Language and the imagined communities of tourism: A sociolinguistics of fleeting relationships Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow To appear (2010) in N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization. Oxford: Blackwell. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid indentities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. (Hardt and Negro, 2000: xiii) We start this chapter from the premise that sociolinguistics is on the move. This is partly in response to the reorderings of contemporary social life under global capitalism and partly in keeping with the reconceptualizing of key ideas in social theory – both of which are exemplified in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri quoted above. We are living and researching at a time when power is no longer so neatly centered or easily tracked (cf. also Deleuze and Guattari, 2000; Harvey, 2005) and when people’s lives and identities are no longer so neatly bounded or easily located (cf. also Sheller and Urry, 2006; Z. Bauman, 2000). As scholars of language-in-society, we are therefore necessarily obliged to review the bread-and-butter material of our work. Specifically, we are needing to rethink – and, in some cases, to ditch altogether – some of the central tropes of our field such as ‘community’, ‘authenticity’, ‘identity’ and, indeed, ‘language’ and ‘society’ themselves. In this regard, Jan Blommaert (2005) and Ben Rampton (2009), amongst others, have both written about the need for a sociolinguistics or discourse analysis that is better able to account for the hybrid, the translocal, the spectacular, the idiosyncratic, the creative, and the multimodal (cf. Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001, on this last point). Following the lead of Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (1990), both Blommaert and Rampton make a special point of promoting the importance nowadays of attending to processes of entextualization and recontentextualization, as well as to situated, local practices, and to the linguistic reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of language users. Tourism, we think, offers itself as an ideal – and surprisingly overlooked – context for studying precisely the kinds of theoretical issues and social processes Blommaert, Rampton, Hardt and Negri and others address. In its pursuit and endless production of difference, tourism is a past master at recontextualization: lifting the everyday into the realm of the fantastical, transforming the banal into the exotic, and converting use-value into exchange- value. Tourism not only demands a rethink of certain sociolinguistic truisms, however; it also helps to moderate any tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not all of our old notions are defunct, just as contemporary life continues to be shaped by many of the disciplining, colonizing, determining habits of the past (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Deleuze and Guattari, 2000). We have shown this to be the case in our own work, for example, with regards the tenacious influence of nationality and national identity in tourism discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2004). In the current chapter, we want to explore this old–new tension a little further with particular reference to some of the ways we see language and other semiotic material commonly moved and exchanged in tourism. (It is by no means only the English language which is on the move under global capitalism but also a wide range of genres, discourses, styles, etc.) We start by reconsidering the general