Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-l4dxg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-10T23:20:32.780Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Unsettling race and language: Toward a raciolinguistic perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2017

Jonathan Rosa  and
Nelson Flores
Jonathan Rosa*
Affiliation:
Stanford University, USA
Nelson Flores*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University, Graduate School of Education, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305[email protected]
Nelson Flores, University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article presents what we term a raciolinguistic perspective, which theorizes the historical and contemporary co-naturalization of language and race. Rather than taking for granted existing categories for parsing and classifying race and language, we seek to understand how and why these categories have been co-naturalized, and to imagine their denaturalization as part of a broader structural project of contesting white supremacy. We explore five key components of a raciolinguistic perspective: (i) historical and contemporary colonial co-naturalizations of race and language; (ii) perceptions of racial and linguistic difference; (iii) regimentations of racial and linguistic categories; (iv) racial and linguistic intersections and assemblages; and (v) contestations of racial and linguistic power formations. These foci reflect our investment in developing a careful theorization of various forms of racial and linguistic inequality on the one hand, and our commitment to the imagination and creation of more just societies on the other. (Race, language ideologies, colonialism, governmentality, enregisterment, structural inequality)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 46 , Issue 5 , November 2017 , pp. 621 - 647
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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.)

Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who helped to focus and strengthen this manuscript, as well as Jenny Cheshire and Angela Reyes for their editorial guidance. We would also like to thank the audiences at the Advanced Research Collaborative at CUNY Graduate Center, Sociolinguistic Symposium 21 in Murcia, Spain, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and the Social Science Matrix at the University of California Berkeley, where we presented earlier versions of this work.

References

Aggarwal, Ujju (2016). The ideological architecture of whiteness as property in educational policy. Educational Policy 30(1):128–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Agha, Asif (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):38–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ahmed, Sara (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy (2016). Introducing raciolinguistics: Racing language and languaging race in hyperracial times. In Alim, H. Samy, Rickford, John, & Ball, Arnetha (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 1–30. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, & Reyes, Angela (2011). Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions. Discourse & Society 22(4):379–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alim, H. Samy, & Smitherman, Geneva (2012). Articulate while black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Aneja, Geeta (2016). Rethinking nativeness: Toward a dynamic paradigm of (non)native speakering. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 13(4):351–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Avineri, Netta; Johnson, Eric; Brice-Heath, Shirley; McCarty, Teresa; Ochs, Elonor; Kremer-Sadlik, Tamara; Blum, Susan; Zentella, Ana Celia; Rosa, Jonathan; Flores, Nelson; Alim, H. Samy & Paris, Django (2015). Invited forum: Bridging the ‘language gap’. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25(1):66–86.Google Scholar
Bamgbose, Ayo (1983). Education in indigenous languages: The West African model of language education. The Journal of Negro Education 52:57–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baugh, John (2003). Linguistic profiling. In Makoni, Sinfree, Smitherman, Geneva, Ball, Arnetha, & Spears, Arthur (eds.), Black linguistics: Language, society, and politics in Africa and the America, 155–63. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bereiter, Carl, & Engelmann, Siegfried (1966). Teaching disadvantaged children in the pre-school. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi (1984). Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse. October 28:125–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2009). Language, asylum, and the national order. Current Anthropology 50(4):415–41.Google Scholar
Bonfiglio, Thomas (2002). Race and the rise of standard American. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bonfiglio, Thomas (2010). Mother tongues and nations: The invention of the native speaker. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Bonilla, Yarimar, & Rosa, Jonathan (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42(1):4–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary (2011). ‘It's different for guys’: Gendered narratives of racial conflict among white California Youth. Discourse & Society 22:385–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, & Hall, Kira (2005). Identity and interaction: A sociocultural linguistic account. Discourse Studies 7(4–5):585–614.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary, & Lopez, Quiana (2011). Performing blackness, forming whiteness: Linguistic minstrelsy in Hollywood film. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(1):680–706.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cameron, Deborah (2007). Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics. In Duchêne, Alexandre & Heller, Monica (eds.), Discourses of endangerment: Ideology and interest in the defence of languages, 268–85. New York: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Capetillo-Ponce, Jorge (2007). From ‘a clash of civilizations’ to ‘internal colonialism’: Reactions to the theoretical bases of Samuel Huntington's ‘The Hispanic challenge’. Ethnicities 7:116–34.Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine (2004). Ideologies of legitimate mockery: Margaret Cho's revoicings of Mock Asian. Pragmatics 14:263–89.Google Scholar
Chun, Elaine (2011). Reading race beyond black and white. Discourse & Society 22(4):403–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chun, Elaine (2016). The meaning of ching-chong: Language, racism, and response in new media. In Alim, H. Samy, Rickford, John, & Ball, Arnetha (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 81–96. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chun, Elaine, & Lo, Adrienne (2016). Language and racialization. In Nancy Bonvillain (ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology , 220–33. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Collier, Virginia, & Thomas, Wayne (2004). The astounding effectiveness of dual language education for all. NABE Journal of Research and Practice 2:1–20.Google Scholar
Collins, James (2017). Dilemmas of race, register, and inequality in South Africa. Langauge in Society 46:39–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43(6):1241–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Delpit, Lisa (2006). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Del Valle, José (2006). US Latinos, la hispanofonía, and the language ideologies of high modernity. In Mar-Molinero, Clare & Stewart, Miranda (eds.), Globalization, language, and the Spanish-speaking world, 27–46. New York: Palgrave.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Derrida, Jacques (1974). Of grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Dick, Hilary (2011). Language and migration to the United States. Annual Review of Anthropology 40:227–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dick, Hilary, & Wirtz, Kristina (2011). Racializing discourses. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 21(s1):E2–E10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fanon, Frantz (1967). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Fishman, Joshua (1991). Reversing language shift: Theory and practice of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Flores, Nelson (2013). Silencing the subaltern: Nation-state/colonial governmentality and bilingual education in the United States. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 10:263–87.Google Scholar
Flores, Nelson (2016). A tale of two visions: Hegemonic whiteness and bilingual education. Educational Policy 30(1):13–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flores, Nelson; Kleyn, Tatiana; & Menken, Kate (2015). Looking holistically in a climate of partiality: Identities of students labeled ‘long-term English language learners’. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 14:113–32.Google Scholar
Flores, Nelson, & Rosa, Jonathan (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85:149–71.Google Scholar
Fought, Carmen (2003). Chicano English in context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan (1989). Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 18:345–67.Google Scholar
Gal, Susan (2012). Sociolinguistic regimes and the management of ‘diversity’. In Heller, Monica & Duchêne, Alexandre (eds.), Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit, 22–37. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
García, Ofelia; Flores, Nelson; & Spotti, Massimiliano (2017). Language and society: A critical poststructuralist perspective. In García, Ofelia, Flores, Nelson, & Spotti, Massimiliano (eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society, 1–16. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Green, Lisa (2002) African American English: A linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen (1990). Learning to curse: Essays in early modern culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Haney-Lopez, Ian (1994). Social construction of race: Some observations on illusion, fabrication, and choice. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29:1–62.Google Scholar
Haney-Lopez, Ian (1996). White by law: The legal construction of race. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Hanks, William (2010). Converting words: Maya in the age of the cross. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hart, Betty, & Risley, Todd (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing. Google Scholar
Hartigan, John (2013). Knowing race. In Hartigan, John (ed.), Anthropology of race: Genes, biology, and culture, 3–19. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research.Google Scholar
Haviland, John (2003). Ideologies of language: Some reflections on language and US law. American Anthropologist 105(4):764–74.Google Scholar
Heller, Monica, & Duchêne, Alexandre (2012). Pride and profit: Changing discourses of language, capital, and nation-state. In Heller, Monica & Duchêne, Alexandre, Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit, 1–21. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hesse, Barnor (2007). Racialized modernity: An analytics of white mythologies. Ethnic and Racial Studies 30:643–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hesse, Barnor (2016). Counter-racial formation theory. In Saucier, P. Khalil & Woods, Tryon P. (eds.), Conceptual aphasia in Black: Displacing racial formation, vii–x. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane (1998). Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist 100(3):680–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill, Jane (2008). The everyday language of white racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hill Collins, Patricia (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hodges, Adam (2015). Ideologies of language and race in US media discourse about the Trayvon Martin Shooting. Language in Society 44(3):401–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inoue, Miyako (2003a). The listening subject of Japanese modernity and his auditory double: Citing, sighting, and siting the modern Japanese woman. Cultural Anthropology 18(2):156–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inoue, Miyako (2003b). Speech without a speaking body: ‘Japanese women's language’ in translation. Language & Communication 23:315–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inoue, Miyako (2006). Vicarious language: Gender and linguistic modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith (1989). When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy. American Ethnologist 116(2):248–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith (1990). Registering affect: Heteroglossia in the linguistic expression of emotion. In Lutz, Catherine A. & Abu-Lughod, Lila (eds.), Language and the politics of emotion, 126–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith, & Gal, Susan (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul (ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35–84. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita (2006). From the kitchen to the parlor: Language and becoming in African American women's hair care. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Khan, Kamran (2014). Citizenship, securitization, and suspicion in UK ESOL policy. Working Papers in Urban Language and Literacies 130:1–14.Google Scholar
Kubota, Ryuko (2014). Race and language learning in multicultural Canada: Toward critical anti-racism. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 36(1):3–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Leonard, Wesley (2012). Reframing language reclamation programmes for everybody's empowerment. Language & Gender 6(2):339–67.Google Scholar
Leonardo, Zeus (2012). The race for class: Reflections on a critical raceclass theory of education. Educational Studies 48(5):427–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Oscar (1959). Five families: Mexican case studies in the culture of poverty. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, Rosina (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lo, Adrienne, & Reyes, Angela (2009). On yellow English and other perilous terms. In Reyes, Angela & Lo, Adrienne (eds.), Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America, 3–17. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lowe, Lisa (2006). The intimacies of four continents. In Ann Laura Stoler (ed.), Haunted by empire: Geographies of intimacy in North American history, 191–212. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree; Smitherman, Geneva; Ball, Arnetha F.; & Spears, Arthur K. (eds.) (2003). Black linguistics: Language, society, and politics in Africa and the Americas. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree; & Pennycook, Alastair (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In Makoni, Sinfree & Pennycook, Alastair (eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages, 1–41. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Marr, Tim (2011). ‘Ya no podemos regresar al Quechua’: Modernity, identity, and language choice among migrants in urban Peru. In Heggarty, Paul & Pearce, Adrian J. (eds.), History and language in the Andes, 215–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillian.Google Scholar
McElhinny, Bonnie (2010). The audacity of affect: Gender, race, and history in linguistic accounts of legitimacy and belonging. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:309–28.Google Scholar
Meek, Barbra (2006). And the Injun goes ‘How!’: Representations of American Indian English in white public space. Language in Society 35(1):93–128.Google Scholar
Melamed, Jodi (2011). Represent and destroy: Rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Mendible, Myra (ed.) (2007). From bananas to buttocks: The Latina body in popular film and culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter (1995). The darker side of the Renaissance: Literacy, territoriality, and colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia (1971). Language behavior in a black urban community. Berkeley, CA: Language Behavior Research Laboratory.Google Scholar
Moraga, Cheri, & Anzaldúa, Gloria (eds.) (1981). This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color. Watertown, NY: Persephone.Google Scholar
Morgan, Marcyliena (2002). Language, discourse, and power in African American culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Marcyliena (2009). Foreword: Just take me as I am. In Lanehart, Sonja (ed.), African American women's language: Discourse, education, and identity, xiii–xxiii. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
Motha, Suhanthie (2014). Race, empire, and English language teaching: Creating responsible and ethical anti-racist practice. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar
Ndhlovu, Finex (2014). Becoming an African diaspora in Australia: Language, culture, identity. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omi, Michael, & Winant, Howard (1994). Racial formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Park, Joseph, & Wee, Lionel (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair (2002). Mother tongues, governmentality, and protectionism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 154:11–28.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair (2015). Class is out: Erasing social class in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 36(2):1–9.Google Scholar
Petrovic, John (2005). The conservative restoration and neoliberal defenses of bilingual education. Language Policy 4:395–416.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana (1980). Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18:581–618.Google Scholar
Puar, Jasbir (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Rafael, Vincente (2000). White love and other events in Filipino history. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Ramanathan, Vaidehi (2013). Language policies and (dis)citizenship: Who belongs? Who is a guest? Who is deported? Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 12:162–66.Google Scholar
Reyes, Angela (2017). Ontology of fake: Discerning the Philippine elite. Signs and Society 5(s1):s100–s127.Google Scholar
Robinson, Cedric (2000). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan (2016a). Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2):162–83.Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan (2016b). Racializing language, regimenting Latinas/os: Chronotope, social tense, and American raciolinguistic futures. Language & Communication 46:106–17.Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan (2018). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistic ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press, to appear.Google Scholar
Roth-Gordon, Jennifer (2016). From upstanding citizen to North American rapper and back again: The racial malleability of poor male Brazilian youth. In Alim, H. Samy, Rickford, John, & Ball, Arnetha (eds.), Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 51–64. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shankar, Shalini (2013). Racial naturalization, advertising, and model consumers for a new millennium. Journal of Asian American Studies 16(2):159–88.Google Scholar
Shankar, Shalini (2015). Advertising diversity: Advertising agencies and the creation of Asian American consumers. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Shankar, Shalini, & Cavanaugh, Jillian (2012). Language and materiality in global capitalism. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:355–69.Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23:193–229.Google Scholar
Smitherman, Geneva (1977). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Stoler, Ann Laura (1995). Race and the education of desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Suskind, Dana (2015). Thirty million words: Building a child's brain. New York: Penguin Random House.Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (1995). Language and borders. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:525–46.Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (1996). Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (1998). Acceptable difference: The cultural evolution of the model ethnic American citizen. In Carol J. Greenhouse (ed.), Democracy and ethnography: Constructing identities in multicultural liberal states, 178–95. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Urciuoli, Bonnie (2016). The compromised pragmatics of diversity. Language & Communication 51:30–39.Google Scholar
Valdés, Guadalupe (1997). Dual language immersion programs: A cautionary note concerning the education of language-minority students. Harvard Educational Review 67:391–429.Google Scholar
Veronelli, Gabriella (2015). The coloniality of language: Race, expressivity, power and the darker side of modernity Wagadu 13:108–34.Google Scholar
Vigoroux, Cécile B. (2017). The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping: ‘Africans as incapable of speaking French’. Language in Society 46(1):5–21.Google Scholar
Williams, Quentin E., & Stroud, Christopher (2015). Battling the race: Stylizing language and coproducing whiteness and colourdness in a freestyle rap performance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 24(3):277–93.Google Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina (2014). Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, voice, spectacle in the making of race and history . Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wolfram, Walt (1984). Is there an ‘Appalachian English’? Appalachian Journal 11:215–24.Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia (2014). TWB (Talking while bilingual): Linguistic profiling of Latina/os, and other linguistic torquemadas. Latino Studies 12:620–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar