Raciolinguistic perspective on labor in the Americas
-
Lara Alonso
and
Laura Villa Galán
Abstract
This introduction presents the concept of raciolinguistic ideologies and discusses its potential to look at issues related to labor in the Americas. We explore the concept of raciolinguistics as a helpful anchor for researchers to examine the co-construction of race and language. Additionally, we link the current reproduction of social and economic inequality to the interconnection of slavery and capitalism stemming from the colonial projects. We briefly present the six contributions to this special issue, a collection of works that rely on different theoretical perspectives, methodologies, and analytical approaches to examine the (re)production of inequality in American labor markets as it materializes in unfair working practices and discourses that naturalize labor discrimination across the region. The six papers included in the issue offer an interesting dialogue between the raciolinguistic perspective and political economy approaches. Finally, these papers highlight four overarching themes: the repercussions for vulnerabilized communities of the stratification of the labor market, the ways in which the commodification and decommodification of racialized languages tend to favor powerful social positions, the way in which language authority operates to decide what counts as legitimate languages/speakers; and the need felt by speakers to make discursive sense of raciolinguistic practices and discourses.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Raciolinguistic perspective on labor in the Americas
- Língua e raça no Brasil colonial
- Indexing whiteness: practices of categorization and racialization of social relations among Maroons in French Guiana
- Language, race and work in the Caribbean: a Bakhtinian approach
- Decommodifying Spanish-English bilingualism: aggrieved whiteness and the discursive contestation of language as human capital
- ¿Habilidad o identidad?: tensiones entre las ideologías neoliberales y las raciolingüísticas en el trabajo de los y las jóvenes bilingües de origen latino en EEUU
- International students and their raciolinguistic sensemaking of aural employability in Canadian universities
- Discussion
- Varia
- Positioning English as the international language during the Interamerican scientific integration: the role of multilingualism in defining the scope of a scientific journal in the mid-20th century
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Raciolinguistic perspective on labor in the Americas
- Língua e raça no Brasil colonial
- Indexing whiteness: practices of categorization and racialization of social relations among Maroons in French Guiana
- Language, race and work in the Caribbean: a Bakhtinian approach
- Decommodifying Spanish-English bilingualism: aggrieved whiteness and the discursive contestation of language as human capital
- ¿Habilidad o identidad?: tensiones entre las ideologías neoliberales y las raciolingüísticas en el trabajo de los y las jóvenes bilingües de origen latino en EEUU
- International students and their raciolinguistic sensemaking of aural employability in Canadian universities
- Discussion
- Varia
- Positioning English as the international language during the Interamerican scientific integration: the role of multilingualism in defining the scope of a scientific journal in the mid-20th century
