Salsa, Language and Transnationalism

Britta Schneider is Lecturer in the Department for English Language and Literature at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include sociolinguistics of globalisation, language ideology, language policy, epistemology of language and multilingualism, and superdiversity.

Salsa, Language and Transnationalism is a unique and complex study about the deconstruction of the relationship between language ideologies and a cultural practice in transnational contexts. The novelty of this book lies in the object of study: while most studies have placed the center of attention on certain ethnic/national groups, Britta Schneider focuses on communities based on a Latin or Hispanic cultural practice – salsa dance in Germany and Australia. The research in these transnational salsa communities successfully stays away from the essentialist approach and abstains from the traditional “one-to-one” mapping of language and identity. At the same time, with the use of ethnographic observation and discourse analysis, the author moves beyond the national language discourses and offers an insightful discussion of the co-constitution of societal and cultural discourses and language ideologies in transnational salsa communities.

• 1. Salsa, Zombies and Linguistics 2. Transnational Language Discourse 3. Transnational Salsa – Cultural Re-inventions of the Global in Local Contexts 4. ‘…wenn ich Spanisch spreche, das macht mich immer unheimlich glücklich’: Multilingual Longing and Class Exclusion in Frankfurt Salsa 5. ‘It doesn’t matter what they sing and how sad they are, they always sound happy’: Evolutionist Monolingualism and Latin Branding in Sydney L.A. Style Salsa 6. ‘It’s the Cool Factor’ – Multilingualism and Authenticity in Sydney’s Cuban Style Salsa Community 7. Language in a Transnational Age – Mobile Meanings and Multiple Modernities Appendix References