Language and Intercultural Communication

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmli20

Making sense of the intercultural: finding

decentred threads
by Adrian Holliday and Sara Amadasi, Oxon/New York, Routledge, 2020, 130
pp., £45.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9781138482036

Ramzi Merabet

To cite this article: Ramzi Merabet (2020): Making sense of the intercultural: finding decentred
threads, Language and Intercultural Communication, DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2020.1852643

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1852643

Published online: 08 Dec 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 5

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmli20
LANGUAGE AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION

BOOK REVIEW

Making sense of the intercultural: finding decentred threads, by Adrian Holliday and Sara
Amadasi, Oxon/New York, Routledge, 2020, 130 pp., £45.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9781138482036

Making Sense of the Intercultural: Finding DeCentred Threads portrays Holliday and Amadasi’s con-
tinuous endeavours to relocate the intercultural within an anti-essentialist postmodern paradigm by
means of narratives that individuals produce and interact with as part of their engagement with
small culture formation on the go. This work draws on the authors’ previous research (Amadasi
& Holliday, 2017, 2018; Holliday, 2016) and elaborates further on various concepts that underpin
interculturality: essentialism, cultural blocks/threads, positioning, narratives, etc.
The book is divided into five chapters that comprise extracts from interviews, workshops, recon-
structed ethnographic accounts, research diaries, and discussions of literary works. Throughout the
book, the authors challenge the centre positivist paradigm that reinforces essentialist conceptualiz-
ations of the intercultural and accentuates the role of social and political structures in predicting
individuals’ behaviours and ‘creating’ an imagined cultural homogeneity.
The first chapter highlights the theoretical stances underpinning the book. The authors empha-
sise interculturality as a constant ‘state of being’ rather than a ‘movement between’ distinct national
cultures. This advocates a non-essentialist and decentred conceptualization of culture, as it aligns
with a more hybrid understanding which enables the authors to reimagine the concept of third
space as the place ‘where we need … always to stand if we are to see the hybrid complexity of things’
(p. 2). This attempt to highlight the significance of third space reminds me of Lefebvre’s La Présence
et L’absence (1980), where he stresses the necessity to introduce a ‘third term’ in response to phi-
losophy’s long-standing reliance on binary logic. It also concurs with what Borges refers to in his
short story as The Aleph, or the place ‘where all places are’ (cited in Soja, 1996, p. 55).
The chapter proceeds with a brief explanation of the concepts that characterize the centre-mar-
gin interactions. Several extracts (mainly literary and ethnographic) are employed to illustrate the
complexity of individuals’ attempts to make sense of the intercultural. While the accounts demon-
strate specific events, their aim transcends a mere demonstration as they imply the intricacy of daily
events that everyone strives to explain. This stands in contrast to a positivist approach which would
advocate the development of a prior intercultural competence that would result in the emergence or
accentuation of already-existing national, ethnic or religious categories that can be adopted and
mobilized to predict, explain, or impose a certain reality.
Building on the previous discussions, Chapter two probes into what is termed as ‘integration’, a
process that is perceived on many occasions as a crucial factor to determine the success of cultural
travellers in ‘host communities’. The authors defy this conceptualization, as it implies the presence
of a homogenous whole that ‘the other’ must ‘learn’ to ‘conform to’ for integration to be successful.
Instead, they emphasize individuals’ creativity and criticality, which allows them to enrich any cul-
tural environment with decentred narratives. This can be difficult to observe, as is witnessed in
Sara’s interaction with primary school children (pp.34-49) about their travel experiences. Instead
of conforming to Sara’s positioning as ‘expert travellers’, the children demonstrated a ‘creative cri-
ticality which is far more than she expected’ (p. 49). In doing so, the emergent narratives trans-
cended both the constraining institutional discourses and Sara’s positioning and unveiled a
plethora of ‘hidden spaces’ where they articulated complex threads.
The unexpectedness underpinning how threads are received and negotiated is further discussed
in the third chapter. The authors elaborate on three main points that revolve around the pulling of
threads and blocks. These can be summarized as: centred threads that innocently build into blocks
(as observed in chapter 2); threads that are purposefully mobilized to pull others ‘into massive
2 BOOK REVIEW

blocks’ (p. 58), and dominant blocks that are utilized in the form of decentred threads. The authors
provide definitions along with numerous illustrations that demonstrate the workings of threads and
blocks, and how that impacts individuals’ intercultural engagement. These modes of thinking help
to unveil the ambivalences that characterize individuals’ positionings. While these positionings are
to a large extent fed by the small cultures we form on the go, it is what we choose to pull during
interactions that results in the emergence of either blocks or threads.
The fourth chapter draws on interviews conducted by the authors with other researchers and
with each other to shed light on the significance of researchers’ personal cultural trajectories.
Here, social researchers are perceived as research participants who are equally involved in the social
processes that they strive to investigate. The narratives presented in this chapter tackle social
researchers’ struggles with positionings, interpretations, identity, and the representation of partici-
pants. This reinforces the authors’ constructivist stance that rejects a positivist conceptualization of
the role of researchers as neutral and detached individuals. Researchers’ personal trajectories and
cultural travel, along with their uncertainties regarding the social processes they aim to understand,
are perceived as the main factors contributing to their ability to comprehend complex events.
The last chapter deals with what Holliday and Amadasi refer to as an ‘unexpected discovery’ of a
decentred grand narrative. This emerged in one of the reconstructed ethnographic accounts and
served to unveil an entirely different perspective about grand narratives. In this event, the narrative
is not employed as means to accentuate a false homogeneity or establish cultural blocks by means of
essentialist references to otherness. Instead, it appears to be at the heart of the third space, as it
allows interlocutors to go beyond the confines of an initial superficiality fuelled by their alleged pre-
conceptions and eventually engage in a thread mode of thinking and interacting with others.
This book highlights several important points that should not be undermined in a time where a
plethora of realities are increasingly affected by essentialist and neoliberal influences. The explicit
constructivist stance advocated throughout the chapters allows the authors to critically examine
the co-constructed narratives that serve to uncover an array of perspectives within intercultural
environments. While a centred positioning might seem a default approach for dealing with the
intercultural, individuals and researchers throughout the book portray the set of ambivalences
that they grapple with in their quest to define themselves and their positions towards others. In
so doing, threads and blocks emerge in unanticipated ways, which imply the complexities that
all of us encounter as we strive to make sense of the intercultural.

References
Amadasi, S., & Holliday, A. (2017). Block and thread intercultural narratives and positioning: conversations with
newly arrived postgraduate students. Language and Intercultural Communication, 17(3), 254–269. doi:10.1080/
14708477.2016.1276583
Amadasi, S., & Holliday, A. (2018). ‘I already have a culture.’ Negotiating competing grand and personal narratives in
interview conversations with new study abroad arrivals. Language and Intercultural Communication, 18(2),
241–256. doi:10.1080/14708477.2017.1357727
Holliday, A. (2016). Difference and awareness in cultural travel: negotiating blocks and threads. Language and
Intercultural Communication, 16(3), 318–331. doi:10.1080/14708477.2016.1168046
Lefebvre, H. (1980). La présence et l’absence. Casterman.
Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell Publishers.

Ramzi Merabet
Leeds University
mlrme@leeds.ac.uk http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7677-3286
© 2020 Ramzi Merabet
https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2020.1852643