While white settler colonialism and its eliminatory logics of dispossession structure the foundation of contemporary societies, the ongoing significance of colonialism is often downplayed or erased altogether in a purportedly postcolonial era (Day 2015). This colloquium analyzes the enduring colonial organization of hierarchies of race and language in white settler colonial societies. Two central components of the European colonial formation of modernity were the construction and naturalization of the concept of race along with the construction and naturalization of languages as bounded and separate objects associated with particular racial groups. The raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores and Rosa 2015) that organized these colonial relations continue to shape the world order in the postcolonial era by framing racialized subjects’ language practices as inadequate for the complex thinking processes needed to navigate the global economy, as well as the targets of anxieties about authenticity and purity.
This colloquium examines the coloniality of race and language in settler colonial nation-states including South Africa, Peru, Australia, Canada, and the US. The papers analyze: (1) the reproduction of colonial hierarchies through the historical institutionalization of bilingual education; (2) raciolinguistic ideologies in debates about multilingual language policy and the legitimacy of minoritized languages in public political discourse; (3) the deceptively exclusionary function of governmental efforts toward the racial and linguistic inclusion of minoritized “Others”; (4) language-in-migration policies that assess (im)migrant desirability and eligibility for citizenship in racially and linguistically coded ways; (5) minoritized youths’ experiences of linguistic and racial (dis)possession; and (6) linguistic stylization among racialized youth as a powerful mode of contestation in postcolonial settings. Collectively, the papers seek to draw on settler colonial critique to redefine racial and linguistic “problems” on the one hand, and reimagine anti-colonial theories of change on the other.
References:
Day, I. (2015). Being or nothingness: Indigeneity, antiblackness, and settler colonial critique. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(2), 102-121.
Flores, N., and Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85, 149-171.
