1st Edition

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race

Edited By Sinfree Makoni, Bassey E. Antia, Stephanie Rudwick Copyright 2025
538 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

538 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race provides an up-to-date overview of language and race from a modern global perspective. Challenging the concept of race that has been defined by global North scholarship, this book interrogates these academic conventions and encourages the reader to look beyond these narrow viewpoints of language and race. Taking a decolonizing approach, this... Read more

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Bassey E. Antia, Sinfree Makoni, and Stephanie Rudwick: Overview: The complexity of race and its relationship with language

Part I: Conceptual issues and their political predicates

1.           Nick Riemer: Racism and ideology in linguistics

2.           Eduardo Henrique Diniz de Figueiredo, Juliana Zeggio Martinez & Clarissa Menezes Jordão: The concept of whiteness in Applied Linguistics research within Brazil

3.           Romina Istratii: The discourse of "whiteness," its universalization, and the epistemological colonization of the European East

4.           Ọbádélé Kambon: GandhiMustFall,#AugustusMustFall, Temporal Reality,   Ma’at and   srwḏ tꜢ n Kmt "Restoring the Land of Black People"

5.           Joshua Babcock & Jay Ke-Schutte: Against methodological monolingualism: “language,” “race,” and western-intellectual cultures of monoglot standardization

6.           Ian F. Hancock and Nicholas Faraclas in conversation with Sinfree Makoni and Bassey E. Antia: Rethinking boundaries and the trans-national Romani experience

7.           Uju Anya in conversation with Sinfree Makoni and the African Studies Global Virtual Forum: Blackness: multiple and scalable?

Part II: Encounters and encountering

8.           Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta: Un-/indisciplined research at the margins: (non)-naming positionalities in Swedish spaces

9.           Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo & Rachel Muchira: On being Black: the linguistic conceptualization of colourisms in English and German

10.         Margaret Amaka Ohia-Nowak: From “Murzyn” and “Mulat” to “Czarny”: Naming black people in Poland

11.         Ajohche N. Awungjia: Race, discourse, and friendship

12.         Miché Thompson: Racialized relations: constructing the “other” through the discourse of prejudice in China Town in Cape Town, South Africa

13.         Bassey E. Antia & Sinfree Makoni:  Kwesi Kwaa Prah and conversations on seven decades of peripatetic activism

Part III: Contestations within and beyond

14.         Ying-Ying Tan: Race(ing) accents in Singapore

15.         Cristine Gorski Severo & Sinfree Makoni: African heritage in Brazil

16.         Gavin Furukawa & Mie Hiramoto: Language, race and nationalism: views from East Asia

17.         Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi & Agnes Young: Grappling with placards: transracial politics and un/doing whiteness at Black Lives Matter Protests in Germany

18.         Saffo Papantonopoulou: Anal temporalities: racialization, homosex, and the legacy of nation-building in the Balkans

19.         Nathan Oyori Ogechi: Relics of imperialism? Racialization and language choice in multiracial Kenya

20.         John Baugh in conversation with Bassey E. Antia: Linguistic profiling

Part IV: Education and media

21.         Afua A. Yeboah: Belonging and not belonging: a personal narrative

22.         Cristine Gorski Severo and Ezra Alberto Chambal Nhampoca: Language ideologies and racialization in Mozambique: from the colonial era to contemporary bilingual education

23.         Pinky Makoe & Carolyn McKinney: Race and coloniality of language policy in education

24.         Alimiswen E. Ayaawan and Bassey E. Antia: Racializing to delegitimize: indigenous epistemology in Ghanaian English language textbooks

25.         Tamah Sherman & Jiří Homoláč: Asian or Vietnamese? The intersection of racial, ethnic and national categorization in discourses of young Vietnamese in the Czech Republic

26.         Sisanda Nkoala: The intersection of race and gender in online violence against South African female journalists

27.         Busi Makoni in conversation with Bassey E. Antia: The woman in the academy as a black person, student, faculty, and researcher

28.         Arthur K. Spears in conversation with Bassey E. Antia and Sinfree Makoni: Language and race in careers in the academy

Index

Biography

Sinfree Makoni, Pennsylvania State University, USA. He has recently co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s (Routledge).

Bassey E. Antia, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has recently co-edited (with Sinfree Makoni) Southernizing Sociolinguistics: Colonialism, Racism, and Patriarchy in Language in the Global South (Routledge).

Stephanie Rudwick, Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Science and University of Hradec Kralove, Czechia. She has recently published The Ambiguity of English as a Lingua Franca: Politics of Language and Race in South Africa (Routledge).