“…Linguistic anthropology has played an important role in this scholarship: researchers often point out the ironic persistence of racism “in a country where to call a person ‘racist’ is a deep insult” (Hill :vi), which suggests covert processes at work. Covert racializing discourses, “which racialize without being denotationally explicit about race” (Dick and Wirtz :E2), are pervasive and centrally involved in the continued maintenance of racial distinctions and their material consequences. As Hilary Dick and Kristina Wirtz explain, “racial stereotypes are so highly presupposed that only a few subtle cues may be sufficient to invoke them” (:5).…”
Section: Studying Race Ethnicity and Class Through Ethnonymsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Covert racializing discourses, “which racialize without being denotationally explicit about race” (Dick and Wirtz :E2), are pervasive and centrally involved in the continued maintenance of racial distinctions and their material consequences. As Hilary Dick and Kristina Wirtz explain, “racial stereotypes are so highly presupposed that only a few subtle cues may be sufficient to invoke them” (:5).…”
Section: Studying Race Ethnicity and Class Through Ethnonymsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, we never heard anyone rank or organize these categories into a hierarchy, a third element of Hill's model, and an important component of most definitions of race. As Dick and Wirtz assert, race marks some people as fundamentally and irredeemably dangerous and Other (:4; see also Urciuoli ). The lack of a hierarchizing tendency and the fact that speakers stressed a sense of community among neighborhood residents suggest that we will want to avoid imposing the scholarly category of “race” onto this nomenclature.…”
Section: The Semiotics Of Ethnic Mentions: From Race To Ethnicity To mentioning
This article considers the roles played by ethnic mentions, or ethnonyms, in the discursive reconstruction of a former neighborhood in Easton, Pennsylvania, "Syrian Town." We argue that these labels engage in the production of ethnic difference by depicting a social world composed of discrete types while presupposing a local class divide and a contrasting neighborhood imagined as elite and privileged. In this way, speakers narrating stories of bygone days are taking a particular stance toward the diversity of their former neighborhood and the segregated cityscape of contemporary times, thereby challenging a once-dominant chain of indexicality. We conclude by arguing that close attention to vernacular usage allows us to advance our understanding of the relative importance of racial, ethnic, and class-based distinctions in specific locales, and challenges hegemonic constructions of the evolution of a Black-White binary in twentieth-
“…Linguistic anthropology has played an important role in this scholarship: researchers often point out the ironic persistence of racism “in a country where to call a person ‘racist’ is a deep insult” (Hill :vi), which suggests covert processes at work. Covert racializing discourses, “which racialize without being denotationally explicit about race” (Dick and Wirtz :E2), are pervasive and centrally involved in the continued maintenance of racial distinctions and their material consequences. As Hilary Dick and Kristina Wirtz explain, “racial stereotypes are so highly presupposed that only a few subtle cues may be sufficient to invoke them” (:5).…”
Section: Studying Race Ethnicity and Class Through Ethnonymsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Covert racializing discourses, “which racialize without being denotationally explicit about race” (Dick and Wirtz :E2), are pervasive and centrally involved in the continued maintenance of racial distinctions and their material consequences. As Hilary Dick and Kristina Wirtz explain, “racial stereotypes are so highly presupposed that only a few subtle cues may be sufficient to invoke them” (:5).…”
Section: Studying Race Ethnicity and Class Through Ethnonymsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…However, we never heard anyone rank or organize these categories into a hierarchy, a third element of Hill's model, and an important component of most definitions of race. As Dick and Wirtz assert, race marks some people as fundamentally and irredeemably dangerous and Other (:4; see also Urciuoli ). The lack of a hierarchizing tendency and the fact that speakers stressed a sense of community among neighborhood residents suggest that we will want to avoid imposing the scholarly category of “race” onto this nomenclature.…”
Section: The Semiotics Of Ethnic Mentions: From Race To Ethnicity To mentioning
This article considers the roles played by ethnic mentions, or ethnonyms, in the discursive reconstruction of a former neighborhood in Easton, Pennsylvania, "Syrian Town." We argue that these labels engage in the production of ethnic difference by depicting a social world composed of discrete types while presupposing a local class divide and a contrasting neighborhood imagined as elite and privileged. In this way, speakers narrating stories of bygone days are taking a particular stance toward the diversity of their former neighborhood and the segregated cityscape of contemporary times, thereby challenging a once-dominant chain of indexicality. We conclude by arguing that close attention to vernacular usage allows us to advance our understanding of the relative importance of racial, ethnic, and class-based distinctions in specific locales, and challenges hegemonic constructions of the evolution of a Black-White binary in twentieth-
“…According to Dick and Wirtz (2011), language used in tandem with other social symbols helps the process of constructing and giving meaning, whether real or not, to racial beings. The space of possibility for Diasporic encounters here could be used to teach about misconceptions and hegemonic U.S. structural racism that continues to bear on understandings of and embed itself in ideological frameworks about race and what it means to be a part of a Diaspora.…”
Section: Diasporic Encounters In Schoolsmentioning
This article explores complexities of identity inhered in African Diasporic communities through an investigation of Spanish-speaking Afro-Latinas/os and Latinas/os of African descent in a predominantly Black middle school. Participant observation and interview data collected over 17 months revealed a school whose members represent peoples of diverse African descent. Among educators and students at the research site, Diasporic encounters reveal ideologies grounded in a lack of awareness and misconceptions about race, ethnicity, and nationality. Particularly for Afro-Latina/o students and educators, these ideologies influenced the creation of their own distinct racial and ethnic identities and subjectivities and informed how they understand and experience notions of Diaspora.
“…I rely on Bauman and Briggs's (:79) definition of poetics as “the artful use of language in the conduct of social life” as a way of conceptualizing these interactional contexts, a perspective contingent on a performance‐oriented analysis of culturally situated communicative processes. As a way of locating the aesthetic use of language within a broader politics of contestation in relation to U.S.–Mexico transnational migration, I draw on recent analyses of the discursive construction of social markedness (Dick and Wirtz ; Roth‐Gordon ; Urciuoli ). Bonnie Urciuoli (:119) suggests:The discourses that generate categories of social markedness have deictic properties that are part of their chronotopic nature.…”
Section: Language Markedness and Migrationmentioning
Drawing on recent work on the linguistic production of social markedness, this article explores the cross‐border usage of what I term the “Dallas” chronotope: a form of poetics that critically frames the political‐economic logics that undergird the markedness structure central to the time–space relational construction of migrant illegality. In a community where back‐and‐forth movements between Mexico and the United States result in varying degrees of Spanish–English bilingualism, the Spanish expression “da' las” (to give ‘em)—short for “dar las nalgas” (to give your buttocks; a reference to getting screwed, comparable to the English colloquial expression “to give it up” in reference to a sexual offering)—is invoked as a phonetic equivalent of “Dallas,” the name of the city in Texas, figuratively equating the social violation of migrants with sexual violation of the body. I extend the analytical frame of markedness through an application of the notion of biopolitics to these instances of linguistically mediated spatiotemporality within a U.S.–Mexico transnational context in order to describe how embodied poetics figuratively construct a resilient sense of migrant personhood that undermines its marked status and literally performs resiliency into being.
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