Sticky Raciolinguistics

Abstract

Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.

(Out)Caste language ideologies: Intersectional raciolinguistic stigma and assimilation from denotified tribal students' perspectives in rural India

“…While not intended only as stigmatization, my use of racialization in the analysis I provide here through a lens of language and mother tongue education policies and practices relies on the co-naturalization of a collection of identity markers, extending from colonial endeavors of mapping biological and physical differences onto social distinctions positioned within value systems and social hierarchies which continue today. Race and racialization are located in hierarchies and histories of privilege and discrimination in India but do not operate alone to make meaning through and about language, which is again a factor of a raciolinguistic perspective which is limited when applied to this context compared to other studies (Delfino 2020;Flores and Rosa 2015;Pak and Hiramoto 2023;Rosa 2019;Smalls 2020).…”

“…The production of identities for Banjara youth includes negotiating their social statuses within a structure of linguistic hegemony for social advancement through assimilation to the majority language group. It is also necessary to point out that a limitation of applying a raciolinguistic perspective to analyze Banjara marginalization in education and broader society does not account for an examination of semiotic connections of speakers' physical characteristics with phonological distinctions, especially in a cultural and national context which treats race differently than what has been examined in raciolinguistic studies based in the United States (Delfino 2020; Pak and Hiramoto 2023; Rosa 2019; Smalls 2020). Similarly, caste is a larger socially organizing structure than race is in the context I discuss here.…”

Toward a non‐binary semiotics of intersectionality: linguistic anthropology in the wake of coloniality

“…Through this special issue, we build on our previous call for a “both‐and” semiotics of intersectionality, one that refuses to take an “either‐or” approach to the question of what can count as a structuring influence on semiosis (Babcock and Ke‐Schutte, 2023; see also Henry, 2023; Pak and Hiramoto, 2023; Yoo, 2023). Though often assumed to be a universally accepted baseline among linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language, analysts routinely find themselves subjected to professional pressures to choose: is this about race or class?…”