying contraction and disappearance.
Collapsing them into a single word calls on the reader to hold both meanings
simultaneously. With respect to ‘Espanish,’ loosing and losing are two of the
main processes that are happening in the United States. With increased
immigration from Latin America, Spanish has been let loose as the de facto
second language of the country. Across the United States, people hear it
every day. Automated phone calls routinely include the ubiquitous para
español oprima el dos, ‘press two for Spanish.’ Spanish is overwhelmingly
the choice for second language study at all levels of schooling, which creates
the bilingual familiarity Carrillo relies on in his readers. At the same time,
monolinguist ideologies persist, even at official levels, and Spanish is
particularly stigmatized.2 Immigrant offspring are losing it in favour of
English at an accelerating pace. The implied speaker of Carrillo’s title is
indeed losing/loosing his Español into a Spanish-inflected form of English.
Through the pun, Carrillo situates his novel, and his reader, in the space of
bilingualism and in the interplay of these two dynamics in the contemporary
United States. In his title, the aesthetics enact the politics.

THE CROSS-CULTURAL SUBLIME

Sociolinguists have long been fascinated by verbal activity in situations
where, as in Carrillo’s text, multiple linguistic codes are in play
simultaneously. Panels on language mixing, code-switching, bilingualism
and translanguaging pepper the applied and sociolinguistic literature and
conference programmes. These phenomena have become objects of
particular fascination for their links to vital sociopolitical issues around
global migration, colonialism, language and education policy,
multiculturalism, immigrant justice, and societal integration. In these few
pages, I aim to explore one particular suggestion: that aesthetic analysis is a
necessary tool for sociolinguistic explication, especially of translingual and
transcultural verbal behaviours, and especially for understanding their
political dimensions. The suggestion is that to grasp what Doris Sommer
calls the ‘real world of living language’ (Sommer, 2004: 34),
sociolinguistics needs analytical tools to make explicit the aesthetic
dimensions of the materials it studies. Verbal aesthetics are too powerful and
important to be left implicit or ignored.3
In her important book, Bilingual Esthetics: Toward a New Sentimental
Education (2004), language and literary theorist Doris Sommer argues that
learning to value the play of linguistic difference is a central building block
of contemporary democracy. She proposes a ‘new sentimental education’
that replaces mistrust and fear of the unfamiliar or incomprehensible with
the ability to appreciate and enjoy them. As her title suggests, these
capacities have to be taught, transmitted as social know-how, just as fear and
mistrust must be taught. For Sommer, the challenge is fundamentally an
aesthetic one. It is about the cultivation of sensibilities, the aim being ‘to
reframe a fear of foreignness into an appetite for it’ (135). To develop her
approach, Sommer surprises us by returning to Emmanuel Kant, never a
beacon for multiculturalists. Sommer appropriates Kant’s distinction
between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful, Kant argues, is
created through harmony and symmetry, and inspires love of the world. The
sublime is created through the combined experience of beauty and terror,
fear and admiration, the beautiful and the horrible. Kant valued the sublime
over the ‘merely’ beautiful, seeing the former as the source of the highest
artistic achievement. Sommer is not interested in that hierarchy, but rather
in developing people’s capacity to appreciate invigorating combinations of
beauty and fear, pleasure and unpleasure, certainty and risk, comprehension
and incomprehension in contemporary social life. What contemporary
democracies need to develop, Sommer argues, is a ‘cross-cultural sublime’
that gives citizens ‘a palate for the unfamiliar, for surprise, even irritation’
(134):
Some tolerance for a cross-cultural sublime (the thrill of
incomprehension) as well as for humor should spice our talk of
aesthetics. Then particular subjects will recognize our own ‘migrant’
condition as normal double consciousness. Whether more than one
culture is inside or alongside the subject, the doubling or multiplying
of codes amounts to a humbling consciousness of one’s limits. And
humility is a sublime double agent that collaborates with reason to
make feeling funny feel very good. (134)

I am convinced that developing this ‘palate for the unfamiliar, for surprise,
even irritation’ is what sociolinguists are doing when they find themselves
engaged by transcultural interaction, translingual, and mixed language
materials, the dramas of communication across difference. I am quite sure
that developing this palate (or what I once called the ‘arts of the contact
zone’; Pratt ,1991) is also what our informants are doing in the often skilled
and performative interactions that grab our attention. In both the
interactions and our engagement with them, I suggest, the politics we care
about are often enacted to a significant degree in and by the verbal
aesthetics. Making these aspects of the data analytically explicit makes for
stronger sociolinguistic analyses. To explore that claim, I introduce three
parameters for identifying the aesthetic dimensions of verbal activity, then
see how they work in two examples, one a spontaneous speech exchange
and the other a corpus of videotaped personal narratives. The three
parameters will be familiar to scholars of poetics:
 1) the display of technical skill and virtuosity
2) estrangement or defamiliarization
3) intensification.

The first parameter has two key terms: skill and display. These combine in
the concept of virtuosity, made so useful to us by the Italian philosopher and
semiotician, Paolo Virno (2004).4 The second parameter, estrangement or
defamiliarization was introduced by the Russian Formalists in the first half
of the 20th century. The force of art, they argued, lies in its power to make
people see the world anew, to render the familiar unfamiliar, or to interrupt it
with story, fantasy or (to use Sommer’s terms) the unfamiliar, surprise, even
irritation. The third, intensification, may be grasped by placing the aesthetic
alongside its opposite, the anaesthetic. Anaesthesia is the absence of
sensation, awareness or feeling. Aesthetic activity aims to intensify
sensation, awareness, or affect. In language, aesthetic action intensifies the
experience of sound, meaning, feeling, gesture, and the interaction of any of
these. Rhyme and rhythm, volume, speed, emphasis and repetition intensify
the experience of sound and its interaction with meaning. As discussed
above, Loosing My Espanish intensifies meaning and estranges linguistic
experience by entangling two languages so they cannot be deciphered
separately. One of the purest forms of defamiliarization or estrangement, of
course, is fantasy - imagining the world otherwise than it is. To some these
three parameters will recall Roman Jakobson’s famous account of the
‘poetic function’ of language in which, as he put it, ‘the principle of
equivalence is projected from the axis of selection onto the axis of
combination’ (Jakobson 1960). In general terms this means that aesthetics
operates in language as an intensification or densification of the interplay of
sameness and difference across the linear sequence of writing or speech.
Metaphor and simile, for example, create a semantic equivalence between
object A and object B projected across a syntactic sequence. Done with
skill, the projection produces the familiar in a new, revealing way. Parody
estranges through exaggeration, that is, by intensifying familiar markers.
‘Style,’ or better, ‘styling’ names another manifestation of the aesthetic in
language. Styling involves intensifying certain aspects of speech or writing,
as a display of skill - an act of defamiliarization that distinguishes one
person or group from others. Standup comedians are often virtuosos in these
styling practices5. One of sociolinguistics’ specializations, the study of
language variation, requires aesthetic categories to capture the performative
dimensions of socially marked speech. For example, in the Americas, one of
the ways speakers from the Dominican Republic perform ‘Dominicanness’
is by speaking Spanish at a deliberately intensified speed, as a style
displayed for an audience. Speakers do this with varying degrees of skill,
and the skill is admired. Extreme performances of this style are a staple of
Dominican standup comedy.6 In its performative marking of difference,
styling is a particularly clear instance of aesthetics as the vehicle for politics.
Whether it is done within or between languages, skillful styling is one way
of producing the invigorating combinations of beauty and fear, pleasure and
unpleasure, certainty and risk, comprehension and incomprehension that
characterize Sommer’s cross-cultural sublime. Learning to appreciate such
combinations, she argues, is key to contemporary democracy. The politics
are in the aesthetics.

‘YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE SYSTEM!’

I suggested earlier that the power of the aesthetic often plays a role in
attracting the interest of sociolinguists to particular instances or genres of
verbal activity, like translingual and transcultural expression. We are
fascinated by speech that is artful, inventive, and skillful, speech that
estranges, and intensifies, whether spontaneous, preconstructed, or anywhere
in between. One of my most memorable encounters with the ‘cross-cultural
sublime’ was a spontaneous speech exchange I witnessed on a street corner
in New York City around 2004. I was standing beside one of the ubiquitous
corner markets that were then a New York trademark, with a pair of delivery
workers, a Jamaican man who was clearly the boss, and a Guatemalan man
who seemed recently arrived and spoke almost no English. Our exchange
about my bill was interrupted by the shout of a woman’s voice, with the
Korean accent of the store manager: ‘Water!’ One of the store’s Mexican
employees, a young man, bounded into the street in pursuit of a pedestrian
who had just snatched a bottle of water. The Jamaican quickly reached out,
grabbed the Mexicano by the arm and gently said. ‘No, mon, don’t be a fool.
Let him go. You could get yourself killed.’ The following dialogue ensued
(with gestures, accents, emphases, I can only ask readers to imagine):

Mexicano: But he stole water. It’s my job.

Jamaican: No, mon, it’s your job to chase him inside the store, but in
the street, let him go. Don’t risk your life for fifty cents.
Mexicano: If I don’t stop him, the next guy will do the same thing.
Jamaican: That’s not your problem, mon. You talkin’ ‘bout fifty
cents. And not even your fifty cents
Mexicano: It’s not the money. It’s the act.
 Jamaican: Nobody cares about you, mon. You don’t understand
the system.
Mexicano: No, YOU don’t understand the system.

Both shrugged, and the exchange ended there. The Guatemalan apparently
did not speak enough English to join the argument, but he seemed to
understand well enough, and listened intensely. I stood by riveted, in full
grip of the invigorating pleasure of difference and risk – Sommer’s cross-
cultural sublime. The future of this city, I thought, and all the world’s global
cities, is being crafted by exchanges like this. Every minute of every day, in
public, private, and institutional spaces, the residents of globalizing social
worlds are at work exploring and explaining their differences, creating
clashes and resolving them, negotiating ethics, desires, spaces, manners,
meanings, and the assumptions of mutual responsibility that make collective
life work or fail. Radical inequalities of all kinds are constitutive features of
these worlds, and the global processes that produce them.
The exchange, to my multiculturally trained sensibilities, abundantly
displayed the ‘invigorating combinations of beauty and fear, pleasure and
unpleasure, certainty and risk, comprehension and incomprehension’ that
Sommers calls upon citizens of modern democracies to appreciate.
Audiences with whom I have shared the anecdote have found the exchange
as compelling as I do. They too relish the zone of the cross-cultural sublime.
But here is the point: the compelling character of this exchange results from
the artfulness and skill the two speakers exercise as they construct it. Their
spontaneous collaboration creates an elegant, lively discursive architecture
that explores difference, disagreement and uncertainty through a practice of
intensely sustained symmetry and reciprocity. Together they produce a
‘sublime’ outcome. Neither party capitulates to the other, difference persists,
but agreement is reached on the object of disagreement, ‘the system.’ Risks
are taken – the Jamaican interrupts the Mexican’s course of action, and a
verbal duel ensues which, like all such duels, takes place at the risky edge of
insult, rupture, or violence. The exchange succeeds because both participants
uphold cooperative turntaking. Neither escalates, neither walks away. More
important, both speakers artfully tailor each of their responses to the length,
content, syntax, lexicon and tone of the previous one, thereby maintaining a
democratic contract of equivalence between them. Through a repeated
syntax of ‘it’s not that, it’s this,’ each man deftly defamiliarizes the other’s
positions with an alternative, adding intensity and density with each turn.
What the Jamaican calls risking your life, the Mexicano calls his job. Your
job, the Jamaican says, holds inside the store but not outside; the water is
worth fifty cents, not your life. For the Mexicano it’s not about this guy, but
the next, not about the money but the act. Again, these artfully executed,
cumulative acts of intensification, defamiliarization and sustained
equivalence carry the politics. The back and forth argument develops a
symmetrical contrast between two principles for organizing collective life,
self-interest (the Jamaican) and the common good (the Mexicano). The
cultural analyst hears history in play as well. The Mexicano’s claims for the
common good brings forward the principles of collective responsibility that
organizes Mexican communal life, especially in rural areas; the Jamaican’s
critique of exploitation and defense of self-preservation bring forward his
homeland’s history of colonialism, slavery, and their aftermaths.
There is another curious layer of reciprocity here that the speakers
enact without acknowledging it. In the sphere of embodied action, each
participant acts in accord with the other’s expressed values, not his own. The
Jamaican argued for self-interest and self-preservation, yet in stopping the
Mexicano he performed an act of altruism and solidarity, underscored by the
gentleness of his speech. The Mexicano disagreed with the Jamaican about
his obligations, but in the sphere of embodied action, he took the Jamaican’s
advice – he did stop. (The performance of the water-snatcher also enters the
equation here. He strolled away up the street in a performance of styled
defiance that also embodied politics and the sublime.)

‘EVEN MY CLOSEST FRIENDS DON’T KNOW’

Aesthetics and the politics of difference interact somewhat differently
in the second corpus I’ll introduce here: a speech genre developed in recent
years by the undocumented youth movement in the United States. The
undocumented youth movement, advocates on behalf of young people who
were brought to the United States illegally as children by their parents.7
They number between one and two million, a majority from Latin America,
but many from other places as well. They share a distinctive, dramatic life
story. Because public (state-sponsored) schools in the United States are
prohibited from recording immigration status, undocumented children attend
school like everyone else, and form the ambitious dreams of achievement
and success that American schools ask of the young. Usually their parents
avoid telling them about their undocumented status, for fear they will reveal
it to others. They discover it only as young adults when they apply for a
driver’s license, a job, a scholarship or student loan, a passport, admission to
post-secondary education. Only then do they learn, usually from their
parents, that their path forward is completely blocked by the lack of the all
important social security number. This abrupt revelation is a life-changing
shock. Suddenly they have a secret to hide from everyone around them, and
they are unsafe. Aspirations are replaced by the prospect of a life of
permanent concealment, fear of deportation, and unstable, menial
employment in the shadow economy of undocumented labor. The alternative
is deportation to a country of origin many do not know, because the
undocumented cannot travel. It is a nightmarish predicament.
The election of Barack Obama to the U.S. presidency in 2008
galvanized demands in the United States for a full overhaul of the
immigration system, including paths to legalization for the millions living
and working in the country illegally. When it became clear that right wing
opposition would make a general overhaul impossible, the undocumented
young began organizing on their own. In the face of real risk of deportation,
they began ‘coming out’ as undocumented people in public forums and
media, the way gay people had done before them (Zimmerman 2012). Under
the artful slogan, ‘Undocumented and Unafraid,’ they organized rallies and
media events on college campuses and in Washington DC, and began
publicly confronting politicians, including the President. Defying
concealment, they sought exposure, to create awareness of their plight and
support for a piece of proposed legislation called the DREAM Act –
Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors. The act would give
access to work permits, drivers’ licenses, educational opportunities, and a
path to legalization for those who met certain criteria. When immigrant
rights organizations took up their cause, the DREAMer movement quickly
became national in scope. 8
One of the DREAMers’ biggest challenges was to overcome the
stigma of illegality and the disenfranchising label ‘illegal.’ On this front,
their most effective tool, the movement discovered, was storytelling. The
DREAMers’ own life stories, told by themselves, were capable of moving
mainstream American audiences to compassion and acceptance – provided,
of course, the stories were designed and performed in an effective way. For
example, many DREAMers had compelling stories of illegal border
crossings with terrified parents in the dead of night. But what moved their
audiences politically, the DREAMers found, was the narrative trajectory
summarized in the paragraph just above, the story of growing up as a normal
American kid with dreams of personal achievement, the violence of abruptly
thwarted dreams, and the longing to belong. The narrative hinges on the
moment of revelation at the brink of young adulthood, that nothing is as it
has seemed.
In meetings and workshops across the United States, the youth began
putting their stories together and teaching others to do so. It was an intense
period of exploration, experimentation, and creativity. They learned to speak
in public and on camera, after years of secrecy and fear. They worked at
crafting texts and performances that would intensify compassion and
empathy and dispel hatred and fear, an aesthetic task. Videomakers filmed
and edited the stories and put them into circulation on the internet, especially
YouTube. Among the hundreds of examples, two formats prevail: short, one
to three minute personal testimonies by individuals, and longer six to fifteen
minute films that splice several people’s stories together, sometimes adding
bits of policy explanation and commentary from public officials.9
Political scientist Bonnie Honig provides a useful analytical frame for
approaching the DREAMer narratives, in her now classic Democracy and
the Foreigner (2003). Modern democracies like the United States, she
argues, have a ‘passionate ambivalence’ (106) about immigration. On the
one hand, xenophobia abounds: invading aliens are here to take our jobs,
change our way of life, exploit our support systems, and so on. Their
differences, their foreignness is a constant irritant. On the other hand, Honig
argues, immigrants also elicit xenophilia. Through their eagerness to join
and belong, they reaffirm the often jaded national ideals of their adoptive
countries. They defamiliarize those ideals, make them available in a
renewed, reinvigorated, intensified way. They re-enchant the nation’s self-
image by eagerly accepting its terms over the conditions they left behind,
They performatively declare their consent to be governed, which native-born
citizens simply inherit whether they like it or not - another act of
defamiliarization in which the anaesthetic or unfelt becomes aesthetic, that
is, felt. Immigrants, Honig argues, renew the nation’s confidence in its
merits, despite its obvious and systemic failures to make good on its
promises. ‘Foreignness’, she says, is ‘a necessary supplement to national
democratic nations’ (108); democracy is ‘a politics among strangers’ (72).
The term ‘necessary’ is striking here.
This language of re-enchantment, estrangement, phobia and philia
suggests we are again on the terrain of the aesthetic as well as the political,
and again on the ground where Sommer seeks to establish the cross-cultural
sublime. Indeed, Sommer draws on Honig to affirm the value of foreignness
as a productive ‘irritant’ that ‘provokes’ politics and culture to ‘interact in
restless, dynamic ways’ that ultimately strengthen democracy (Sommer,
2004: 85).
Xenophobia and xenophilia draw the social map (or maybe the dance
floor) that the undocumented storytellers navigate. Their narrative
performances are crafted to concentrate meaning around signifiers able to
trigger the xenophilic response, that promise of national reaffirmation, and
avoid signifiers likely to trigger xenophobia. The speakers are consistently
well-groomed and healthy in appearance; in dress, body type, and body
markers they fulfill conventional middle-class values. No tattoos, shaved
heads, dyed hair, body piercings, gang markings, or signs of ambiguous
sexualities appear. They speak in standard American English only. While
many mention arriving with no English, the videos contain no traces of
bilingualism, non-native accents, or other signs that might suggest divided
loyalties. In the context of ‘illegality’ and xenophobia, these normalizations
carry out a form of defamiliarization, countering stereotypes of immigrants
as dangerous, criminal, and inscrutable. Alongside these concentrated
markers of conformity, however, the speakers skillfully individualize
themselves through voice, body language, gesture, and facial expression.
They express style, personality, self-possession, and charm. They smile and
speak directly to the camera, establishing equality with the viewer. Close
camera range reduces distance and fosters identification between speaker
and listener. Though speakers smile often, affect in the videos is
choreographed around sadness, through music and facial expressions. But
there are no tears, and no expressions of anger, resentment or despair. The
speakers convey resilience, aspiration and desire, not victimhood. The other
affect is sincerity. This dance floor is no place for the riskiness of irony,
parody or sarcasm.
A brief video made in 2009 in support of the DREAM Act exhibits
some of the practices of the movement in its initial phase. Just over a minute
long, it is not subtle. On the screen we see a young Asian woman standing
on a pier in New York City, looking at the Statue of Liberty a short distance
away. Her hands are in her coat pockets; her face holds a serious, downcast
expression as she looks out over New York harbour. The Star Spangled
Banner, the U.S. national anthem, plays softly in the background. The young
woman’s narrative, in voiceover, describes her stymied life:
 My parents brought me here when I was six years old. I’m just like
everyone else. I study hard in school, I volunteer, and I have friends.
And now I’m about to graduate with honors. But there’s just one
problem. I have nowhere to go. My teacher says that if I don’t have
papers I don’t qualify for financial aid, federal loans or scholarships.
How am I going to pay for my tuition? I can’t even find a decent job.
This is not how I imagined life would be. I was looking forward to my
future, but now I’m just scared. I guess in my case working hard is
just not enough. (DreamTV, 2009)

The visual component intensifies the theme of ‘I have nowhere to go.’ One
shot films the young woman from behind, standing alone at the railing,
surrounded by people in motion, who do have somewhere to go. In this
trafficked public place, she appears isolated, disconnected and immobilized.
Another shot shows her feeding pigeons, a stereotyped image of someone
with nothing better to do, not an occupation for an ambitious honours
student. The narrative turns on the ‘then and now’ moment of estrangement,
in which the speaker asserts she was always ‘just like everyone else,’ and
now she is not. She was hopeful, and now she is just scared. The last line,
‘in my case working hard is just not enough’ is an act of defamiliarization,
marking the gap between how the world looks to the undocumented ‘me’
and documented others whom she is otherwise like in every way. The line
contradicts the American national mantra that hard work is necessary and
sufficient to succeed. It challenges the mainstream audience to make good
on that American promise, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty and the
national anthem, by changing the conditions under which the speaker is
required to live.
As in the other examples discussed the aesthetics carry the politics in
the DREAMer videos. They use skill, intensification, defamiliarization,
affect and enchantment to mobilize what Honig calls xenophilic desire in
their viewers, to convert stereotyped subaltern otherness into individualized
mainstream selfhood, fear into familiarity, depersonalized hostility into
personalized caring. Visually and performatively, they seem to seek not the
gut-wrenching terrain of the Kantian sublime, where beauty and fear
combine in invigorating ways, but the symmetrical, harmony-seeking terrain
of the beautiful - except of course for the content of the stories. The strategy
of using every available tool to create identification and familiarity
intensifies the grotesque incongruity of the chasm between the realities the
speakers and viewers are living. ‘They’ are ‘just like us’ except that they
have been denied the most fundamental building blocks of middle class
American lives - travel, friendship, driving a car, working for pay, getting an
education. Almost always, the videos stage the DREAMers alone and
immobile, in enclosed rooms or in outdoor spaces interacting with no one.
One begins with a young woman sadly wandering in an empty airport. Soft,
meditative piano music plays in the background, while in voiceover she says
‘Even my closest friends don’t know,’ begins another young woman in a
video posted in 2012. ‘I know I shouldn’t really care about Facebook
comments, but I feel very shameful.’ She describes herself: ‘I’m Mexican,
I’m double majoring and I’m going to graduate summa cum laude. I didn’t
take out any loans, I worked since I was sixteen. I can’t hide it for the rest
of my life’ (illegalmovieproject). A shot of a young man follows, sitting
alone in a room at a desk, studying. The piano music continues. With a
slight smile he looks at the camera: ‘Right about 17,18, that’s when I got my
acceptance into Harvard. I read my acceptance letter and I leapt out the door
… I ran all the way to school to show them the email I just got, and that was
the first problem there’ (ibid). This young man’s story includes a forty-five
day incarceration in an immigration detention center after a minor traffic
offence. A third speaker appears alone in a classroom, writing mathematical
equations on a blackboard. He introduces himself as a major in mathematics
and statistics. He dramatizes his moment of revelation: ‘So I went and I
asked, I was like “Mom, Do you have my social security number?” And
she’s like “You don’t have a social security number.” And I’m like “What?
Wait, so how am I in school?” The mother explains she was only required to
present a birth certificate to get him into school. “Then, I’m like ‘Wow, that
means I’m undocumented!”’ (ibid). This young mathematician also spends
time incarcerated in a detention center. While they recount experiences of
fear and frustrated ambitions, the DREAMer performances carefully avoid
expressing abjection or defeat. They convey a stance of purposeful
readiness: let us just fix this. That affective architecture is a product of
narrative and performative artistry.
As the DREAMer video genre established itself and proliferated,
experimentation increased. In a video from 2013, for example, a young
woman of Nigerian origin, called Praise Ogidie, constructs a more
aestheticized and emotionally intense performance than the examples
mentioned so far. With an edgy haircut, bright lipstick, and colorful clothes
she appears alone in a room, looking and speaking directly at the camera, a
slight smile on her face. The camera remains stationary throughout, varying
only by zooming in and out as the speaker delivers her message. She speaks
rapidly, with intense emotion. The video lasts just under two minutes
(transcribed verbatim):

We used to lay on top of sweat-churned sheets and make wishes under

dead fans. Funny thing is, we didn’t wish for Nepah not to take away
the light, or for hot water to bathe during the Hamatan season. We
wished for long hair, gave ourselves fake American names, giggled
and fantasized about what kind of pop stars we would be. We were
too young to be lectured by poverty, too innocent to be educated by
pain. I remember the first time my tongue embraced the tip of a red
white and blue popsicle stick, my teeth chased after the drawn out
string of cheese falling from a triangle shaped bread. ‘This is pizza,’
auntie said. ‘Pizza.’ I never heard of pizza in Africa. America was a
treasure box hidden under miles of dirt. I had to dig, but I knew that it
was there, a treasure waiting for me to unravel. You ever ran for
miles and miles to reach your destination and realized you didn’t have
the key? You refused to give up. You knocked until your knuckles
bled. You kept knocking, knocking, and knocking, hoping someone
was listening, hoping someone was there, hoping you’d knock so hard
you’d eventually break down the wall of indifference that lay ice cold
over their conscience. There is something life changing about the
moment when you realize there are no other options. There are no
spare keys for the undocumented immigrant. And so you raise your
tired knuckles and you knock and you knock and you knock, hoping
that someday, someone will be kind enough to open the door. (Odigie
2013)
This speaker cultivates what Sommer calls ‘the palate for the unfamiliar, the
reframing of fear as appetite.’ She defamiliarizes ‘America’ by depicting it
from the perspective of two young African girls, as the object of fascination
and innocent desire. The introduction of pizza first as ‘cheese falling in
strings from a triangle shaped bread’ is a classic instance of estrangement,
refreshing the listener’s image of pizza. She lexicalizes the estrangement in
her repetition of the strange new word ‘pizza,’ along with a puzzled facial
expression imitating her first response. ‘Appetite’ is concrete here. The aim
is to invoke xenophilia – first, her own enthusiasm for America’s unknown
treasures, and then that of the audience, whose Americanness, as Honig
argues, is reaffirmed through the speaker. She expresses no fear of America,
no ambivalence, no sense of loss of her home culture, though all these could
certainly have been present. The text is saturated with a longing so intense
it nears abjection. She conveys the longing through the semantic density and
affective power of extended metaphors – the metaphor first of the treasure
chest deep underground, then of the long run to a door that turns out to be
locked, then of the endless knocking and hoping. At the end, the rhythmic
repetition of ‘knock’ imitates the sound of the knocking leaving the audience
with an audio memory grafted onto an image.
These metaphors carry a theme affirmed in one way or another in all
the DREAMer videos: stamina, persistence and hard work. This theme or
topos is one of the DREAMers’ central devices for combatting xenophobia
and affiliating themselves with American national values. Other aspects of
their lives and selves are left outside the frame – family, community,
religion, multilingualism, and the political identities they also have as
protesters, organizers, and activists in a dissident social movement. The
DREAMer videos are purposefully and strategically depoliticized, and that
is their politics, carried by their aesthetics. If it all seems heavy handed, it is.
In these interventions, conformism and familiarization are antidotes aiming
to convert the xenophobic toxin of ‘illegality’ into the gift of acceptance and
permission. But that is not the whole story.
The DREAM videos are part of a clear political strategy aimed at
audiences outside the movement. Within the movement, they exercise
another kind of power that is equally important. The storytelling workshops
quickly became central to the undocumented movement’s internal dynamics.
The process of crafting and performing their life stories turned out to be
profoundly life-changing for the young people themselves. Before the
movement coalesced, undocumented status was a guilty secret, not a
narratable story or a meaningful experience. Like homosexuality, it was
lived as a hidden condition that could not speak its name, the very opposite
of a life story. Said one trainee: ‘I didn’t even know how to tell my story.
There was no beginning or middle or end for me … Within a few months I
was empowered to share my story not only here, but also publicly. Once
sharing my story it became something else. I was ready to … risk more than
I thought I could risk’ (quoted in Nichols, 2014: 63-4). Constructing the
story, coming out, takes courage and agency, and it creates courage and
agency. That empowerment through storytelling is yet another place where
aesthetics, politics, and performance meet in ways that, Sommer and Honig
tell us, are necessary for contemporary democracy.
What gives utterances the ability to generate courage? To move
people from one belief to another, to compel action? How does speech
emancipate and generate new futures? What qualities give speech the world-
making, subject-producing, transformative powers we see exhibited every
day? Social movements across the political spectrum inhabit this terrain. As
analysts of the force of language in the world, so do we.

CODA
To be a sociolinguist is to interact constantly with the aesthetic. It is to
know the way conversation is a dance and oratory is song. It means being
trained to recognize musicality, rhythmic back and forths, dissonance and
interruption, changes of key in the play of living speech. It is to know that
in any speech situation, there are enormous social stakes in voice, register,
repertoire, timing, pacing, orchestration of turns; to know that linguistic
exchanges are saturated by the micropolitics of style – that variation can be a
quickstep or a duel, a choreography of risk across whatever social map is in
play. My questions here have been: How can the aesthetic and the
performative be incorporated explicitly and systematically into
sociolinguistic analysis? Is this not essential to explicating the way language
works in the world?

REFERENCES

Botta, Johanna 2016. An Undocumented Student’s Journey to Harvard,

3:03 mins., Nov 4, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7ATm_EcRjk accessed 6/20/16.

Dalonzo, Daniel 2011. Undocumented and Unafraid. 7:59 mins, Feb. 28,
2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdOrxLLHo0U, accessed
03/25/16
De Genova, Nicholas. The queer politics of migration: reflections on
“illegality” and incorrigibility. Studies in Social Justice 4:101-126.

Donellon, Benjamin 2013. Living Undocumented. 17.35 minutes, May 4,

2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjBkrqJ9BEc, accessed 3/20/16

Dream TV 2009. The Story of the Undocumented Students.1:12 mins.

Uploaded 4/24/09. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K99UJTUaLck,
accessed 06/23/16

Honig, Bonnie. 2003. Democracy and the Foreigner. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

Illegal Movie Project 2012. Illegal. June 15, 2012, 6:02 mins,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhlScTZ-8Y, accessed 3/3/16

Ju Hong, 2012. UC Berkeley Undocumented Student. December 10, 2012,

3:19 mins, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZhlScTZ-8Y, accessed
03/05/16

Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Closing statement: linguistics and poetics. In: Style
in Language, edited by Thomas Seboek, pp. 350-371. New York: Wiley
350-71

Murray, Braelen, 2009. Undocumented Dreams. May 22, 2009, 9:40 mins,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6zuuItnjbY, accessed 3/15/16
Nicholls, Walter J. 2014. The Dreamers: How the Undocumented Youth
Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

Odigie, Praise. 2013. How an Undocumented Immigrant Looks at America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H4qy5WNEuk, uploaded February 20,
2013, 1:43 mins., accessed 3/21/16

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary

Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. Arts of the contact zone. Modern Language
Association, Profession, 33-40

Pratt, Mary Louise. 2009. Harm’s way: language and the contemporary arts
of war. PMLA Special issue on War, October 2009: 1515-1531.

Pratt, Mary Louise. 2012. ‘If English was good enough for Jesus…’:
Monolinguismo y mala fe. Critical Multilingual Studies 1: 12-30.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Language and the aftermaths of empire. PMLA, Special

section on inter-imperiality and the longue duree, ed. Laura Doyle, 348-57.

Sommer, Doris. 2004. Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education.

Durham: Duke University Press.
Raunic, Gerald. 2008. Modifying the Grammar, Paoolo Virno’s works on
Virtuosity and Exodus. Trans. By Aileen Derieg. Available at
http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/modifyingthegrammar#redir
07/01/08, accessed 07/07/16.

Rubin, Josh. 2013. Undocumented. 26:46 mins. May 29. 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuqwnSiW60Y, accessed 03/20/16

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Mary Louise Pratt. 1980. Linguistics for
Students of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

UCLA Labor Center. 2012. Undocumented and Unafraid. 8:40 mins, June 5,
2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKS_mpJfbSU accessed 6/20/16
Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of
Contemporary Forms of Life.(New York: Semiotexte, 2004)

Zimmerman, Arely. 2012. Documenting DREAMs: New media,

undocumented youth and the immigrant rights movement. Working paper,
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of
Southern California, April 2012.
1 The written letter z is pronounced in the Americas as unvoiced /s/, and in Spain as a

dental fricative like English th .

2 Under both presidents Bush and Obama, the U.S. Department of Education has

prioritized only the learning of English. St9 (udents entering schools with competence in

other languages are immediately categorized as “English Language Learners.” The

hostility to Spanish in the U.S. originates not in immigration but in the fact that Spain

was a rival empire in the Americas, against which the U.S. continues to make war long

after its defeat in 1898 (Pratt 2015)

3 I write as a scholar with training in both linguistics and literary/cultural studies, and

with a long history of engagement with applied and sociolinguistics (for example, Pratt

1977, 1991, 2009, 2012, 2015; Traugott and Pratt 1980)

4 According to Gerald Raunic, “For Virno, virtuosic activity is any activity that firstly

finds its own fulfillment and its own purpose in itself without objectifying itself into an

end product. Secondly, it is an actibity that requires the presence of others, it exists only

in the presence of an audience.” (Raunic, 2008)

5 The well known US biracial comedy team Key and Peale are virtuosos at exploring the

sociopolitics of style in speech. See, for example, their hilarious sequence called “Phone

call”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzprLDmdRlc

6 Dominican standup comedy specializes in a form called the trabalenguas ‘tongue

twister,’ which are long, meandering narrative monologues performed very rapidly with

no internal pauses of any kind, sometimes including internal rhymed couplets. For

examples, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYZkCdUitXs and

View publication stats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4qTxSr9ofQ. Rapid fire speech occurs in Spanish

language comedy from other countries as well, though not as a national identity marker.

7 The North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) decimated the Mexican peasant

agricultural economy, sending millions of rural Mexicans into the northward migrant

stream. Neoliberal reforms in other Latin American countries created similar tides of

economic refuges, and continue to do so, especially in Central America.

8 Overviews of the DREAMer movement can be found in De Genova 2010 and Nicholls

2014. In a crushing defeat, the DREAM Act failed by a few votes to pass in the US

Senate. In response, President Obama issued an executive order, Deferred Action for

Childhood Arrivals (DACA), that gave some undocumented youth a five-year reprieve,

provided they met certain criteria. Individual states also began passing legislation to

address the issue.

9 Exaamples of the short, one person format include Dream TV (2009), Ju Hong (2012),

and Bottla 2013. Examples of the longer format include: Illegalmovieproject 2012,

Murray 2009, Rubin 2013, UCLA Labor Center 2012