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

Abstract

This special issue proposes a non‐binary semiotics of intersectionality to both draw attention to and unsettle binary participation frameworks of “the‐West‐and‐its‐others.” Contributors demonstrate how intersectionality can reconfigure scholarly approaches to the semiotic analysis of social life, expanding the bounds of the ethnographic as both genre and site of ideological work while also suggesting new stakes for conceptualizations of the personal beyond static, neoliberal presuppositions of the identity‐bearing individual. This proposed reorientation has stakes for the study of race–language co‐naturalizations in locations reflexively cast as beyond white settler‐colonial contexts. We place the study of intersectionality within the historical socius of the colonial and its prefixes (de‐, post‐, and anti‐) by engaging with the historical and material conditions of human capital and land enclosure out of which Kimberlé Crenshaw’s micro‐interactional observations emerged as originary reflections on the concept of intersectionality. Together, we consider linguistic and co(n)textual phenomena that are left out of most contemporary intersectional and critical race analyses. The authors demonstrate an array of modalities through which we can analytically separate intersectionality‐as‐method, while not assuming American monolingual racial experiences as universal.

Undoing raciolinguistics, unsettling (socio)linguistics

“…Sito emphasizes that efforts to develop new conceptual tools for analyzing the complex global and local processes that shape the emergence of particular racial categories require intersectional approaches that locate race and language within mutually constitutive matrices of power (Babcock & Ke‐Schutte, 2023; Ke‐Schutte & Babcock, 2023). King frames these co‐constitutive hierarchies in terms of biopolitics, crucially noting that we must resist not only the siloing of raciolinguistics from sociolinguistics, but also the siloing of a consideration of race from gender and sexuality.…”