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Abstract
This article addresses how different types of, and differences in, power affect the micro-processes of face-to-face interaction as they contribute to the dynamic co-construction of identity of the interactants. The specific focus will be on linguistic and national identity when a French L1 speaker who is bilingual in American English and lives in the United States interacts with French speakers in France. Based on an authentic conversation, it will be shown that this speaker at first is proud of being bilingual and binational but then evidences ambivalence about and lack of confidence in his two languages when confronted by a native speaker with greater symbolic power who challenges his abilities in French and who is prejudiced against English and the United States. It is concluded that we must take into account the issue of symbolic power when studying those who are at the boundaries of linguistic and national identities.
Notes
1I wish to thank members of the Identity and Ideology Research Study Group at the University of Arizona for the highly interesting conversations we've been having about the issues discussed here, as well as the official discussant and the audience at the panel of the American Association for Applied Linguistics annual meeting in 2006 at which an earlier version of this article was presented.
2The transcription conventions used here are the following: all the proper names are pseudonyms; [..] indicates overlap with either a preceding or a succeeding utterance by one or more of the interlocutors; <> + italics means a comment by the author; <.>, <..>, <…> are pauses of different lengths; < -- > means an ellipsis; a [/] between forms indicates alternative translations. French written language conventions are followed, except that, both in the French and in the English translation, the so-called unstressed/conjunctive subject and object clitics/pronouns, like je, tu, me, te, and the negative marker ne, are transcribed as prefixes with a hyphen since they are in reality morphemes (see CitationFonseca-Greber & Waugh, 2003a, Citation2003b).