Linguistics in the Pursuit of Justice. JohnBaugh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xx + 215 pp.

Abstract

other racializing norms of "authenticity." In the next chapter, Kamran Khan skillfully shows how mutually co-constructive languaging and racialization are fundamental components in the consolidation of a panopticon consisting of the security state aided and abetted by protofascistic horizontal surveillance, whereby the "white listening subject" is enlisted in the "preventive" profiling of members of racialized "suspect communities," such as individuals who are "seen" or "heard" as Muslims. Next, Sabina Perrino astutely documents the extent to which these racialized processes that weaponize exclusion to reinforce a mythical intimacy have saturated linguistic practice and performance in Italy and other countries where far-right anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. In the chapter that follows, Hilary Parsons Dick skillfully analyzes how overt racism, masquerading as "common sense" and "plain speaking," has been re-mainstreamed in US politics and society by Donald Trump and his supporters, in part through racializing discourses which associate illegality first with non-European descended immigrants and then, by extension to all racially othered citizens. In the final chapter, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman cogently demonstrate how racialized compliments, although they may be ostensibly framed as positive assessments, constitute a particularly pervasive and insidious form of covert racism, given the fact that they operate from the assumption that racially othered people and their languages are inherently inferior.With the publication of this volume, there is no longer any excuse for any of the institutions of learning with which any of us are associated to delay any longer in establishing courses that deal explicitly with the dynamic and mutually co-constructive relationships between the full expanse of possible semiotic repertoires (linguistic, visual, musical, etc.) and the inextricably and intersectionally entwined mechanisms of hegemony, including ethnocentrism/race, patriarchy/cisheterosexism, and accumulative plunder/capitalism. In fact, I can think of no better textbook for such a course than this one.