Volume 2020, Issue 265 - Special Issue: Reconstituting Selves and Others: Racialization, Voicing, and Resemiotization in Raciolinguistic Perspective; Guest Editors: Jennifer B. Delfino and Maureen Kosse

This introduction argues that understanding the co-construction of race, language, and nation is essential to understanding liberal democratic governance in today's world. Using the theories and methods of raciolinguistics, we argue that voicing and resemiotization are important discursive processes that people use to reconstitute selves and Others in relation to liberal democratic ideas about national belonging. Specifically, we examine how racialized redefinitions of “the body” are central to how right and left-leaning groups alike (re)define nationhood, albeit for different ends. We foreground an intersectional, international approach to understanding the role of language in constructing race and vice versa as well as the role of social media in how differently positioned groups seek empowerment.

After the 2016 spelling reforms deleted the accent circumflex from some French vowels, on right-wing French Twitter, the circonflexe reappeared in the center of the French flag – echoing the flag of Vichy France. Tweets with the hashtag #JeSuisCirconflexe resemiotized the accent circumflex as icon of a lost Frenchness, or voiced the racial other in a colonial faux pidgin to frame them as illiterate and brutish. Drawing on research on resemiotization (Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media , 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan) and raciolinguistics (Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review , 85(2). 149–171), this article explores how constructions of mock youth French use raciolinguistic tropes to imagine a language of social decline, connecting linguistic purism to racist myths of white genocide and the great replacement. Despite this, youth invert the imagination of their illiteracy, using playful language and satirizing white speech (Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183) to contest French nationalism – reframing #JeSuisCirconflexe as #JeSuisSirCornflakes.

There has been much discussion of the proliferation of racialized narratives both offline and online and its role in the current electoral successes of far-right movements across the globe. We extend this conversation by analyzing narrative practices from two contexts where far-right parties and figures enjoy popular support: Italy and the Philippines. In both cases, we show how narratives that pivot on race constitute stancetaking practices that align with far-right agendas. In the Northern Italian case, racialized stances emerge in storytelling events, through which participants (co)construct extracomunitari , or ‘migrants from outside the European Union’, as “other” and “a danger” to the Italian nation. In the case of Filipino YouTube users, President Duterte’s supporters subvert racialized tropes through anti-imperial narratives in ways that attempt to delegitimize human rights criticisms of the drug war. We show how, in and through narrative practices, speech participants justify exclusionary and eliminationist politics in far-right contexts.

This study examines how 9- to 13-year old African American students in a Washington, D.C. after-school program use an African American discourse practice called marking to voice adults performing acts of discipline. Using audio-recorded data collected during nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, it shows how students used marking to resemiotize the prestige value of African American Language (AAL) relative to so-called “standard” American English, which is imagined in relation to whiteness as an objectively correct set of linguistic practices. As part of an intersectional raciolinguistic perspective, this study foregrounds how students recruit gender stereotypes to challenge hegemonic ideas about racial and linguistic difference. It also attends to the contradictory nature of everyday acts of resistance: while students transformed hegemonic raciolinguistic ideologies of “articulate” and “appropriate” language in the after school space, they relied on racial and gender stereotypes in order to do so.

Combining raciolinguistics and social semiotics, I explore a snapshot of socio-politically and historically contextualized multimodal digital activity in social networking site Tumblr involving American entertainer Beyoncé. I examine a set of 41 Tumblr posts, gathered in 2016 during Beyoncé’s heightened social and political salience, in which users expressed counterhegemonic stances. I first demonstrate how Tumblr users employ images and references of Beyoncé in ways that resist visual and linguistic hegemonic discourses and realize and index issues of race and gender. I show how Tumblr users resemiotize and reentextualize Beyoncé in decolonizing stances, including those that challenge White gazes, prioritize non-White subjectivity, and destabilize Whiteness. I conclude that Beyoncé’s use as a semiotic resource adds to her indexicalities as she is deployed in various stances. I assert that a raciolinguistic perspective elucidates intersectionally racialized and gendered ideological changes to Beyoncé’s multimodal indexical field and that attention to digital semiotics increases the multimodal and intersectional perspectives of raciolinguistic analyses.

Drawing on branded tweets that linguistically appropriate slang, African American Language, and hip hop lyrics, this article examines how corporations rework black culture to create “corporate cool” as part of their advertising strategy on social media. We examine three processes that corporations engage in to associate themselves with “coolness” while managing levels of racial contact and proximity for their audience: 1) racially ambiguous voicing, 2) “bleaching” black bodies out of images, and 3) the forging of “racially tinged” intertextual connections. While previous scholarship has analyzed how acts of cultural and linguistic appropriation reap profit for white people and continue to stigmatize already racially marginalized groups, we describe how these seemingly innocent cultural and linguistic references harness a corporately constructed black cool to produce a sense of white comfort. We argue that white comfort is generated not only through the avoidance of overt references to racial conflict, as the term “white fragility” suggests, but also through well-worn, familiar, and comfortable reminders of racial difference and domination that are offered at a safe distance from actual black people and contexts of racial violence.

This brief commentary considers how the papers in the special issue on “Reconstituting Selves and Others: Racialization, Voicing, and Resemiotization in Raciolinguistic Perspective” address issues of affect, race, and commodification under capitalism. It discusses how the affect of racialized others gets tamed, commodified, and redirected in new media sites and it highlights the different types of affect that have drawn researchers’ attention.