Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners [Hardcover]

1. A Day in the life of the Ethnically Ambiguous 2. The Ghosts of Our Past: Conceptualising Heritage as Capital 3. Eternal In-Betweeners: Narratives and Lived Experiences of Hybrid Identity 4. Of Wogs, White-Washing, Turbans and a Black Miss Japan: Race and Visibility 5. Bourdieu with a Side of Garlic Sauce: Not to Speak is to Speak 6. A Generation that Could Change the World - If We Let Them

In this absorbing and accessible book, Zozan Balci looks at the adult children of culturally and linguistically mixed families. Amid the assimilatory pressures of educational institutions, social expectations and racial positioning, being hybrid and ethnically ambiguous entails silences and struggles over heritage and identity, but also possibilities for other ways of being. Fascinating, painful, rewarding.
Alastair Pennycook, Emeritus Professor, University of Technology Sydney

This book is a rich, insightful and passionate plea to recognise mixed identity as a valid and significant way of being for millions of linguistic and cultural in-betweeners. In a time where the norms of nativist nationalism, monolingualism and monoculturalism are overwhelmingly hegemonic, the importance of this forceful argument for cultural hybridity cannot be overstated.
Ien Ang, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University

Through a compelling examination of cultural hybridity in Australia that resonates globally, this book reconceptualises hybrid identities not as deficits to be managed but as valid ways of being that deserve recognition and nurturing, particularly in educational settings. This accessible yet theoretically sophisticated work offers vital insights for scholars across sociolinguistics, migration studies, and education, while its call for normalising hybrid identities provides an essentlã-