HYBRIDITY AND SUPERDIVERSITY ON SYRIAN DISSIDENTS’ FACEBOOK PAGES. AN ONLINE ETHNOGRAPHY OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Arabic and Islamic Studies By Francesco Luigi Sinatora, M.A. Washington, D.C. July 12, 2016 Copyright 2016 by Francesco Luigi Sinatora All Rights Reserved ii HYBRIDITY AND SUPERDIVERSITY ON SYRIAN DISSIDENTS’ FACEBOOK PAGES. AN ONLINE ETHNOGRAPHY OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY AND AUTHENTICITY Francesco Luigi Sinatora, M.A. Thesis Advisor: Karin C. Ryding, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This work contributes to the discussion about the role of social media in political mobilization by analyzing the writing practices of a group of Syrian dissidents on Facebook. Challenging the assumption that Western technology inhibited political activism, this work shows how Syrian dissidents appropriated a global medium like Facebook to negotiate, construct identities and create political participation. In particular, it demonstrates how the resources and the discursive strategies utilized by two Syrian dissidents before and after the revolution underlay respectively the construction of new individual, cosmopolitan identities and the collective identity of dissidents as authentic Syrians. The latter emerged in concomitance with a claim made by Bashar al-Asad at the beginning of the uprisings, who alleged that protestors were foreign infiltrators spreading religious fragmentation and sedition. The methodology for this study was informed by Androutsopoulos’s (2008b) Discourse- Centred Online Ethnography and Barton and Lee’s (2013) Mixed-Method Approach, which advocate the integration of text analysis with interviews with text producers and readers. This work embraces a social constructionist approach to language and identity (cf. De Fina, Schiffrin and Bamberg 2006), which investigates identity as emergent in discourse and interaction. In iii addition, it builds on ideas proposed by Blommaert and Rampton (2011) in their agenda for the study of language in superdiversity, including their own call for language ethnography. Among the main findings is that identities are more often indexed through hybrid, including creative and strategically bivalent forms, rather than separate codes. This finding contributes to sociolinguistic theory, highlighting the importance of a hybridity focus for the study of language in superdiversity. Moreover, the emergence and negotiation of new identities in a short period of time and the different values attributed to similar linguistic resources and strategies based on online interaction triggered by socio-political events reinforces the validity of a notion such as superdiversity. iv To the Syrian people and their ongoing struggle for a better life v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to start by thanking my family for the values they instilled in me and for helping me achieve my dreams. To my parents Agazio and Vittoriana, my sister Rosamaria, my brother-in- law Michael, my niece Irene, my nephews Alessio and Mathias and my cousins Maria, Fabio, Angela and Graziella goes my gratitude for their unconditional love and support. I am deeply indebted to my adviser, Dr. Karin Ryding. Her tireless mentorship, enthusiasm and integrity have taught me that being a successful scholar goes hand in hand with the highest human qualities of empathy and kindness. I am grateful to Dr. Anna De Fina for her precious advice and extremely helpful feedback, to Dr. Yasir Suleiman for inspiring me through his work and for offering his stimulating insights on the data I collected and to Dr. Jennifer Sclafani for her guidance and advice leading up to the completion of my dissertation. I would also like to thank the many scholars who helped me shape my ideas and develop my critical thinking throughout the years, including Manuela Giolfo, Elie Kallas, Reem Bassiouney, John Norris, Suzanne Stetkevych, Deborah Tannen, Andrea Tyler, Ruth Wodak, Jan Blommaert, Mark Sicoli, Adel Iskandar and Elliot Colla. Many thanks go to the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University for supporting my studies and my research. To Meriem Tikue and Caitlin Bentley for all their help, to my friends Pamela Klasova, Mike Raish, Abdallah Soufan, Enass Khansa, Robert Ricks, Nick Mangialardi, Miguel Merino, Hana Jan, Nazir Harb, Carolyn Reed and to the Professors Sahar Mohamed Ali, Huda Al-Mufti and Hanaa Kilany for enriching this journey. I thank my friends throughout these years, Serena Lari and Eleonora Crippa, Eloisa Manera, Giulia Daniele, Elisa Bestetti, Monica Mazzoleni, Nader Othman, William Salfiti, Taraf vi Abu-Hamdan and my dear DC friends Gonzalo Cabral, Luis Cerezo, Marcus Mirra, Amelia Tseng, Theo Christov, Juan Hines, Ashley Smith, Andrew Kadi, Jason Sanderson, Brian Browning, John Woodhead, Peter Kadlecik, Andre Bradley, Andrea Ajello, Cameron McGlothlin, Giulio De Tommaso, Torsten Menge, Brian Sweet and Daniel Giglio. Special thanks go to those friends who also went the extra mile providing a roof over my head when I was in a pinch: Doug Lingenfelter, Gail Cleere, Carol Dover, Rahshan Watt, Machaela Cavanaugh and Nick Brotzel. Last but not least, I am grateful to my Syrian friends, without whom this work would not have been possible. I thank Maher Alkurdi, Nawar Bulbul and all my informants for welcoming me in their lives and sharing their thoughts and their struggle. I am also thankful to Hassn Altawil, Fadi Achkar, Roula Haddad and all those friends in Syria who have accompanied me since the beginning of my learning experience in Syria and who helped making Syria a second home. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION AND SCOPE OF THE STUDY ............................................................................1 2 INTRODUCING THE RELEVANT CONCEPTS .............................................................................10 2.1 Hybridity – An Ongoing Debate .......................................................................................................10 2.1.1 Code-Switching ......................................................................................................................11 2.1.2 Code-Switching (CS) and Code-Mixing ................................................................................12 2.1.3 Diglossia and Code-Switching in Arabic ...............................................................................13 2.1.4 Linguistic Simultaneity ..........................................................................................................20 2.1.5 Hybridity in Arabic ................................................................................................................27 2.2 Identity and Discourse .......................................................................................................................31 2.2.1 Voice and Register .................................................................................................................32 2.2.2 Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity .......................................................................................36 2.3 Language and Globalization - A Sociolinguistics of Mobility ..........................................................40 2.3.1 Scales, Orders of Indexicality and Polycentricity ..................................................................40 2.3.2 Superdiversity ........................................................................................................................49 2.4 Hybridity and Authenticity ................................................................................................................52 2.5 Conclusion: Superdiversity and Hybridity under Scrutiny ...............................................................53 3 METHODOLOGY AND DATA ........................................................................................................56 3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................56 3.2 The Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography ....................................................................................57 3.3 The Mixed-Method Approach to New Vernacular Literacies ...........................................................59 3.4 The Critical Discursive Approach .....................................................................................................61 3.5 Data ....................................................................................................................................................63 3.5.1 Maher Alkurdi and Addōmarī ................................................................................................63 3.5.2 Nawar Bulbul .........................................................................................................................69 3.5.3 Radio Orient ...........................................................................................................................72 3.5.4 Interviews ...............................................................................................................................74 3.5.5 The Face-to-Face Interviews: Discussion ..............................................................................94 3.5.6 Texts .......................................................................................................................................96 3.6 Concluding