The Counter Narratives of Migrants and Cultural Mediators.

Being a hybrid language, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is inevitably affected by the languages and cultures of its speakers and, as ELF studies show, ELF can have an empowering role for its speakers when the latter appropriate the language and make it their own in constructing their identity, as in the case of activist artists. At the same time, however, it can contribute to power imbalance in high-stakes encounters, such as asylum procedures. ELF is in fact central in determining the destiny of migrants and asylum seekers as the language of communication between the latter, police officers and commissions for asylum requests. Suck key role in contexts of inequality and injustice, however, has so far been given scarce attention. Cultural mediators play an equally pivotal function in welcoming migrants to EU countries, such as Italy, whose borders are currently being reinforced through the enclosure of migrants in identification camps where they are all categorized as non European/ Other. Cultural mediator is the term used to refer to professional, and often non-professional, figures facilitating communication between migrants and public service servants in Italy. However, such definition, together with a very low professional recognition leading to extremely low hourly rates, fails to fully account for a complex role which goes well beyond that of interpreters to include skills and competences, such as the ability to listen and understand people’s needs and to resolve conflicts (Amato and Garwood, 2011). In this paper I will show how ELF contributes to the marginalization and categorization of migrants and asylum seekers through selected interviews to cultural mediators and migrants’ stories narrated within the storie migranti project (www.storiemigranti.org). The homogenizing categorization of migrants, far from being a neutral act, is the consequence of socially and politically oriented discourses (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) that tend to ignore the complex nature of diasporic identities subject to a process of change and transformation (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). In my analysis I will apply ELF studies, narrative theory (Baker 2006) and the notion of prefigurative politics to try and answer a series of research questions. To what extent can cultural mediators and migrants counteract predominant representations of non-Europeans and thus contribute to a rethinking of European citizenship? Can mediators, together with migrants, provide an alternative narrative about the evolving nature and role of Europe? These and other issues need to be addressed from a variety of perspectives to reveal the potential role of translation and self-translation in making radical social and political transformations possible.