Publication date:
23 August 2019Publisher
Multilingual MattersDimensions:
245x174mm7x10"
ISBN-13: 9781788925099
This book breaks new ground in its representation of the voices of people in a superdiverse city as they go about their everyday lives. Poetic, polyphonic, and compelling, it places the reader at the heart of the market hall, surrounded by the translanguaging voices of people from all over the world. Based on four years of ethnographic research, the book is a gift to the senses, evoking the smells, sights, and sounds of the multilingual city. This is a book that reimagines the conventions of both ethnographic writing and academic discourse.
With coffee and croissants and chairs in a circle, this book invites us to explore the mundane world of ethnographic research amid the voices, bodies, meat cleavers, everyday racism, conviviality, and cuts of meat in a market. It takes us on a poetic expedition in search of the quintessence of experience and its impossibility, giving us instead the rhythm and rhyme of encounters with eels, intestines, milk, blood, tea and fish. Beguiling.