Do limão faço uma limonada: estratégias de resistência de professores negros de língua inglesa

Abstract

This dissertation presents an autoethnography built on autobiographies of Black English language teachers, including me, as a participant-researcher. It aimed at describing the various forms of resistance these Black teachers used to resist racialization through/in language. Taking-for-granted there is racialization in English language teaching in my country, in addition to the assumptions about coloniality of power in Latin America, I also question language as the zone of being in racialization that manages to influence biographies of Black English teachers through color-blind practices informed by a friendly racism, in which language is negatively or positively constructed as part of downplaying the competence of Black English language teachers. My questions here draw on the idea of black heterogeneity, white accountability for racism, and the very possibility to understand language as a weapon for Black English language teachers to posit their own "agency" in the world. This said, I comprehend Black as a sign produced by whiteness / coloniality / racism. However, I also argue that race can be signified by Black people as sign to be signified in order to resist towards a double sign of oppression and resistance. I seek, therefore, to theorize race and racism for understanding their meanings beyond both racialism of the nineteenth century and twentieth century racialist/culturalist-based ideologies. Among the linguistic assumptions informing my dissertation are those that embrace language as a metadiscursive regime and analyze the interplay of English language, coloniality and imperialism, as well as those that situate racism / racialization in language policies and in language teaching. The methodology I chose stresses the aspects of a life story, with autobiographical narratives of Black English language teachers and my autoethnography as a teacher. The results, written through a literary chapter, and provided through autobiographical narratives, demonstrate several resistance aspects these Black teachers used in language, such as the resistance to language as a zone of non-being, to race as a political fantasy and to racism as ghost image as well as the way race as a sign can be signified, from oppression to resistance. I claim with this research the possibility to blacken the epistemic core values of our field, and I begin by rethinking critically the consequences of the structural racism and its multiple forms in the Black English language teachers' biographies that originated in Teacher Development Programs. I thus seek to blacken the decolonial theories and face racialist and racialistculturalist-based ideologies in modern racial assumptions. All these endeavors are informed by both my desire toward a black becoming in language teaching and the idea of race as a double sign that means oppression, but also resistance.