Language And Racism

Dis/possession Afoot: American (Anthropological) Traditions of Anti‐Blackness and Coloniality

“…In other words, because the theft of Native land and racial slavery are foundational and essential to the United States as a “settler‐slave state” (King 2014), they are foundational to (linguistic) anthropology (Anderson 2019; Harrison 1991) and (socio) linguistics. These institutions of knowledge production and the settler colonial‐slave state have and continue to co‐constitute one another through processes that reify both Native and Black people as “always property” (Smalls and Davis forthcoming). They also lean on and help reproduce ideologies of Natives as “already dead” (Deloria 2007, 2008; O’Brien 2010; Davis 2021; Perley 2012) which depends upon the perception of settler colonialism as total and completed (i.e., “past‐tensed” (Davis 2020)), as well as ideologies of Black people as “already known” which emerge from the peculiar intimacies of racial slavery (Smalls forthcoming), and that can paradoxically produce interpretations of “unintelligibility” of anything that is not familiar and already known (i.e., felt to be property): notions of “gibberish” or “nonsensical” language or sounds in regards to “creoles,” unappropriated slangs, or Indigenous African languages, for example (Smalls 2015; forthcoming).…”

“…This means that addressing race/racism as ahistorical structures or social constructs is deeply counterproductive to anti‐racist commitments, and treating it as encapsulated within a small temporal frame is also inadequate. Instead, it is necessary to address both the historical situatedness and transhistorical nature of race (i.e., take up race as modern race) and this entails deeply engaging with the constitutional structures that animate modern race ((racial) slavery, (settler) colonialism, and (racial) capitalism), with the cardinal subject positions that are interpellated through them (Black, white, and Indigenous) (Fields and Fields 2012; McKittrick 2011; Wynter 2003), with the racialized and indigenized positions that emerge, and with the subjects who may move between them and others who are materially fixed (Smalls and Davis forthcoming).…”