A multimodal discursive approach to translanguaging and identity in Chilean social media

Abstract

The social imaginaries of national identity in Chile notoriously fuel the idea of cultural and racial homogeneity, normalizing racial prejudice and stereotypes of allegedly inferior races, ethnicities, and languages. In this context, social media can potentially become a third space, that is, an imaginary cyberspace that fosters communal bonds and support among minoritized communities to share their experiences, identities, and languages. Hence, this study analyzes the multimodal discursive strategies used by two influencers in Chile to perform their intercultural identities on Instagram to promote and validate their linguistic practices in the creation of translanguaging spaces. We examined how these influencers’ multilingual repertoires are constructed and reinforced by multimodal features in their videos, which not only validate their cultures and ethnicities but also the translanguaging spaces they have created. To do so, we drew on Reisigl and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach and van Leeuwen’s taxonomy for social actor representation in multimodal texts, and we used the Crowdtangle Application to download the most interacted posts in these accounts. The results show that intersectional features such as gender, race, class, and ethnicity are in constant negotiation and resignification in advancing towards a multimodal integration of intercultural identities. Interculturality, on the other hand, is multimodally mediated by these influencers in the dominant language (Spanish) to demystify racial and ethnic stereotypes, while challenging normative linguistic hierarchies.