Performative linguistic space looks at the interconnection between space and language anew. Previous work has highlighted the pivotal role of language in ‘making room’ or ‘dismantling houses’ from linguistic, feminist, and queer lenses. This book crystalises cross-disciplinary auto/ethnographic data and complements the missing bidirectional arrow by advocating that space encourages, discourages, or limits utterances or signs (9). And that's where performativity lies.
Nonetheless, performativity is not a priori and must be activated by individuals’ movement across spaces, during which competing spatial politics and language ideologies intersect. This occurs when a Guatemalan American student travels with Anglophone American fellows to Spain via a short-term study program (Neriko Musha Doerr, chapter 2). Spain becomes a performative linguistic space in a complex way as it simultaneously hinders English, which is dominant among study program members, and ‘ushers’ standard Spanish while perceiving its colonised varieties as less desirable (53). Such complexity of performativity also emerges from the synchronous online classroom. When students metaphorically move across the virtual zoom space and physical homes, different facades of performativity are activated. Students’ speeches are discouraged by technical affordances of the ‘speaker view’ and ‘un/muting’ while engaging participation is enacted by the sense of egalitarianism and security generated by the ‘gallery view’ (Yuri Kumagai, chapter 4). Apart from utterances, the production or inhibition of signs is also inflexed with geographical mobility. When Japanese deaf youth move from hearing spaces that promote audism and phonocentrism to deaf spaces where signers and newcomers gather, their acquired communicative skills, such as lipreading and spoken Japanese, are inhibited while signing is encouraged (Jennifer M. McGuire, chapter 5).
Movements across conceptual spaces can also activate performativity. The ‘translanguaging’ space presents itself at an English-taught program in Japan when students and faculty constantly traverse across the spatial triad—the mental space where monolingual ideology surveils idiolects, the physical space where personal linguistic repertoires are performed, and the social space where individuals with varying linguistic competence and language politics interact. It is advocated that translanguaging should be elevated to the ideological level to exert influence on languaging in the social space (Ngoc Anh Đỗ & Gregory S. Poole, chapter 3). Moreover, the researcher's ideological movements, together with those of participants, sharpen the contour of a ‘safe’ performative linguistic space during return interviews, where reflective thinking about the actual beneficiaries in market-oriented volunteer tourism and questioning of White Saviourist narratives can ‘come out’ (Cori Jakubiak, chapter 6).
Although unmentioned by editors and contributors, it is worth contemplating whether the movement of space itself, be it active or passive, can activate performativity. Is the ‘critical’ space formed because the Japanese street/space, where a black cosplayer stands, has transformed into the TikTok space, where her cosplay post is subtitled with the hashtag ‘kawaii’ (Laura Miller, chapter 7)? By focusing on traces of contrasting language politics, this book challenges ‘named languages’ and subverts linguistic hierarchies. It excels in providing insights on how to expand our attention from language politics to politics of other axes of discrimination, with this ‘performative linguistic space’ tool, to disrupt rigid social categories and promote cross-disciplinary dialogue.
