"What frame allows you to take seriously the consequence of ideological overdetermination without conceding that it has a reality or a natural position?” This is one of many questions that Jonathan Rosa poses throughout this episode. What perspective allows us to see race and language as ontologically overdetermined without essentializing that overdetermination to the point of inextricability? Taking a few steps back, this episode is largely about questions and questioning. Why have certain fields maintained the practice of using race as a variable, thereby stabilizing the idea of race? Whose interests are served by entrenching the categories of race, ethnicity, and so on?
Through discussion of a raciolinguistic perspective and its reception, raciontology and ontological overdetermination, and critique of power in general, this episode centers around hierarchies of the human and the problems that humans are made into based on their particular position within hierarchies. Rather than viewing race, ethnicity, disability, (fill in the blank), as intersectional phenomena, Jonathan asks that we move instead towards thinking of identity as a process of interconnection, and question the goal of intersectionality as a framework.
For me, this all comes down to a rather unsettling problem: what if the inequities, pernicious ideologies, and their enabling structural frameworks aren't dismantled but rather perpetrated through the academic inquiry that originally sought to obliterate them? And what if that academic inquiry still purports to serve a remedial, ameliorative function? What then? This isn't to say everything is a paradox; this is to say that paradoxes abound. Description can become prescription. So if nothing else, I invite you to struggle through the frustration of irony. I invite you to squirm at the failures of academic inquiry and hegemonic ideas which have prevailed for quite some time. But hopefully we'll get to better questions and answers, and perhaps better ways of failing.
Jonathan Rosa is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford. He is the author of a terrific book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race. I recommend reading it.
Stanford profile, all publications
The Viral Underclass by Steven Thrasher
Beyond Yellow English: Towards a Linguistic Anthropology of Asian Pacific America
Angela Reyes' Language and Ethnicity
Ana Celia Zentella's Puerto Rican Code Switching
Michael Berman's Toward a Linguistic Anthropological Approach to Listening
Josh Babcock's Toward a “Both-And” Semiotics of Intersectionality: Raciolinguistics beyond White Settler-Colonial Situations
