Abstract
A comprehensive book and one of a kind, Multiple Globalizations: Linguistic Landscapes in World-Cities, by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Miriam Ben-Rafael, focuses on linguistic landscapes (LL) of eight world-cities—four from western Europe, three from Asia, and one from Africa (Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Addis Ababa, Delhi, and Tokyo-Yokohama) that meet the demographic and structural parameters of being a world-city and are discreetly different from each other in linguistic and ethnic compositions, socio-economic conditions, political histories, geographic locations, and contextual realities determined by migration of people from different countries of the world. These world-cities differ in culture, business, festivals, architecture, artistic endeavors, lifestyle, and presence and composition of refugees and migrants.
Based on LL in public spaces at the city-centers and quarters outside downtowns, including residential middle-class neighborhoods populated by ethnic and socially underprivileged communities of these world-cities, the book explores the semiotic representations of names of business, commercial establishments, and street art, including posters on London double-decker buses, murals on the remnants of the Berlin Wall, comic strips on walls of houses and underground stations in Paris, and anarchist paintings in peripheral parts of the cities of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Consequently, the book covers a broad range of examples from various LL from these eight cities and identifies the factors that influence the choices of linguistic, cultural, and semiotic features in LL with much rigor.
The strengths of this book lie in its interdisciplinary approach. The book demonstrates that any decontextualized analysis of LL will not provide an appropriate understanding of LL; it requires an adequate understanding of sociology, critical geography, anthropology, and cultural studies. In addition, LL requires a meticulous analysis of the sociology of language—ways languages interact with contextual realities determined by the historical, political, social, and economic factors that influence the possible options and choices of languages, signs, and symbols in the LL of these cities. Thus, with an interdisciplinary approach, the book seems to be better equipped to address the material, discursive, and ideological processes that influence LL and emerging “societal and cultural metamorphoses” of these cities.
While Chapters One and Two contextualize the research, justifying the relevant theoretical constructs, research questions, and choice of research method and sites, Chapters Three to Seven deal with separate world-cities with reference to their LL. For example, Chapter Four presents photographs of LL from Berlin where German, the national language, is predominantly visible, with chaotic but coherent representations of Turkish, German, Arabic, English, Italian, French, and other languages. LL in Paris, by contrast, display a strong presence of globalization in central spaces of the city with a greater use of international commercial names. The visibility of ethnic vernacular languages in LL is observed in ethno-social quarters occupied by migrant communities. The windowpanes in these quarters display tokens or graphic markers of Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Thai, or other languages and cultures. The presence of North African Jews, Maghrebi Arabs, Sub-Saharan Africans, Chinese, and other Asian groups has created a vibrant multilingualism and multiculturalism within which elements of French language and culture exist as well.
The role of English, the language of globalization and internationalization and the lingua franca across the world, is different in each context. In London, English, as the national and official language, creates an apparent hegemony. There are also different hybridized forms of English combined with other languages, expressing multiculturalism in LL (Chapter 6). Put simply, English does not seem to reduce the role of socio-ethnic vernaculars and particularistic markers.
In Brussels, for example, English plays an important role in minimizing the conflicts between French and Flemish (Chapter 5). The presence and significance of languages and markers of origins in a variety of quarters are visible in the use of Arabic, African languages, Asian languages, Turkish, and other languages. The mixing and blending of multilingual and multicultural resources show that globalization does not thrive in an asymmetrical flow of products or ideas from the United States and the United Kingdom. Globalization also involves multi-directional organic process and the mobilization of local languages and cultures. In other words, both the global and local affect the LL in these cities. The active production and reproduction of languages and cultures with the local as well as the global linguistic and cultural resources make LL fluid and transgressive. The linguistic, cultural, semiotic representations of LL thus surpass particular language, culture, and locations. There is no compartmentalization of language and culture in LL.
Because of the focus on different European and Asian cities in Chapters Three to Seven, the book manages to show the similarities and differences in the way global linguistic and cultural resources are appropriated within the local realities of these cities. The realities are intricately intertwined with the existence of multilingual and multicultural people and their lifestyles, reflected in their preferences and their consumption of food, clothes, and day-to-day commodities and services. The book, in general, indicates that a billboard in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, for example, signifies the function of globalization at the grassroots level in relation to multilingualism and multiculturism, migration, and nationalism. Hence, LL presented in this book have different looks in different world-cities. Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael use the term “multiple globalization” in order to capture the fluidity of these cities—each city having its own distinctive look and aura as reflected in its LL.
World-cities are the symbols of multiple globalization, according to Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael. In these cities, globalization is realized in international and commercial codes; multiculturalism is articulated through ethno-cultural vernaculars; and national policies are reflected in the use of national languages, contributing to the uniqueness of LL in these cities. Thus LL in all these cities represent the permeability of national borders and “linguistic and cultural metamorphoses” amid the politics of difference and recognition. The mural on the Berlin Wall is a rapture with its tragic history and the beginning of a new era; underground Paris reflects the strong ideological presence of French while the surface is influenced by the ethos of globalization and multiculturism; Brussels’s comic strips drawn by youths surreptitiously challenge social problems and suffering; and the posters on London double-decker buses epitomize the national, linguistic, social, cultural, ethical, and commercial spirit that the city of London itself historically inherits. Tel Aviv’s Florentine quarters—in their mural compositions in garish colors, with historical figures and slogans—offer a counterculture existing in the city, one that is political, expressionist, and surrealist. Thus Chapter Eight of the book successfully represents the unique trajectories of linguistic and cultural resources in LL, which eventually epitomize the distinctiveness of these cities.
Because of my interests in sociolinguistics, I found certain of the book’s empirical findings reassuring. LL in different cities challenge the normative logocentric way of looking at language. LL in these cities demonstrate an anti-foundationalist anti-essentialist notion of language: that is, language is changeable, going through a constant process of semiotic reconstruction. It does not have fixed or predetermined meaning; it is not unique to any specific social space. On the contrary, meaning is realized in localized social practices (here, in LL) within their spatial practices. In addition, globalization does not imply homogenization or Americanization, since linguistic and cultural resources are appropriated differently in these world-cities. The boundlessness of global space and the permeability of one culture into others in LL show that age-old sociolinguistic terms such as language, nationality, nation-state, community, or national identity are inadequate to account for the dynamic use of languages in LL. These age-old categories are perhaps too rigid to address the changing realities of post-modern societies created by mobility, migration, diverse media, or popular culture.
While the book adequately highlights the necessity of exploring LL with reference to political, historical, spatial, and social realities, it falls short in addressing the sociolinguistic features of LL. Understandably, Lefebvre (1991:136) wrote that “Signifying processes (a signifying practice) occur in a space which cannot be reduced either to an everyday discourse or to a literary language of texts.” Schatzki (2002) stated the inadequacy of conducting research on any social practice only through languages. Keeping these statements in consideration, I want to add that a phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic analysis of LL would have unraveled the relationship between micro features of languages and the macro-dynamics of the society. Taking this book as a reference point, further research studies may be conducted in order to explore the translinguistic features in LL. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Multiple Globalizations is an essential reference book for academics and researchers intending to conduct interdisciplinary research on LL.