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(Looking for one more to present on a panel about XYZ. Send me an email at velda.khoo@colorado.edu with your abstract if you think this is something for you!)

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The submission deadline for both new panels and panel changes is 14 Feb 2022, 11:59PM EST. New panel proposals should be submitted through the Call for New Submissions link. Changes to original panels should be submitted through the Call for Updates link.

 

To quote Toni Morrison’s incisive analysis from nearly 50 years ago: “the function, the very serious function of racism...is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being” (Morrison 1975). These distractions manifest as rank assertions of lack, deficit, underdevelopment, and the like, but they also manifest through deeply normalized routines for performing scholarly “rigor”: “but is this really about race? Is it really about language? Isn’t this about class, gender, sexuality, ability, education, citizenship, migration histories, settler status, religion, culture, etc.?” These questions create a distraction by positing an interchangeability of analytics, rather than an interrelationship among vectors of difference and marginalization. Instead of an approach that insists on “either-or,” we begin from the perspective of “both-and.” We ask: how are raciolinguistic ordering projects manifested in, through, and alongside their co(n)textual intersectionalities? This is not to advocate for “race/language plus,” an approach that multiplies discrete categories in conjunction. Following founding theorists of intersectionality, we acknowledge that intersectional dynamics are experientially and empirically indistinguishable, even if they are analytically specifiable (Crenshaw 1991, Collins 2019).

 

We turn our attention to settings in which whiteness is treated as foreign or outside, residing in the domain of a white-western racialized chronotope, and yet nevertheless becomes recruitable as an aspirational horizon. We begin by focusing on situations that are structured around a constitutive tension: between the insistence on exemption from whiteness, on the one hand, and the pervasive presence of the English language as one register or code among many comprising a multilingual situation, often (but not always) one that is deeply invested with cosmopolitan desire. We extend our semiotic attention beyond things overtly acknowledged as colonial legacies (Reyes 2017) to ask: what is the function of semiotic phenomena and processes whose status as colonial legacies become actively disavowed? How, in light of such disavowals, does English become more than a language and whiteness more than a race, even in the absence of their respective phenotype: “purely” white bodies and “purely” English grammars?

 

Panelists undertake an ethnographic exploration of the “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality across a range of settings reflexively cast as outside, beyond, or exempt from the structuring effects of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and the raciolinguistic indices through which they are materialized.