Fish, phone cards and semiotic assemblages in two Bangladeshi shops in Sydney and Tokyo

ABSTRACT

By focusing on assembling artefacts (particularly, fish, phones and phone cards) – objects that mediate across geographies, environments, culinary traditions and histories – in two Bangladeshi-run stores in Sydney and Tokyo, we argue in this paper that these objects need to be taken very seriously as part of the action. It is clear that assembling artefacts such as fish draw the attention of customers to the freezers where they are stored, and to discussions of bones, taste, size and “cleanliness.” Central to our study is the way objects such as fish and phone cards come together as part of semiotic assemblages of material and semiotic resources as customers, goods and languages assemble and disassemble at particular moments. This has implications for how we understand the role of objects in social semiotics as part of a critical sociolinguistics of diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotic assemblage
• assembling artefacts
• metrolingualism
• spatial repertoire
• Bangladeshi shops

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to Dr Mahmud Khan and his team for all their assistance in transcribing these data. Thanks too to Francis Hult for useful discussions about nexus analysis and to the helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers, as well as the special issue co-editor, Zhu Hua.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alastair Pennycook is Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. He is best known for his work on the global spread of English, critical applied linguistics and language as a local practice. Three of his books – The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows and Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places – have been awarded the BAAL Book Prize. His most recent book, with Emi Otsuji, is Metrolingualism: Language in the city (Routledge). He is currently working on a book on Posthumanist Applied Linguistics.

Emi Otsuji is a senior lecturer in International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests include language and globalization (metrolingualism and multilingualism), performativity theory of language and identities, and language teaching ideologies. She is a co-author (with Alastair Pennycook) of Metrolingualism: Language in the City (2015), Routledge, co-editor (with Ikuko Nakane and William Armour) of Languages and Identities in a Transitional Japan: From Internationalization to Globalization (2015), Routledge and a co-editor (with Hideo Hosokawa and Marcella Mariotti) of Shiminsei Keisei to Kotoba no kyoiku [Constructing citizenship and language education], Kuroshio (2016).

Notes

1. Excerpt 1 was recorded when both authors were following a Bangladeshi woman (research participant) shopping in Lakemba, as part of a wider study of Bangladeshi-run stores in Sydney and Tokyo. We were also accompanied by the Bangladeshi wholesaler who supplies a variety of Bangladeshi goods to the shop. This allowed us to gain broader insights into the flow of the products, trading trends and politics. Taking a participatory linguistic ethnographic approach (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015a), we were also shopping and making ethnographic observations. Other excerpts were recorded using a similar methodology though in the Tokyo context we were not following a particular shopper.