Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations

Abstract

In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the conaturalization of language and race is flexible and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate our projects at what has until now been a point of breakdown in raciolinguistic discussions by examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white settler colonial.