“So, what English do I speak, really?”: A transnational-translingual-and-transracial pracademic inquires into her raciolinguistic entanglements and transraciolinguistic transgressions

Abstract

Identities are fluid, dynamic, and contextual; and identity (co)construction is a deeply contextualized process, especially when seen through postmodern and poststructural lenses. Adopting a qualitative-researcher-as-bricoleuse stance, the author presents an overarching autoethnographic narrative where she specifically analyzes three critical, nonsimplistic, and layered incidents of linguistic racializations, or raciolinguistic entanglements, that occurred across a multiyear timespan and serve to exemplify similar recurring experiences, and which collectively represent a narrative arc of conflict, crisis, and resolution. Building upon Alim's ideas around transracialization and her own prior individual and collaborative inquiries, the author proposes that agentive transnational-translingual-and-transracial participants explore the liminal spaces and generative tensions created when our languages are (mis)racialized and the co-construction of our raciolinguistic identities gets entangled across inequitable raciolinguistic landscapes. She further suggests that we do so in order to resist and contest the (mis)racialization of our languages and linguistic identities, especially when originating from postcolonial Global South contexts, as both part of our own critical transraciolinguistic transgressions and a broader transraciolinguistic reckoning currently taking place in the Global North.