Julie Byrd Clark: Multilingualism, Citizenship, and Identity: Voices of Youth and Symbolic Investments in an Urban, Globalized World

Abstract

In this book, Julie Byrd Clark sets out to disentangle ‘‘the complex interrelationships between globalization, multilingualism, and identity’’ (p. ix) using interview data from nine young adult bior multilingual Italian-Canadians, training to teach French. The book uses its interview data to create an account of the way these teacher trainees construct their identities in relation to others around them, their family history, their ethnolinguistic context and their social and professional aspirations. The purpose is to shed greater light on the lived experience of multilingual individuals in a globalising world, and in a nation (Canada) with a complex and politically heated national language and immigration backdrop of its own. The main undercurrent of the book is that the interviewees—and by implication others in similar situations—make significant ‘‘symbolic investments’’ in different language practices, which reveal their perceptions of themselves as citizens (local, national and global). Analyses of interview data are frequently supplemented by authorial commentary and personal reflection, a methodology referred to throughout as ‘‘critical sociolinguistic ethnography, discourse analysis, and reflexivity’’. Empirically the book is constrained to Italian-Canadians, but is pitched as mappable onto other ethnolinguistic contexts. Ultimately Byrd Clark endorses greater flexibility—or ‘‘wiggle room’’ as she affectionately puts it periodically—in these kinds of identity-making practices. The book is fundamentally problematic for a number of reasons. First is its engagement with theory. Although the idea of ‘‘symbolic investments’’ is a promising one, and lends itself to such a small-scale sensitive ethnography, it is not substantially developed, or sufficiently backed up with reference to relevant theory. There is a tendency to dip superficially into theories from famous (fashionable?) authors, like habitus, linguistic markets, capital, power, agency. Authors are seldom cited in detail, or even by page, and consistently over-reduced for point/counterpoint. Other, more