Title: Discursive Scaling of Solidarity through Difference
Abstract: Drawing on data from a two-year ethnographic observation, audio-recorded face-to-face interactions with a group of multiethnic Black women, this study examines discursive and linguistic strategies, namely ‘solidarity through difference and distinction’ and ‘solidarity through denaturalizing difference’ through scaling in deictically anchored interactions. The study presents a moment-by-moment analysis of culturally and socially situated conversations, which help construct and ‘scale’ (Blommaert 2007; Gal 2016) the women’s positionality in different times and spaces. The discursive practices show that when we attend closely to race and gender in identification practices and specifically consider the particularity of Black womanhood, new and even more complex ways of understanding transnational identity formation emerge. Participants’ constructions indicate that the women co-construct a unique brand of solidarity that is not based on sameness but meaningfully created through differentiation and distinction—the article captures the Black and African feminist lens of understanding diaspora identity formations.