Racialization and language provides a linguistic approach for analyzing racism in Peru. In this volume, an excellent perspective is offered for better understanding how racialization is discursively constructed, and the new perspective serves as an alternative way to explore language and racism in Latin America. A wide range of cases are provided and analyzed using interdisciplinary methods, thus contributing to research on language and race in Peru.
In chapter 1, Michele Back & Virginia Zavala's introduction provides a comprehensive overview of language and race in the Peruvian context. Chapters 2 to 6 analyze cases from every walk of life. In chapter 2, Leonor Lamas defines the concepts of race and racism in Peru by analyzing an impacted advertisement, exploring the ways of reproducing race through meritocratic arguments. Margarita Huayhua demonstrates, in chapter 3, the construction of race through people's interactions in rural minivans and shows how racialized identities are constructed in exchanges. Nathalie Koc-Menard finds that racism is associated with migration and subjective positions by analyzing a marginal Peruvian community. As language and race are related through language ideologies, in chapter 5, Ylse Mesía explores four racialized language ideologies of high school students, which demonstrates the links between race, education, and language. With regards to the ideology of ‘good education’, lower-middle class students believe that anti-racism can be achieved through education, while upper-middle class students believe it can only be acquired through ‘good upbringing’. To further explore racism, Víctor Vich & Virginia Zavala analyze interviews with young upper-class businessmen and find they also emphasize ‘good upbringing’, not formal instruction. In these cases, the persistence of racism is identified but it is camouflaged by a ‘lack of education’ and hidden in a discursive way.
The second part of the volume (chapters 7–10) analyzes not only the unique and racializing characteristics of virtual spaces, but also the impact of persistent racism beyond the virtual world, which fills in research gaps in related fields. Chapter 7, by Eunice Cortez, analyzes the discourse and images of an Andean bilingual actress to explore Peruvian social identities accepted by the public. The next three chapters analyze cases in two virtual environments: Facebook and Twitter. Roberto Brañez-Medina analyzes a virtual community to explore language and racism on Facebook. Chapter 9, by Michele Back, analyzes the interactions of history and ideologies on Twitter, which associate race and language in the imagination of Peruvians, while chapter 10, by Isabel C. Wong-Fupuy, further analyzes two discursive cases on Twitter, revealing the construction of racism and language ideologies in virtual spaces.
Overall, Racialization and language contributes to a long-existing Latin American practice of exploring ways to understand and overcome racism, providing a unique perspective to analyze race and language in the Latin American context.
