1 Introduction
Words not only describe but also make things happen. Words can start a class or unite people in “holy matrimony.” This is the “performative” aspect of language, effective when the convention is invoked and the appropriate circumstances exist (Austin 1961/1979). In this volume, we apply this “performative” notion to space to investigate the ways space pushes us to produce linguistic acts. We call this productive aspect of space “performative linguistic space,” and trace how individuals activate a performative aspect of space, reflecting their own linguistic trajectories through physical and metaphorical movement.
Researchers have illustrated that space produces perceptions and actions while being produced by them, though not necessarily with the notion of performativity. City and regional planning—e.g., redlining or the gap of investment between highways and public mass transit (Aalbers 2014;Soja 2010)—shapes our daily actions as well as our life chances, while also prompting us to challenge them. Individuals’ movement and dwelling in space also affect, if not guide, others’ actions and perceptions (de Certeau 1984; Egan 2021; Castañeda 2020). This volume adds a linguistic dimension to the notion of performativity of space.
Just as linguistic interactions are temporal and contextual (Voloshinov 1973), so is performativity of space. As will be explained, this performativity is shaped by temporal and contextual interactions not only between the dynamics of the space and interlocutors’ subject positions but also by the ideologies that are being activated. Ideologies are also brought in from the spatial politics of other spaces that interlocutors have inhabited, just like Doerr’s and McGuire’s respective assumptions about space in spoken and sign language me
