Book Description

"This handbook is the first volume to offer a sustained theoretical exploration of all aspects of language and race from a linguistic anthropological perspective. A growing number of scholars hold that rather than fixed and pre-determined, race is created out of continuous and repeated discourses emerging from individuals and institutions within specific histories, political economic systems, and everyday interactions. This handbook demonstrates how linguistic analysis brings a crucial perspective to this project by revealing the ways in which language and race are mutually constituted as social realities. Not only do we position issues of race, racism, and racialization as central to language-based scholarship, but we also examine these processes from an explicitly critical and anti-racist perspective. The process of racialization-an enduring yet evolving social process steeped in centuries of colonialism and capitalism-is central to linguistic anthropological approaches. This volume captures state-of-the-art research in this important and necessary yet often overlooked area of inquiry and points the way forward in establishing future directions of research in this rapidly expanding field, including the need for more studies of language and race in non-U.S. contexts. Covering a range of sites from Angola, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Italy, Liberia, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and unceded Indigenous territories, the handbook offers theoretical, reflexive takes on the field of language and race, the larger histories and systems that influence these concepts, the bodies that enact and experience them, and finally, the expressions and outcomes that emerge as a result"--