Abstract
Abstract Engaging with four geopolitical timespaces, and the concepts of liminality, lim/lines/ borders/boundaries, mobility and memory, against the backdrop of pre-, anti-, post- and de-colonial ideas, this study illustrates how tenets of what we call a “Second Wave of Southern Perspectives” (SWaSP) can illuminate the myths and imaginations that continue to give credibility to the idea of bounded language, identity and nation-states, including the role of languaging as constitutive dimension of these processes. The study presented in this paper has two aims. First, it explicates a SWaSP framing wherein the role of languaging is both a key dimension of the (multi-scalar) organization of everyday life inside and outside institutional physical-digital spaces, and of the remembering of lim i.e., lines or boundaries as dimensions of belonging. Second, by juxtaposing ideas about belonging and (shifting) boundaries across time and spaces, it highlights the mechanisms involved in contemporary re-enforcements of archaic conceptualizations of language, identity and nation-spaces across global settings. We argue that these mechanisms constitute a similar endeavor across the global-North/South, not least given recent discussions related to mobility and digitalization more generally wherein issues regarding democracy and equity are increasingly confronted with rising right-wing agendas and a racial renaissance. We attempt to show how identity tensions of “individuals/communities” and “an-other” are co-construed and argue that such processes contribute to the re-enforcing naturalization of archaic conceptualizations pertaining to not only language, identity, nation-spaces, but also nationalism.
Highlights
Conceptualizations regarding the boundary-marked nature of language, human identity, and nation-spaces appear etched in scholarship despite having been challenged through historical, philosophical, and empirical explorations
By juxtaposing ideas about belonging and boundaries across timespaces, this study highlights the mechanisms involved in contemporary re-turnings to archaic conceptualizations of language, identity and nation-spaces across global settings
Using a methodological-analytical Second Wave of Southern Perspectives” (SWaSP) stance that draws on the scholar’s mobile gaze, we explicate three overlapping themes that arise through the examination of how difference between entities gets storied
Summary
Conceptualizations regarding the boundary-marked nature of language, human identity, and nation-spaces (and their populations) appear etched in scholarship despite having been challenged through historical, philosophical, and empirical explorations. A researcher’s loitering gaze can recognize that despite the increasingly established viewpoints (in the scholarship) accorded to the imagined nature of things like languages, the fluidity of human identities and the shifting boundaries that re-create nation-spaces, the words that researchers fall back upon (Fig. 1; see Bagga-Gupta forthcoming-a, 2017a) when describing language, identity and nation-spaces are saturated with connotations that are bounded, essentialized and static This premise draws attention to the need to disturb “received knowledge” and its source/s: from who, when and where specific types of knowledge originate, what is meant by it, which others are aligned to it, how its premises are articulated, what a specific perspective is labelled as, etc. The complicity of languaging in the creation of bounded language, identity, and nation-spaces, including what boundaries have meant and mean for the human condition
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