Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

6 Chineseness as a Moving Target
are consequently transforming from multicultural societies with a limited number of
ethnic groups (‘cultures’) to a superdiverse society in which cultural, religious and
linguistic identities cannot be taken for granted anymore. A superdiverse society is a
society in which ethnicity, culture, language and religion have ‘no guarantees’ (Harris &
Rampton, 2009) and are increasingly fluid and difficult to determine and define in
terms of groups of people (cf. Brubaker, 2002).
The concept of superdiversity intends to ‘capture a level and kind of complexity
surpassing anything many migrant-receiving countries have previously experienced’
(Vertovec, 2010:87). As current relations between ethnicity, citizenship, residence,
origin, language, profession, etc. are of an unprecedented high complexity and low
predictability, it becomes increasingly evident that it is descriptively inadequate to
assume fixed relations between such categories of identity or to assume the
countability or representability of cultures, languages and identities (in plural) or to see
migrants (‘ethnic minorities’) as bearers of national, ethnic or religious cultures. With
respect to language, observations of superdiversification have led to abandon notions
of languages as bounded entities and putative things in the physical world, in favor of
an understanding of language as a political construction or historical invention (see
e.g., Blackledge & Creese, 2010b; Makoni & Pennycook, 2007; Shohamy, 2006; Stroud,
2003) and towards adopting an alternative sociolinguistic vocabulary with notions such
as crossing, transidiomatic practices, (trans)languaging, resources, repertoires,
regimes, etc. to describe and understand the communicative practices and experiences
of persons in particular places and situations (Blommaert, 2010; Creese & Blackledge,
2010; Jacquemet, 2005; Jørgensen, 2008; Jørgensen, Karrebæk, Madsen & Møler, 2016;
Rampton, 2005 [1995]).
1.3 Polycentric language and identity repertoires
Polycentricity is the key notion deployed in this study, which is also used in various
disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, including geography, political
sciences and sociolinguistics (Aligica & Boettke, 2009; Aligica & Tarko, 2012;
Blommaert, Collins & Slembrouck, 2005a; Davoudi, 2002; Fuller, 1978; Hague & Kirk,
2003; Polanyi, 1951). It refers to the multiplicity of centers of gravity (or centering
forces) in social or spatial configurations. Whereas monocentric configurations are
regulated according to a single reference point in space (and/or time), polycentric
configurations are regulated by multiple, competing centers with unequal power.
Aligica and Tarko (2012) argue that the polycentricity conceptual framework is a strong
analytical structure for the study of complex social phenomena.
Sociolinguistically, whether languages (in their nominal, countable form) are seen
as species of idiolects with family resemblance (Mufwene, 2008), as artefacts created
by linguists (Blommaert, 2008) or as historical constructs that emerged as by-products
of nation-building projects (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007), they may be recognized to
have a center and a periphery. The center of a language is where speakers themselves
recognize that the language is ‘best’, ‘most correctly’ or ‘most normally’ spoken and
often corresponds to the most populated middle class areas and to where the best or
the highest number of educational institutions and publishers are or were established