Popular Public Discourse at Speakers' Corner: Negotiating Cultural Identities in Interaction

Abstract

This paper examines how cultural identities are negotiated in popular debate at a multicultural public setting in London. Speakers at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park manage the local construction of group affiliation, audience response and argument in and through talk, within the context of ethnic, religious and general topical `soapbox' oration. However, audiences are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages. They are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Speakers' Corner is a space in which participant `citizens' in the public sphere can struggle actively over cultural representation and identities. Transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner are examined to show how cultural identity is invoked in the management of active participation. Audiences and their affiliations are regulated and made accountable through the routines of membership categorization and the policing of cultural identities and their imaginary borders.