Translingual practices and national identity mediated in the semiotized digital spaces

Abstract

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.