Discourse and Racialization (original) (raw)

2020, The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies

In this chapter, we discuss in detail the role of discourse in creating race and racialized categories, providing examples from recent research where applicable. We provide a historical overview of the topic, with an emphasis on two main theoretical approaches pertaining to discourse in this area: racial discourse and racialized linguistic practices. Throughout this chapter we highlight the flexible, contextual nature of discourse and racialization and the need to analyze its effects on racialized subjects, as its content is always shifting.

Racializing language: Unpacking linguistic approaches to attitudes about race and speech

Is race a legitimate category of linguistic differentiation? In other words, can someone's race shape how they speak or how they sound to others? If so, how does this come to be? In which contexts and according to whom do links between race and speech style become assumed as real or meaningful? In this chapter, I explore various ways that linguists have attempted to answer these questions, framing the larger issue of attitudes about African American Language (AAL) and the construction of research on them.

Discourse and Whiteness

Discourse and Whiteness, 2020

Entry on discursive constructions and enactments of whiteness for the Encyclopedia of Critical Whiteness Studies in Education. Discourse and whiteness. In Z. Casey (Ed.), Encyclopedia of critical whiteness studies in education, pp. 133-143. Boston: Brill Sense.

Polyphonic Approaches to Race in Discourse Analysis

The ways in which we talk and write about the constructs of race and ethnicity are influenced by our societal systems, which tend to serve the more powerful and perpetuate a monologic discourse. Bakhtin and Babha, representing literary theory and post-colonial thought respectively, provide the theoretical means, and end goal, of an alternative paradigm of polyphony. Taking a polyphonic perspective on how discourse analysis has treated " race talk " illuminates major issues, as well as the contradictions reflected in our language use, symbolism and structures. Discourse analysis itself can be seen as a " third space " in which multiple voices can be heard and interrelate. This article gives a synthesis of four approaches to race and ethnicity in discourse analysis, highlighting polyphony as a means of moving from the acknowledgement of racial injustice in language to addressing and dismantling it. In particular, I highlight the (re)presentation of ethnographic research as a symbolic move from homophonic to polyphonic discourse about ethnicity and race theory.

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