Paper short abstract:

The ethnography specifically focuses on multi-language practices of Arabic, Somali, and Swahili spoken among Somali immigrants in Bellville.

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores aesthetic formations of superdiversity through performances of Muslim-ness in the central business district (CBD) of Bellville, Cape Town. I will look specifically at the performance of an imagined Somali community, the related politics of authenticity and the materialization of cultural difference. In my initial fieldwork I found that Somali's embodied cultural style appears distinct - from other immigrants - through aesthetic performances of body, food, language, and images, all of which are evoked and realized through sensory experiences. The ethnography specifically focuses on multi-language practices of Arabic, Somali, and Swahili spoken among Somali immigrants in Bellville; the way they embody a symbolic enactment through their everyday performances of self-presentations, through mediating objects such as shop signs, and through stage performances at the mosque. Multi-language practices signify aesthetic formations of superdiversity, inasmuch as it implies a shifting of identities, hybridization, temporality, and blurred communitarian cultural boundaries. The Somali community in Bellville is a complex construction that shows a distinction between Somalis who come from Somaliland and Somalis of Ethiopian, and Kenyan nationality, and which through multi-language practices exercise contextual politics of inclusion and exclusion. The initial observation of this ethnography suggests that Somali community is unified through Somali language, and - a long with Muslims from other communities - through a sensorial attachment to aesthetic sound of Arabic language, mainly performed during religious rituals.