In racist societies, language ideologies legitimise the discrimination against racialised minorities. In the US, the emerging field of raciolinguistics (Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015; Alim, Rickford, & Ball Reference Alim, Rickford and Ball2016) critically investigates the intersection of race and language and seeks to contribute to a more just society. Key sites for producing, reproducing, as well as contesting raciolinguistic ideologies are schools and other educational institutions, where young people are ‘socialised’, by means of a punitive grading system, into mainstream ideas about what counts as proper, good, or appropriate English. Proficiency in a particular socially idealised variety of white American English is selected as the benchmark for students’ academic success. Minoritised varieties, such as Englishes spoken by African Americans, Chicanx, or Latinx, are either devalued or at best seen as an additional cultural skill, yet one that is inappropriate for use in the school. Raciolinguistic research tries to unpack such racist ideologies and practices of institutions, teachers, and students; and it is also committed to transforming raciolinguistic ideologies and thereby contributing to greater social justice.
Feeling it is a recent addition to the raciolinguistic work done in the US. The thirteen chapters report and reflect on SKILLS (School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society), an ongoing justice-oriented and multi-sited academic outreach programme organised by a large university in California. SKILLS offers youth of colour, and in particular Latinx youth, opportunities to develop critical understandings of dominant ideologies that link language and race. In American educational practices, these youth are often severely disadvantaged, both because of their racialised bodies and their multilingual competencies, which include varieties of Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Rather than understanding students’ multilingualism as a problem, SKILLS educators chose to utilise recent developments in sociolinguistics—in particular turns to embodiment, affect, and translanguaging—to create safe learning spaces in which students can take agency over their multilingual repertoires and their cultural heritage.
In order to promote such agency, SKILLS developed three guiding principles: sociolinguistic justice, linguistic and cultural sustenance, and accompaniment. Teachers work towards sociolinguistic justice by ‘supporting young people as they stand against policies, practices, and ideologies that deny them linguistic self-determination’ (10). Because language, culture, and society are all mutually constitutive, sociolinguistic justice is of critical importance for the cultural sustenance of minoritised communities. The final guiding principle is accompaniment (also developed brilliantly in Elizabeth Mainz’ chapter), a type of collaborative action across difference that recognises youth as experts in navigating their multilingual repertoires. Accompaniment moves away from a ‘neoliberal view’ (10) of youth empowerment, in which minority groups are given access to previously denied rational knowledge to make them equal with everybody else.
The volume instead focuses on affective and agentive dimensions of the three guiding principles above. The editors ‘define affect as the simultaneous cognitive, perceptual, and emotional experience of embodied encounters’ (3). Affect is thus not understood as the opposite of knowledge, but it rather includes and goes beyond knowledge by incorporating the body and emotion as significant sites for making meaning. The editors also do not draw sharp distinctions between affect, feeling, and emotion. While this might seem unusual for novice readers and confusing for academically trained theorists who like clear categorisations and typologies, the open and broad definition allows the authors of the chapters to understand affect as an agentive resource in youth learning. Agency has traditionally been regarded as a faculty of reason and as ‘rooted in Enlightenment conceptualizations of the (white, male) social subject as an autonomous actor effecting his will upon the world through rational cogitation’ (4). In contrast, the editors suggest that affective agency emerges from ‘the interactional experience of moving and being moved’ (4), that is, from students’ embodied encounter with both personal feelings of injustice and political awareness of institutional racism.
Readers who expect some sort of deep theorisation of affect or a demonstration of affect in all its empirical reality will be disappointed: affect rebuffs total analysis and so the chapters of the volume never arrive at a complete closure, always leaving readers with more questions than answers. Whether this is a good or a bad feeling is unclear, but the openness and the recursive reflexivity achieved in these chapters is certainly inspiring and perhaps starting to do justice to the immense courage that students brought forward when voicing their emotions during the SKILLS programme.
The chapters of Feeling it were written by upcoming academics, mainly graduate students at the time, who had been involved in teaching in the SKILLS programme. In the chapters, they use ethnographic styles of writing to study interactions that happened in the classroom, report on projects they conducted with the students, analyse interviews with teachers, and reflect on their own positionality as educators. Many of the authors are Latinx women, and they all brought their own experiences with racialisation and other forms of discrimination into classroom interactions with the youth. As Zuleyma Nayeli Carruba-Rogel noted, SKILLS created ‘a safe space for all of us to be vulnerable’ (151).
Methodologically, such vulnerability makes an important intervention in our understanding of what ethnographic research and the politics of representation can and should do. I get reminded of Jackson's (Reference Jackson2010) attention to what he calls ethnographic sincerity. Without such sincerity, we run risk of ‘dehumanizing and thingifying the ethnographic project/subject’ (Jackson Reference Jackson2010:283), which in turn ‘reduces the people we work with—sometimes even as political allies—into political objects no less inert for their ventriloquized placeholding as reflections of others’ ethnographic and ideological interests’ (Jackson Reference Jackson2010:283). He suggests that ‘to remember the significance of laughter, love, and the everydayness of affect is an important methodological, epistemological, and political intervention… in the ethnographic machine’ (Jackson Reference Jackson2010:283).
The chapters in Feeling it can all be read as ethnographically sincere. They try everything in their capacity to represent youth of colour not merely as victims of racism but also as affective agents who are fully capable of articulating their own multicultural and multilingual voices. Adanari Zarate's chapter shows in powerful ways how three young Latino men share stories in which they challenge the racial and linguistic profiling they experience in their everyday lives. Carruba-Rogel's chapter discusses how students use translingual Spanglish to contest their parents’ monolingual ideologies, which manifest in their pride in their children's maintenance of Spanish and their shame of their children's loss or ‘corruption’ of Spanish. Tijana Hirsch considers Latinx students’ creation of posters by which they explored their linguistically informed ideas about their own future bilingual family language policies. Audrey Lopez studies two young bilingual women's affective reflections on language brokering, that is, acting as translators between English-language institutions and their Spanish-language families and communities. Katie Lateef-Jan utilises the method of freewriting to encourage her multilingual Latinx students to affectively reflect on what translation and living with two languages means to them. María José Aragón's chapter analyses how students took up the academic notion of communities of practice over the course of several months and incorporated it in their narratives about the hybrid linguistic and cultural worlds they inhabit.
While these chapters, which all appear in the second half of the book, highlight students’ powerful contestation of institutional and social racism and thereby demonstrate (although never uncritically) that SKILLS was somewhat successful in providing spaces in which youth can exercise agency, the earlier chapters problematise the programmes’ approach and the teachers’ positionalities. Rachel Rys’ chapter is, as she says, ‘an uncomfortable opening’ (44) for the volume. The chapter is based on close analysis of interviews conducted during a preparatory seminar in which future SKILLS teachers discussed and devised the contents, the approach, and the aims of the programme. Some of the discussions in the seminar triggered deeply personal and politically acute emotions, yet (or because of that) some interviewees disregarded them as ‘just’ emotions that had no place in an academic discussion. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work, Rys asks if we can rehabilitate emotions as just, in the sense of justice, instead of rendering them irrelevant. In the chapter by Elizabeth Mainz we learn about SKILLS teachers/researchers’ own multicultural biographies, language beliefs, and teaching practices and begin to understand the complexities of racialisation and the challenges for transformative collaboration in the classroom. In the chapter by Jessica Love-Nichols, white teachers’ well-intended colourblindness is examined. Even though these teachers explicitly commit to an anti-racist discourse, they support their arguments with cultural essentialisations and problematic ideologies of linguistic appropriateness and thereby contribute little to dismantling institutional racism. Anna Bax & Juan Sebastian Ferrada critically reflect on their own shortcomings and difficulties of responding to Latinx teenagers who racialised the teachers and contested the aims of SKILLS in an after-school youth centre. Meghan Corella critically reflects on racialised humour and argues that what she calls white laughter can construct multicultural classrooms as normatively white.
While the authors of all of the chapters problematise their own teaching and writing practices and sometimes even adopt a confessional voice that lays bare their own raciolinguistic ideologies, some assume affectively agentive writing positions by incorporating Spanish and Spanglish in their writing to represent themselves as multilingual agents, highlight their accompanying relationships with their students, promote linguistic and cultural sustenance, and challenge customary monoglot academic ways of writing to push against hegemonic ideas of appropriateness in educational and institutional discourse. This is necessary to show that teachers and researchers are students themselves. Teachers have to go through at times discomforting processes of learning and realising to become not only more informed about structural injustice but also to become affectively and politically moved by the voices of their students.
The chapters certainly trigger affective responses in the honest reader. I felt deep discomfort when I discovered raciolinguistic ideologies in my own teaching practices. I felt disgust for the racist institutions and societies these youth have to navigate. And I felt empathy towards their emotional responses and critiques of racism. Our affective responses should not stop there; any reader who understands the affects discussed in this book also has a responsibility, I believe, to become an affective agent and actively unlearn their own ideas and practices to find strategies that move institutional education towards greater sociolinguistic justice. Feeling it is thus not only a detailed account of what has happened during SKILLS but also an indispensable guideline for similar projects in the future and for young people's learning in general.
I imagine Feeling it to be of interest to anyone who has a real-life concern for linguistic minorities, education, and race. While it is certainly of incredible importance that critical raciolinguistic work continues to be conducted in North America, where race relations seem far from improving, it remains to be seen how the field will be taken up internationally. How does the intersection of race and language shape education in Africa and Asia? What does the category of ‘race’ mean for participants, researchers, and educators in South America and the Pacific? To what extent can and should race, racism, and racialisation be understood to shape education in countries and societies that have little experience with such categories and who imagine themselves as historically ‘monoracial’? In answering such questions, I think that a global raciolinguistics could provide critical insights into the ongoing sociolinguistic injustice caused by colonialism in societies and educational practices around the world.
Given its accessible and courageous writing, the volume can also to be used as a rich resource for university lecturers who want to update, ‘diversify’, and decolonise their course readers and include more female authors of colour. The readings will encourage students—‘diverse’ or not—to read and hopefully also to write in more affective ways.
