[lg policy] The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (+ interesting series of reviews)

[Dave Sayers]

A new book of potential interest for research and teaching across diverse areas of 
linguistics, including variation, language policy, linguistic ethnography etc., but 
which may have been off the radar for many: 
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674728752. It's about African 
American youth, but a main purpose is to advance theory so should be mappable to 
other contexts.

The journal Ethnic and Racial Studies has also just published a very interesting 
collection of short articles reviewing the book from different cultural and 
theoretical standpoints: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rers20/39/8 (scroll down 
about 1/3 to 'Symposium: Orlando Patterson And Ethan Fosse (Eds) The Cultural Matrix: 
Understanding Black Youth'. These also pick up on aspects of language, e.g. the 
contribution 'Culture, structure and black youth diversity' by Stephen Small asserts 
that "a greater focus on gender, cultural and linguistic diversity, among Black youth 
would lead to a more compelling analysis". My eyebrows also rose at "The culture 
question: a view from the UK" by Claire Alexander, which "highlights some of the 
dangers of privileging an overly cultural account of racialized inequality" - the 
'cultural turn' critique is seriously overlooked in sociolinguistics I think.

By the way, I find myself pretty regularly linking to stuff in Ethnic and Racial 
Studies. I'd strongly suggest a wide range of sociolinguists with any interest in 
ethnicity or multiculturalism subscribe to its ToC updates with e.g. 
http://zetoc.jisc.ac.uk/ (with the usual cringe about shilling for Routledge/Informa, 
who I recently learned are floated on the stock exchange!).

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
dave.sayers at cantab.net | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers

---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list