Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T09:14:47.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

24 - Discourse and Racialization

from Part V - Ethics, Inequality and Inclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2020

By
Virginia Zavala  and
Michele Back
Edited by
Anna De Fina  and
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Anna De Fina
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

This chapter discusses the idea that discourse is central to how race is culturally understood and the form it takes in different contexts. Through the notions of “racialization” and “racialized,” as the semiotic and ideological processes through which race comes to be produced and reified through language practices, it proposes to study ideological processes instead of fixed racial categories, which entails moving beyond the study of the ideology of racism towards the study of its ideological practice. This chapter also addresses the links between race and language that emerge dynamically through discursive practice. It sustains that language and race intersect in two main ways: in “racial discourse,” or discourse that takes race as its topic, and in “racialized linguistic practice,” or the use of language associated with specific racialized groups. It finally recommends integrating the different discursive approaches that address language and race under the wider perspective of language as social practice. This entails researching what race does in specific contexts through the understanding of how power relations emerge in local contexts, how people make sense of their social practices, and how wider social structures influence discursive practices.

Keywords

Discourseraceracismracializationsocial practice
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies , pp. 527 - 546
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

In this multi-authored work, Alim, Rickford and Ball introduce the concept of raciolinguistics, or how language and ideas about race intersect. In three sections, “Languaging Race,” “Racing Language” and “Language, Race, and Education in Changing Communities,” researchers from several global contexts offer new perspectives on racialization, racial malleability and marginalization, among other topics addressing race and discourse.

Back and Zavala situate Peruvian ideas about race and racialization in the overall context of Latin American scholarship on race. Each empirical study in this multi-authored work offers a unique glimpse into the complex construction of racialized identities and “race talk” in both real-world and virtual contexts.

This excellent chapter proposes three main approaches in the study of language, race and ideology: the distinctive ethnoracial language, the acts of ethnoracial identity and the racialization approach. It discusses critical issues for addressing the key role of language in semiotic processes of racialization.

This article establishes the research agenda of a raciolinguistics perspective after the groundbreaking article from Flores and Rosa (2015, see references). It theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race and discusses five key components of this perspective.

In this book, the author discusses how racial ideas and structural racism permeate the lives of shantytown youth and people from the middle class in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She argues that the amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features but also through attention paid to always malleable cultural and linguistic practices.

Alim, H. S., Rickford, J. R. and Ball, A. F. (eds.) (2016). Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Back, M. and Zavala, V. (eds.) (2019). Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru. New York/London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Chun, E. and Lo, A. (2016). Language and Racialization. In Bonvillain, N. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Taylor and Francis. 220–33.Google Scholar
Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective. Language in Society 46: 621–47.Google Scholar
Roth-Gordon, J. (2017). Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar

References

Agha, A. (2005). Voice, Footing, Enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alcoff, L. (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Alim, H. S., Rickford, J. R. and Ball, A. F. (2016). Introducing Raciolinguistics. In Alim, H. S., Rickford, J. R. and Ball, A. F. (eds.) Raciolinguistics: How Language Shapes Our Ideas about Race. New York: Oxford University Press. 1–30.Google Scholar
Anderson, K. (2008). Justifying Race Talk: Indexicality and the Social Construction of Race and Linguistic Value. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(1): 108–29.Google Scholar
Augoustinos, M. and Every, D. (2007). Contemporary Racist Discourse: Taboos against Racism and Racist Accusations. In Weatherall, A., Watson, B. M. and Gallois, C. (eds.) Language, Discourse and Social Psychology. New York: Palgrave. 233–54.Google Scholar
Augoustinos, M., Tuffin, K. and Every, D. (2005). New Racism, Meritocracy and Individualism: Constraining Affirmative Action in Education. Discourse & Society 16(3): 315–40.Google Scholar
Back, M. and Zavala, V. (eds.) (2019). Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru. New York/London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bailey, B. (2010). Language, Power, and the Performance of Race and Class. In Korgen, K. (ed.) Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity. New York/London: Routledge. 72–87.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Emerson, C. and Holquist, M.. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World, trans. by Iswolsky, H.. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Baugh, J. (1983). Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bell, A. (2016). Succeeding Waves: Seeking Sociolinguistic Theory for the Twenty-First Century. In Coupland, N. (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 391–416.Google Scholar
Blommaert, J. (2015). Chronotopes, Scales, and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society. Annual Review of Anthropology 44: 105–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brañez, R. (2019). “Amixer Detected!”: Identities and Racism in Peruvian Cyberspace. In Back, M. and Zavala, V. (eds.) Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru. London/New York: Routledge. 162–88.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M. (2011). “Not that I Am Racist”: Strategies of Colorblindness in Talk about Race and Friendship. In Bucholtz, M. (ed.) White Kids: Language, Race and Styles of Youth Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 164–86.Google Scholar
Chun, E. W. (2011). Reading Race beyond Black and White. Discourse & Society 22(4): 403–21.Google Scholar
Chun, E. and Lo, A. (2016). Language and Racialization. In Bonvillain, N. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Taylor and Francis. 220–33.Google Scholar
Daniels, J. (2013). Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique. New Media & Society 15(5): 695–719.Google Scholar
Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990). Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20(1): 43–63.Google Scholar
De la Cadena, M. (2000). Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
De la Cadena, M. (ed.) (2008). Formaciones de indianidad. Formaciones raciales, mestizaje y nación en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Envión.Google Scholar
Delgado, R. and Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Dick, H. P. and Wirtz, K. (2011). Introduction-Racializing Discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(S1): E2–E10.Google Scholar
Fairclough, N. (2002). Discourse and Social Change. London: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Fields, B. J. (2001). Whiteness, Racism, and Identity. International Labor and Working-Class History 60: 48–56.Google Scholar
Flores, N. and Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education. Harvard Educational Review 85(2): 149–71.Google Scholar
García, J. (2003). Three Scalarities: Racialization, Racism, and Race. Theory and Research in Education 1(3): 283–302.Google Scholar
Goldberg, D. T. (1992). The Semantics of Race. Ethnic and Racial Studies 15(4): 543–69.Google Scholar
Goodwin, M.H. (1990). He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Gotkowitz, L. (2011). Introduction: Racisms of the Present and the Past in Latin America. In Gotkowitz, L. (ed.) Histories of Race and Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1–53.Google Scholar
Hochman, A. (2018). Racialization: A Defense of the Concept. Ethnic and Racial Studies DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2018.1527937.Google Scholar
Inoue, M. (2006). Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kroskrity, P. (ed.) (2000). Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities and Identities. New Mexico: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Vol. 3. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, M. (2018). A Critique of the Principle of Error Correction as a Theory of Social Change. Language in Society 47(3): 325–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makoni, S. and Pennycook, A. (eds.) (2006). Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1968). La ideología alemana. Montevideo: Pueblos Unidos.Google Scholar
Mitchell-Kernan, C. L. (1972). Signifying and Marking: Two Afro-American Speech Acts. In Gumperz, J. and Hymes, D. (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Blackwell. 161–79.Google Scholar
Pennycook, A. (2012). Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Pietikainen, S. (2017). Critical Debates: Discourse, Boundaries and Social Change. In Coupland, N. (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 263–81.Google Scholar
Quijano, A. (2000). Colonialidad del poder, eurocentrismo y América Latina. In Lander, E. (ed.) La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas Latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: Clacso. 201–46.Google Scholar
Rattansi, A. (2005). The Uses of Racialization: The Time-Spaces and Subject-Objects of the Raced Body. In Murji, K. and Solomos, J. (eds.) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. 271–301.Google Scholar
Reyes, A. (2011). “Racist!”: Metapragmatic Regimentation of Racist Discourse by Asian American Youth. Discourse & Society 22(4): 458–73.Google Scholar
Reyes, A. (2017). Inventing Postcolonial Elites: Race, Language, Mix, Excess. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27(2): 210–31.Google Scholar
Robles, J. (2015). Extreme Case (Re)formulation as a Practice of Making Hearably Racist Talk Repairable. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34(4): 390–409.Google Scholar
Rosa, J. and Burdick, C. (2016). Language Ideologies. In García, O., Flores, N. and Spotti, M. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 103–23.Google Scholar
Rosa, J. and Flores, N. (2017). Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective. Language in Society 46: 621–47.Google Scholar
Roth-Gordon, J. (2017). Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Schegloff, E. (1997). Whose Text? Whose Context? Discourse & Society 8: 165–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shuck, G. (2006). Racializing the Nonnative English Speaker. Journal of Language Identity, and Education 5(4): 259–76.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, T. A. (2003). Critical Discourse Analysis. In Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D. and Hamilton, H. E. (eds.) The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. 352–67.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, T. A. (2012). The Role of the Press in the Reproduction of Racism. In Messer, M., Schroeder, R. and Wodak, R. (eds.) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York/Dordrecht/London: Springer. 15–28.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, T. A. (2016). Racism in the Press. In Bonvillain, N. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Routledge. 384–92.Google Scholar
Wade, P. (2017). Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd ed. New York: Pluto.Google Scholar
Wetherell, M. (2007). A Step Too Far: Discursive Psychology, Linguistic Ethnography and Questions of Identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(5): 661–81.Google Scholar
Wetherell, M. and Potter, J. (1992). Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Whitehead, K. (2015). Everyday Antiracism in Action: Preference Organization in Responses to Racism. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 34(4): 374–89.Google Scholar
Wodak, R. (2002). Discourse and Politics: The Rhetoric of Exclusion. In Wodak, R. and Pelinka, A. (eds.) The Haider Phenomenon. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. 33–60.Google Scholar
Wong, I. (2019). Racist Practices in Virtual Democracy: Constructing the “Ppkausa” on Facebook. In Back, M. and Zavala, V. (eds.) Racialization and Language: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Peru. London/New York: Routledge. 214–36.Google Scholar
Yudell, M., Roberts, D., DeSalle, R. and Tishkoff, S. (2016). Taking Race out of Human Genetics. Science 351(6273): 564–5.Google Scholar
Zavala, V. (2011). Racialization of the Bilingual Student in Higher Education: A Case from the Peruvian Andes. Linguistics and Education 22: 393–405.Google Scholar
Zavala, V. and Back, M. (2017). Racismo y lenguaje. Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP.Google Scholar
Zavala, V. and Zariquiey, R. (2009). “I Segregate You because Your Lack of Education Offends Me”: An Approach to Racist Discourse in Contemporary Peru. In van Dijk, T. (ed.) Racism and Discourse in Latin America. New York: Lexington Books. 259–89.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×