Racing across borders: transnational racial literacies of Chinese heritage language school teachers

Abstract

Grounded in the scholarship of racial literacies and transnationalism, this study introduces the concept of ‘transnational racial literacies’ to investigate how Chinese immigrant teachers interpret and teach about race as they navigate racialisation and racism across borders and cultivate emerging critical racial consciousness through heritage language teaching. Drawing on interviews and curriculum design workshops with five teachers in a Chinese heritage language (CHL) school in Florida, United States, the study reveals that participants’ understandings of race are shaped both by lived experiences of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. and by racial discourses and ideologies circulating through transnational Chinese media and social networks. While some participants internalised and reproduced dominant racial ideologies, such as race-evasiveness, anti-Blackness and model minority, others began to engage more critically with Asian American histories and racial injustices through teaching, demonstrating evolving racial literacy and critical racial consciousness development. By theorising transnational racial literacies as literacy and pedagogical practices mediated by global flows of people, ideas and power, this study extends understandings of racial literacy development beyond national boundaries and foregrounds CHL schools as key transnational communities for critical and anti-racist learning and development.

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