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Translingual practices entangled with semiotized space and time
Edited by Shaila Sultana and Dariush Izadi
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 45:2] 2022
► pp. 175–197

Translingual practices and national identity mediated in the semiotized digital spaces

| University of Dhaka

Considering the contradictions in the structured and static approaches to the nation and national identity observed world-wide and fluid trans- approaches to language in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, the paper explores how national identity is constructed and sustained nowadays, specifically in digital spaces both discursively and non-discursively. Based on the notion of ‘practice’ by Theodore Schatzki (2002), the paper focuses on the translingual practices in relation to national issues and events in Bangladesh drawn from digital spaces through a virtual ethnography. The findings in this paper show that translingual practices and national identity may apparently seem fluid in digital spaces. However, actors nurture beliefs, values, and ideologies in their translingual practices with reference to a territory-based notion of nation, religion, and national identity. Their discursive construction of nation and national identity also seems entangled with a non-discursive bundle of activities and symbolic and material artefacts within material arrangements of spaces. Verbal violence and terrorism accentuating nationalism get immediacy and are concretized in materially mediated semiotized spaces. With an immediate focus on spatial dynamics, while acknowledging the ethos of the post-structuralist approach to language, the paper, hence, indicates the necessity of transgressing the ‘logocentrism’ in language and identity research in applied linguistics and contributing to the recent development in the post-humanist applied linguistics.

Keywords: translingual practice, national identity, nationalistic violence, digital space, Bangladesh, post-humanist applied linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Translingual practices as ‘saying’ and ‘doing’
  • 3.Translingual practices – ‘saying’ and ‘doing’ and semiotized spaces
  • 4.Translingual practices and national identity in semiotized spaces
  • 5.Research design
  • 6.Bangladesh and the historical construction of nation and national identity
  • 7.Bangladeshi nationalism, translingual practices, and semiotized spaces
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 19 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.21051.sul
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