[Linganth] CALL FOR PAPERS: Toward a ‘Both-And’ Semiotics of Intersectionality

[Josh Babcock]

Dear colleagues,

Please note the following exciting call for papers for a panel on language,
race, and racialization in non-Western settings at this year's Society for
Linguistic Anthropology (SLA) meeting. The panel will be organized by me
and Jay Schutte:

Toward a ‘Both-And’ Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics Beyond
White Settler Situations

Responding to recent, timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness,
settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic
anthropologists and other critical scholars of language (e.g. Smalls,
Spears, and Rosa 2021; Smalls 2021; al-Bulushi 2020), participants in this
panel turn our attention towards two pressing concerns that are at stake in
the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: first, we insist that the
co-naturalization of language and race (Rosa and Flores 2017) is flexible
and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate
our projects at what has until now been a breaking point in raciolinguistic
discussions, examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in
situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white
settler-colonial.

To quote Toni Morrison’s incisive analysis from nearly 50 years ago: “the
function, the very serious function of racism...is distraction. It keeps
you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your
reason for being” (Morrison 1975). These distractions manifest as rank
assertions of lack, deficit, underdevelopment, and the like, but they also
manifest through deeply normalized routines for performing scholarly
“rigor”: “but is this really about race? Is it really about language? Isn’t
this about class, gender, sexuality, ability, education, citizenship,
migration histories, settler status, religion, culture, etc.?” These
questions create a distraction by positing an interchangeability of
analytics, rather than an interrelationship among vectors of difference and
marginalization. Instead of an approach that insists on “either-or,” we
begin from the perspective of “both-and.” We ask: how are raciolinguistic
ordering projects manifested in, through, and alongside their co(n)textual
intersectionalities? This is not to advocate for “race/language plus,” an
approach that multiplies discrete categories in conjunction. Following
founding theorists of intersectionality, we acknowledge that intersectional
dynamics are experientially and empirically indistinguishable, even if they
are analytically specifiable (Crenshaw 1991, Collins 2019).

We turn our attention to settings in which whiteness is treated as foreign
or outside, residing in the domain of a white-western racialized
chronotope, and yet nevertheless becoming recruitable as an aspirational
horizon. We begin by focusing on situations that are structured around a
constitutive tension: between the insistence on exemption from whiteness,
on the one hand, and the pervasive presence of the English language as one
register or code among many comprising a multilingual situation, often (but
not always) one that is deeply invested with cosmopolitan desire. We extend
our semiotic attention beyond things overtly acknowledged as colonial
legacies (Reyes 2017) to ask: what is the function of semiotic phenomena
and processes whose status as colonial legacies become actively disavowed?
How, in light of such disavowals, does English become more than a language
and whiteness more than a race, even in the absence of their respective
phenotype: “purely” white bodies and “purely” English grammars?

Panelists undertake an ethnographic exploration of the “both-and” semiotics
of intersectionality across a range of settings reflexively cast as
outside, beyond, or exempt from the structuring effects of white supremacy,
anti-Blackness, and the raciolinguistic indices through which they are
materialized.

If you might be interested in presenting on our panel, please forward a
250-word abstract to both of us at:

Jay Ke-Schutte (Zhejiang University): xiangfei646 at gmail.com
Joshua Babcock (University of Chicago): josh.babcock at gmail.com

Additionally, we would like to organize future panels around these themes,
so all expressions of interest will be very welcome in establishing an
interested community of scholars around a trans-national semiotics of
intersectionality.

Best wishes and hope to see some of you at the SLAs.
- Josh and Jay
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