The movements of the raciolinguistic perspective in the Latin American South

Abstract

In this commentary, I evoke voices that dialogue with the raciolinguistic perspective from my locus of knowledge production.In this movement of the orisha Eshu, as a way for a polyphonic conversation, I would like to look at Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa's proposal from a Southern perspective, mainly as a black academic woman who has lived in Brazilian and Colombian contexts.What is behind the discourses that value standardized national varieties?Is there any relation to social markers of difference?The raciolinguistic perspective brings a new lens to analyze other dimensions of this debate.Anchored in questions about the relationship among language, race, and coloniality, it seeks to unveil the implicit white supremacy in social dialogues' speaking and listening positions.Furthermore, in my opinion, this perspective dialogues with a solid political, theoretical, and methodological agenda to think about the impacts of colonialism on the daily life of our territories.While recognizing the value of the raciolinguistic perspective in the field of language studies, I want to highlight three elements in the debate on racism in Latin America that could nourish this work: (1) interdisciplinarity, (2) dialogue with social movements' agendas and concepts, and (3) a constant opening for intersectionality.The proposal by Flores and Rosa's (2015) to undo the notion of appropriateness has had repercussions on old debates in Latin America about the relationship between language and race. 1 Reorienting the gaze from a structural approach to racism, the authors challenge us to recognize the historical legacy reflected in the interaction, the encounter, the contact zone (Pratt, 1991).One of the positive points of their work is to focus on the role of language in maintaining racial ideologies from an interactional point of view.However, in making the historical production of these conflicts explicit, we should not lose the sight of sociocultural processes.Thus, by assuming that the nation-state perpetuates colonial projects that have been shaping subjects' linguistic and racial formation in Modern times, the raciolinguistic perspective further enriches understandings of the intersection of speakers' identities and bodies.A second asset of the raciolinguistic perspective is the ability to illuminate the ideology of deficit as a prolific analytical category for understanding social hierarchies.Critically analyzing this ideology-so present in the educational field-contributes to demonstrating its underlying racist How to cite this article:

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