Raciolinguistic Entanglements and Transraciolinguistic Transgressions: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Three South Asian TESOLers in the US (original) (raw)
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Learning from Ryuko Kubota: Applied Linguistics, Race, Identity, and Critical Approaches
Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, 2023
Since the 1990s Ryuko Kubota has extensively researched race, identity, and critical approaches to teacher development in the area of Applied Linguistics (AL). More recently, her last publications include the relevance of translanguaging and ongoing work with the Sister Scholars. As the result of our interest in Kubota’s extremely significant discussions, in this interview, Kubota points out the challenges AL has faced in the last years, as well as the complexities of working in the Global North. Besides, she provides compelling insights in antiracist pedagogy and the role of Freire in English language teaching.
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Translingual students’ identities transcend multiple languages and cultural allegiances. Sociolinguistics widely discusses the linguistic and racial oppressions these students face in schools due to epistemic racism, which is often observed in the tension between their multilingual and multimodal communicative styles and language perspectives rooted in monolingual and monocultural ideologies. This paper expands on the literature that denounces epistemic racism, uses Raciolinguistics and New Literacy Studies as theoretical frameworks, and reports on the following inquiries: What are the characteristics of delegitimizing school stakeholders who become agents of epistemic racism in their interactions with translingual students? How do translingual students reject these agents’ marginalization? Critical focus groups, semi-structured and arts-based interviews, and emplaced observations were used to collect data, centering the identities and voices of participants. Two key findings emerged. First, school stakeholders with various roles, social power, and degree of impact epitomize epistemic racism through ideological discourses. Second, “Translinguals” resist through novel concepts for which I have coined the terms "Covert and Overt Transresistance,” enacted by the means of resisting transliteracies. The theoretical, research, and practical implications of these findings, along with recommendations for future research, are discussed.
Redirecting the Flow of Knowledge: From the Individual to the Local to the National to the International Perspective, 2023
Continued contradictions between what we hope to see and what we do in literacy education increasingly create a challenge for teachers who wish to be responsive to the long-standing linguistic, racial, and cultural diversity that exists across the globe. Addressing this impasse, there are calls that extend beyond a focus on responsiveness to diversity, inviting as a precursor, and more intentionally, a focus on the self. Such calls argue for a simultaneous emphasis on critical multilingual, critical multicultural and critical multiracial awareness, in tandem, as a basis for teachers and educators to embrace assets emerging from students' literate assets presented in and beyond classrooms. They also invite literacy teachers and educators to first focus on the self by engaging with their own critical multilingual, critical multicultural and critical multiracial awareness before looking outward to focus on responsiveness in diverse classrooms. This chapter responds to these calls by using insights from Black immigrant literacy educators to describe the affordances of a transraciolinguistic approach clarifying their critical multicultural, critical multiracial and critical multilingual awareness. Implications for literacy teachers and educators who wish to use a transraciolinguistic approach in conjunction with critical awareness to advance responsiveness in diverse classrooms are provided.
Decolonization, Language, and Race in Applied Linguistics and Social Justice
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While applied linguistics research can serve as an important site for understanding and contributing to efforts toward challenging historical and contemporary power structures, it is also crucial to interrogate how numerous normative concepts and logics within the field of applied linguistics both reflect and reenact dominant power structures. Centering colonialism and racism in our analysis, this commentary considers how applied linguistics often focuses on modest reforms supporting affirmation and inclusion of marginalized populations and practices, rather than on fundamental institutional changes required to eradicate the forces that produce marginalization. As applied linguists grapple with questions surrounding the extent to which their work contributes in substantive ways to social justice struggles, we are inspired by collaborations that challenge us to reconsider normative assumptions about both language and justice. These collaborations demand a comprehensive reckoning that frames social justice not as a normative reality that can be achieved through modest reforms to liberal governance, but rather as an existential horizon that necessitates a fundamental reimagination of communication’s role in narrating and creating decolonial worlds that sustain collective well-being.
Book Review Linguistic Justice Black Language Literacy Identity and Pedagogy RSQ
Linguistic Justice Black Language Literacy Identity and Pedagogy, 2021
In the words of Etta James, "At Last." April Baker-Bell's Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy is, indeed, the book that many of us have been waiting for-not just in rhetoric and composition, but also in education. In line with recent research on culturally sustainable classrooms and representation in education, this creative, thorough, and interdisciplinary text illuminates struggles many of us grapple with in our preK-12, undergraduate, or graduate classrooms today: multilingualism and antiracism. Struggling to incorporate antiracist practices and/or developing nurturing spaces for multilingualism in the classroom have been in the spotlight for decades. With increased awareness of social (in)justice due to Trump-era politicking and steadfast #BLM protests, antiracist work in (and on) the classroom shows no sign of slowing down or fading into the background. In fact, the Student's Rights to Their Own Language (SRTOL) statement is often used as a starting point for many scholarly debates. Even though the 1974 statement shows its age, the idea put forth by the statement-that there is no one "right" language-is still, unfortunately, a contested approach to teaching. So, what can Linguistic Justice offer us now if these issues are concerns that practitioners (hopefully) BIN addressing? To answer, Linguistic Justice broaches post-SRTOL conversations by provoking theoretical questions of language solidarity, racism, and "linguistic appropriation" (13) in rich and unique ways. As such, this text ushers in renewed debates about code-switching pedagogy and advancing a socially just praxis, grounded in sociolinguistics and Black rhetorics, for everyone to understand. With praise from Valerie Kinloch and Geneva Smitherman to start the conversation, Linguistic Justice presents a dynamic case for how language can dismantle inherited racist practices in the classroom and communities. Drawing on foundational works from Smitherman, Elaine Richardson, Lisa Green, H. Samy Alim, John Baugh, as well as John and Russell Rickford, Baker-Bell continues fighting for the validation of Black life, Black culture, and Black language. Overall, Baker-Bell's book is by turns poignant in its reflections on language and racism and brilliantly synthetic, weaving together foundational work in Black rhetorics. The writing is clear and engaging-not to mention detailed and applicable-which makes reading this short text a pleasure. Linguistic Justice not only seamlessly continues other Black scholar-activists' calls for reclamation, but it also pushes the bounds of the conversation-asking what does it mean to "code-switch" and what gets lost in such practices of appeasement? At the heart of this work, Baker-Bell asserts that the solipsistic ideologies transferred through the teaching of a "standard" or "right" way to communicate in English is actually an extension of other tacit, racist oppressive social functions. Teaching, then, has the ability to change the cultural game; how we approach language, identity, and power in classrooms has ripple effects beyond a single course. Baker-Bell says this loud, clear, and often across all chapters of this book: "My point is that we can't be out here using these mediocre and problematic measures of success that only legitimates a white status quo [.. .] that is tethered to the death of blackness and Black Language" (30). Indeed. Her call-to-action mirrors Linguistic Justice's main argument, which is, "Instead of perpetuating linguistic racism in classrooms, language arts teachers should engage their students in critical questioning by asking questions [.. .] [that] show how language is loaded with power" (81). Through six chapters studded with images, charts, and teaching resources, Linguistic Justice admirably shows readers how they might combat long-standing racist practices in the teaching of rhetoric and composition. Chapter one provides the backdrop for Linguistic Justice, positioning Baker-Bell's work as an extension of her own personal and professional evolution. This chapter also describes many of the
This article presents a critical race theory analysis of teachers' and students' language policy negotiation. It draws on an ethnographic study in a high-school English as a Second Language (ESL) program. Results demonstrate how race-language processes create conditions that trauma-tize immigrant and bilingual youth of color through embodied nativist policies. On the other hand, youth made dynamic bilingual policies. It is argued that critical race-language scholars must question the legitimacy of ESL programs that function as white supremacy. [immigrant youth, critical race theory, policy, ethnography, English Learners] Yes, it is the dawn that has come. The titihoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains.. .For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. [Paton 1948:312] In 1988, Kimberlé Crenshaw argued that white supremacy, formerly explicit, was now implicitly circulated through contemporary stereotypes based on notions of culture rather than genetics (1988:1379). She writes, " The rationalizations once used to legitimate Black subordination based on the belief in racial inferiority have now been reemployed to legitimate the domination of Blacks through reference to an assumed cultural inferiority " (1988:1379). Likewise, with a shifting and highly politicized socioscape of immigration politics in a post-9/11 United States, race and immigration status are heard, as language is reemployed to legitimate the continued subordination of brown and black bodies. The subordinated status of immigrants of color is circulated through a discourse of linguistic " otherness " that denies how bilingualism is intertwined with the development of our country and the benefit of linguistic diversity globally. Sociolinguists argue that the work of integrating more effectively into U.S. society through Standard English acquisition is a specific burden relegated to the bodies of brown and black communities (Alim and Smitherman 2012). Here I argue that English-only language policies are enacted on the backs of brown and black immigrant 1 and bilingual youth through segregated education programming. The stories narrated in the following pages share trauma, anger, and anguish. They direct our attention towards the ways in which white racial consciousness and white supremacy use youths' languages as means of oppression. They are stories of hope. The youths' actions to counter nativist language policy put cracks in the system of white supremacy that open up space for new ways of being, ways that spur us to act with authentic love and to transform the conditions that traumatize bilingual and immigrant youth of color. In the following article I analyze teachers' and students' participation in language policy to question how white supremacy is legitimated, critiqued, and resisted in educational settings. In this 18-month ethnographic study of a high school in California, teachers and students (a) substantiated English-only policies, (b) critiqued the policy of segregating