The Body as a Site for (Un)Making the ‘Other’: Shona Speaking Migrants' Negotiation of Identity Politics in Johannesburg

Shona-speaking Zimbabwean migrants have become an ingrained part of Johannesburg, South Africa. This situation has radically transformed Zimbabwean migration to South Africa from a historically largely ethnicized—mostly Ndebele speaking—to a more mixed movement of both Shona- and Ndebele-speaking people. This pronounced presence of Shona-speaking migrants raises questions of how they situate themselves in Johannesburg in light of how their language indexes them as “amakwerekwere” in a hostile context characterized by intense othering. This article stems from a multisited sociolinguistic ethnography in Johannesburg and discusses the experiences of Shona-speaking migrants across various interactional domains. Migrants’ narratives reveal that without the “appropriate” linguistic repertoires in a hostile and xenophobic context, they navigate “insecure spaces” through a range of strategies that mainly center on the body such as “appropriate” dress code (stylizing and decoration), deploying a “streetwise” gait, and calculative management of personal space—acts that blur and destabilize the categories and classifications of a “legitimate” body. I frame my analysis within a selective reading of diverse critical perspectives on situated discourse, with the major concepts being from foundational work by Goffman, Bourdieu, and Blommaert, whose concept of “orders of indexicality” builds on the genealogy of work attuned to issues of the corporeal, power, inequality, and performative in sociolinguistic interaction.