Dr. Jaspal Singh on sociolinguistics, fieldwork in India and research ethics

interviewed by Sean P. Smith

Dr. Jaspal Singh joined the HKU School of English in August 2018 as an Assistant Professor of sociolinguistics. Here, he discusses how the field of sociolinguistics needs to focus more on the body, his research on hip hop and dance in India, and his reflections on how academic work can be discussed with research participants.

What is it about sociolinguistics that motivates you?

When people start a language degree, they are often very science-minded. And that’s great. When teaching sociolinguistics I like to show students a bit of the complexities of doing linguistic research, which—my personal conviction is—cannot be done outside of society. In that sense one of the major rewards of teaching sociolinguistics is that students understand that the analysis of language has to be situated within a social context—that language does not exist outside of people using it. Often people have the idea that the language you speak is somewhere ‘out there’, and you are not a fully competent user of it, you don’t really know the real language. For me, sociolinguistics contests this idea and asserts that language is within us, we can use it. That’s the beauty about language.

During an event this summer I joined a data session analyzing a conversation with a group of students and two scholars. One of these scholars urged us—the students—to refrain from considering the participants, and instead look at the transcript of the conversation alone. What would you make of this idea that language can be analyzed without an understanding of the participants?

That’s a really interesting question. Language is multimodal, language is embodied, so part of what you communicate is through your body, it’s not only verbal. The black skin, the white skin, the female body, the male body, they are themselves channels, or they are themselves content of the communication. If you ignore that, if you take that out of the communication, you actually take a lot away from language. It is relevant who speaks. It’s not irrelevant that the one person who speaks is white and the one person who doesn’t is black. In that kind of very crude schema, skin color is part of the communication. For instance, there has been work done in the US where they talk about the ‘white ear’ and the ‘white gaze’ of teachers. African American children get pushed to use norms, like white middle class English. Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have written several papers on raciolinguistics,[1] and they have done several experiments in schools, and what came out is that even if the African American child produced the white standard middle class English norm, the white teacher, or the ‘white ear’, would hear the African American mistake. They argue that the white gaze supersedes the white ear; that skin color seems more important than the actual linguistic performance when we try to understand language.

So in sociolinguistics we can’t just focus on speech, but the body is as much a part of our field of analysis.

Yes, absolutely. Within sociolinguistics it’s a very recent approach, and I think sociolinguistics needs to do a lot more to recognize the body and the material things that happen around the body as well.[2]

Tell me about your research.

My research was about hip hop in India. As a sociolinguist I go in and say, right, what is the language of hip hop? It’s rap music, right? Lyrics, that is my object of study. There has been a lot of research scholarship on rap lyrics, and because we write that stuff down in journals we can’t really use the music; the beat completely vanishes in our analysis, and we take the lyrics on a piece of paper as being the performance. Which is obviously not true. The rap song is a multimodal whole, to do with the voice of the rapper, the skin color of the rapper, the music. These things are important, and that was a methodological problem I encountered. But then there also was a more basic ethnographic problem. I come to India, and there are no rappers! But, there’s a whole generation, hundreds, of breakers. Dancers. And even those people who were rappers—the handful of young men and one young woman that I met, who identified themselves as emcees, or rappers, or graffiti writers, or DJs—after a couple months thinking they were rappers, we hang out in a park and there’s some breakers over there. And they jump into the circle and go down on the floor and do crazy moves. I said, wait, you never told me you’re a b-boy. And they said, of course I’m a b-boy, we’re all b-boys.

Huh.

So the body, all of a sudden—or the ‘moving body’ as I like to call it—kind of pushed itself onto my project. I saw that I cannot not speak about the body as a vehicle for communication. I was really fascinated about the movements of their bodies, in interaction with each other, and the whole embodied habitus, the whole praxis. Being a b-boy is a way of carrying yourself through your body. It is to do with how you look, how you walk, how you stand. And the findings were incredible), really, as I found that a very particular masculinity was being performed by these young b-boys, informed by a kind of African American type of hip hop masculinity—but it wasn’t that, it was an adapted version, which fit into the economy of Indian masculinities that were available to them. And these are types, right? One is the Bollywood ‘beau’, then you’ve got the ‘muscle’ guy who works out in gyms, and then there’s a kind of ‘soft’ masculinity, what to a Western observer looks like a homosexual masculinity—although they’re not openly homosexual. So these three types, and several others, would have been available to them, but they chose to form a particular type of masculinity informed by this b-boy persona. Which is always ready to battle, is looking unconcerned, a bit distant, but is always highly focused. Which I think was incredible, to see how these masculinities formed in front of me—and mainly through the body.

So you’re heading to India for the first time since your fieldwork. What do you anticipate?

What I expect from my own research is to open up the discussion. I’ve been writing, in an academic genre, and with academic jargon, which I think is wonderful but it’s very limited because no one outside academia understands what we’re doing. It’s too convoluted, it’s too complex. I tried to reach out to my participants by sending them some of my work, and the response was zero. Or even negative. Like, ‘I don’t see myself represented in this kind of thing because I don’t understand what you’re saying—it feels that you’re writing about me but talking to someone else’. It excludes the actual people, right? Then I thought the best kind of feedback for the people I researched is to go back and speak, because that was the modality that we used. I want to open up the interview situation again, without the recorder this time, in order to tell them about my findings and start a new conversation with them. And then see how they react to it. They might confirm some things that I say, challenge some things, and they might also inform my ethical approach. So if they say, ‘wait, this is not what we’re doing’, or ‘I feel that you are over-interpreting stuff’, or ‘I feel not represented’, or ‘you can’t say that about me’—if I get a sense of that, I’m not going to write about that in publications or the book that I’m planning. This trip, I hope, is a preparation for my book, and it will be an ethical check: can I actually say the things that I want to say?