Superdiversity as a discursive field: language, identity and territory in Hong Kong

Abstract

Officially positioned as “Asia’s world city”, postcolonial Hong Kong has become a global financial and economic hub, this new role followed by public and private policies oriented to attract human and material resources from all over the world, and accompanied by new official discourses representing diversity as a key cultural feature (Flowerdew, 2004). These discourses are indeed showcased by Hong Kong Tourism Board which, in the last decade, has strongly invested in the sloganization of Hong Kong as “a unique fusion of Western and Eastern cultures”. In so doing, “diversity” has become a normative value that, although may be seen as denotatively empty, draws its force from the indexical role it plays in articulating marketing devices linked to the cultural communities of the business and management world (Urciuoli, 2003). Drawing from a linguistic ethnography of the networked trajectories of a group of working-class South Asian youth in Hong Kong (Pérez-Milans & Soto 2014, 2016), this paper aims to engage with contemporary sociolinguistic developments whereby public policies/discourses of multilingualism and multiculturalism are examined vis-à-vis socioeconomic, institutional and cultural processes of change tied to the conditions of late modernity (Rampton, Blommaert, Arnaut & Spotti 2016). Following up on Spotti’s call to bring about a greater focus on inequality in studies of superdiversity (2014), we examine the ways in which our participants navigate and make sense of diversity and diversification as a socially stratified ‘discursive field’ (Heller 2007). As such, these participants’ attempts to reconcile nation-based grand narratives about language, identity and territory, on the one hand, and their own transnational experience, on the other, get shaped by a particular institutional logic that assigns different value to different types of social persona, alignments and normative categories within the highly neoliberalized educational context of Hong Kong.