Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective

2020 ◽  
pp. 67-89
Author(s):  
Paul V. Kroskrity
Keyword(s):  
Language Ideologies ◽  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Awareness ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Critical Language Awareness ◽  
Political Economic

Previous scholarship has linked the promotion of racializing projects to the larger political economic contexts of nation-states and their role in (re-)producing social hierarchies. Language, in the form of language ideologies (Kroskrity 2016), linguistic forms, and discursive practices, provides a special kind of resource in such racializing projects because it contributes not only overtly but also covertly to the hierarchical production of social inequality. This study builds on prior language ideological studies of linguistic racism in the United States (e.g., Hill 2008) and demonstrates how this theoretical orientation reveals patterns of overt and covert racism that derive from speakers’ consciousness across a continuum ranging from practical consciousness (Kroskrity 1998) to critical language awareness (Alim 2010). Language ideological data, including the publications of “salvage era” academic researchers, disclose a sector on the spectrum of linguistic racisms directed specifically at indigenous people and their culture by a settler-colonial state and its citizens.

scholarly journals Understanding Heritage Language Learners’ Critical Language Awareness (CLA) in Mixed Language Programs

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Laura Gasca Jiménez ◽  
Sergio Adrada-Rafael
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Language Ideologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Awareness ◽  
Eastern United States ◽  
Language Programs ◽  
Mixed Language ◽  
Critical Language Awareness ◽  
Upper Level

Despite the prevalence of mixed language programs across the United States, their impact on the unique socio-affective needs of heritage language (HL) students has not been researched sufficiently. Therefore, the present study examines HL learners’ critical language awareness (CLA) in a mixed Spanish undergraduate program at a small private university in the eastern United States. Sixteen HL learners enrolled in different Spanish upper-level courses participated in the study. Respondents completed an existing questionnaire to measure CLA, which includes 19 Likert-type items addressing different areas, such as language variation, language ideologies, bilingualism, and language maintenance. Overall, the results show that learners in the mixed language program under study have “somewhat high” and “high” levels of CLA. The increased levels of CLA in learners who had completed three courses or more in the program, coupled with their strong motivation, suggests that this program contributes positively toward HL students’ CLA. However, respondents’ answers also reveal standard language ideologies, as well as the personal avoidance of code-switching. Based on these findings, two areas that could benefit from a wider representation in the curriculum of mixed language programs are discussed: language ideologies and plurilingual language practices.

scholarly journals Faulkner’s Quixotic Picaresque: Carnival, Tricksters, and Rhizomatic Intertextuality in The Reivers

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 270-280
Author(s):  
David E. S. Beek
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lazarillo De Tormes ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Agrarian Society ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Public Body

Abstract Faulkner’s The Reivers exemplifies the Quixotic Picaresque-a conflation of the narrative modes exhibited in Lazarillo de Tormes and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This essay explores the correlation between Spain’s transition from feudalism to a modern mercantile society and the United States’ transition from an agrarian society based on slavery to a modern industrial nation within the cultural contexts of these novels. In each of these works, a series of trickster figures undertake performative acts of deception, particularly the masking tradition of Carnival, in order to endure the hardships of modernity. However, whereas most tricksters tend to be solely focused on pragmatic individual objectives, quixotic pícaros maintain a sense of idealism that leads them to consider the Other and thus act in the name of communal prosperity. These selfless tricksters meta-theatrically parody the generic social conventions in which they reside in order to subvert the hegemony that seeks to oppress and marginalise them and fellow members of their communities. In performing an array of identities and social roles, these quixotic pícaros contribute to the opacity of modern multicultural nation-states, and thus, disrupt all social hierarchies leading to the regeneration of the public body, mobility, and a more utopian world.

Scripts of Blackness

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isar P. Godreau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
Racial Mixture ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. This book explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race—created to overcome U.S. colonial power—simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism. Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, the book examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. The book traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, the book outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black. Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, the book provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

AT WAR WITH DIVERSITY: U.S. LANGUAGE POLICY IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY. James Crawford. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2000. Pp. 144. $49.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. LANGUAGE DIVERSITY AND EDUCATION. David Corson. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Pp. xi + 253. $29.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Timothy Reagan
Keyword(s):  
Preservice Teachers ◽  
Beginning Teachers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language Diversity ◽  
Language Awareness ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Language Differences ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Critical Language Awareness ◽  
Educational Debate

The need to recognize the presence and significance of language diversity in educational settings in the United States has become increasingly apparent to educators and educational policy makers in recent years. Among the more contentious debates about public education that we have witnessed have been those concerned directly with language and linguistic matters, not the least of which have been those dealing with the education of minority-language students in general and bilingual education programs in particular. Also, frequent touchstones for educational debate have been efforts to “recognize” African American Vernacular English as many children's first and dominant language variety—a matter of no linguistic controversy at all but one of immense political and educational controversy, as events in Oakland, California, made quite clear. Although of increasing significance and relevance, it is interesting that relatively few works have sought to target one of the more important audiences concerned with such debates: future classroom teachers. Issues of language and language diversity are largely absent from the teacher education literature, and preservice teachers are relatively unlikely to be exposed in any significant or in-depth way to such matters in their formal preparation (see Reagan, 1997). As David Corson notes in Language diversity and education, “A major challenge for beginning teachers is to understand how language differences construct and reflect ideologies and power relations, especially through the work that teachers do themselves” (p. 96). Fortunately, the two books under review here provide an excellent start for helping new and future teachers to develop the type of critical language awareness necessary if they are to meet the needs of their students more adequately.

The United States, 1783–1861: Britain's Honorary Dominion?

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Related Notion ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Practical Politics ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
British Culture

This essay reinterprets the evolution of the United States between 1783 and 1861 from the perspective of imperial history. The established literature on this period focuses on the national story, and particularly on the struggle to achieve liberty and democracy. Historians of empire, however, routinely distinguish between formal and effective independence and evaluate the often halting progress of ex-colonial states in achieving a substantive transfer of power. Considered from this angle, the dominant themes of the period were the search for viability and development rather than for liberty and democracy. The article illustrates this proposition by re-evaluating the political, economic, and cultural themes that are central to the history of the period. The argument in each case is that the United States remained dependent on Great Britain to an extent that greatly limited her effective independence. The standard controversies of domestic political history, notably the battle between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian visions of the state, are recast as differing strategies for achieving real and permanent independence. Strategies for achieving economic development made practical politics of competing arguments for protection and free trade, but failed to release the economy from its dependence on the British market and British capital. Attempts to create an independent national identity were compromised by the continuing influence of British culture and by the related notion of Anglo-Saxonism, on which prevailing policies of assimilation relied. In all these respects, the United States was an unexceptional ex-colonial state, and indeed closely followed the trajectory of other colonies of white settlement that were classified as dominions within the British Empire. The United States, however, was a dependent state that failed in 1861, and its struggle for independence had to be renewed after the Civil War.

Ill and against the Law: The Social and Medical Control of Heroin Users

1983 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorie Klein
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Orientation ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Heroin Users ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Illicit Markets ◽  
Official Policy ◽  
Political Economic

This discussion focuses on the criminalization and medicalization of heroin users in the United States in two historical periods: the late teens to early twenties, and the late sixties to early seventies. Comparative analysis reveals that while different social circumstances have stimulated specific state responses, class and ethnic patterns of drug use have played a leading role in shaping overall policy. Continuous clashes and adjustments between licit and illicit markets have reflected deeper economic and ideological conflicts. The essence of official policy, whether under a public health or a criminal justice rubric, has been the attempt to effect a real and symbolic order. Claims to the contrary notwithstanding, the advocates of reform and of the medical approach to addiction have accommodated more than they have challenged law enforcement. Doctors' professional interests and the uses of medical rhetoric to justify state policy have changed, but the control aspects within the medical model stand out sharply. This analysis of the limits of conflict and structures of resolution between specific heroin policymakers draws on an appreciation of more general political, economic, and social forces which shape the interplay of “deviance” and the official reaction to it. This theoretical orientation departs from the leading paradigms in the sociology of drug control developed within labelling and interest-group frameworks.

Critical language awareness for the heritage context: Development and validation of a measurement questionnaire

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 573-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Beaudrie ◽  
Angelica Amezcua ◽  
Sergio Loza
Keyword(s):  
Psychometric Properties ◽  
Heritage Language ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Language Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Forces ◽  
Critical Language Awareness ◽  
Development And Validation

Critical language awareness (CLA) is increasingly identified as a central component of the Spanish heritage language (SHL) classroom (Leeman, 2005; Martínez, 2003; among others). As a minority language, SHL is subject to sociopolitical, cultural, and economic forces that devalue its status. It is devalued in the eyes of the public, as a legitimate U.S. language, and as something worthy of being maintained. It is essential that students receive instruction not only in the heritage language, but also on the contextual factors that affect the Spanish-English sociopolitical relationship in the United States. Such instruction will enable learners to begin resisting heritage language loss by questioning language ideologies that promote English monolingualism and standard, monolingual Spanish as the ideal norm. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire with adequate psychometric properties to measure CLA in the SHL context. The respondents were 301 students enrolled in SHL courses in four U.S. universities. The questionnaire results were submitted to a series of statistical analysis to investigate how well the instrument meets the criteria of reliability and validity specified in this study. The final 19-item instrument had adequate psychometric properties and detected change in the CLA of students in a class where CLA was taught.

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