[Linganth] race and language ethnographies

[Roth Gordon, Jennifer F - (jenrothg)]

Hi all,

I would like to start up a new list of books on race and language and, simultaneously, send information on my own book that will be published in late May, 2016. Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro draws on discourse analysis of the spontaneous, slang-filled conversations of shantytown youth and metalinguistic interview data collected from members of the middle class as they discussed the importance of standard Portuguese. I would love to answer questions from anyone who might be interested in using it in undergraduate courses... Please send me a private email, and I can send you more information. I will also happily compile a list of other suggestions of race and language ethnographies for the ling anth blog. Here's a quick blurb of the book:

Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro

Based on the spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Race and the Brazilian Body asks how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. This book draws on over 20 years of research to explain what is called Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” in which embedded structural racism that very visibly privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) carefully “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features, including skin color, hair texture, and facial features, but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech that is commonly described as slang. It is through adherence to implicit social norms that encourage individuals to display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), to avoid blackness, and to “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences), that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls, and who merits the rights of citizenship. One’s ability to linguistically embody whiteness and distance oneself from blackness has become critical in a context where fear and vulnerability infuse what it now means to live in Rio de Janeiro, enduring daily life in an urban center with notoriously high levels of drugs, crime, and violence, where government officials and law enforcement are unable to protect city residents. 

I look forward to hearing other race and language ethnography suggestions!


jen

Jennifer Roth-Gordon
Associate Professor
School of Anthropology
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0030

jenrothg at email.arizona.edu