The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race

by Sinfree Makoni (Editor), Bassey E. Antia (Editor), Stephanie Rudwick (Editor)

Overview

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race provides an up-to-date overview of language and race from a modern global perspective. Challenging the concept of race that has been defined by global North scholarship, this book interrogates these academic conventions and encourages the reader to look beyond these narrow viewpoints of language and race.

Taking a decolonising approach, this handbook includes contributions from academics from Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Pacific as well as those based in Europe and North America with the aim of deconstructing the centre of power into a direction where not only marginalized people are given a voice but also where marginalised scholars can be heard. Chapters in the volume review the state of the art of the study of language and race, capture the prevailing realities of race as experienced in the localities which the authors represent, critique the prevailing conceptualisation to advance debate, and provide an account of specific ethnographic case studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Race is essential reading for all students and academics who want to broaden their understanding of this crucial topic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040367469
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/17/2025
Series:	Routledge Handbooks in Applied Linguistics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	542

About the Author

Sinfree Makoni, Pennsylvania State University, USA. He has recently co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s (Routledge).

Bassey E. Antia, University of the Western Cape, South Africa. He has recently co-edited (with Sinfree Makoni) Southernizing Sociolinguistics: Colonialism, Racism, and Patriarchy in Language in the Global South (Routledge).

Stephanie Rudwick, Czech Academy of Science and University of Hradec Kralove. She has recently published The Ambiguity of English as a Lingua Franca: Politics of Language and Race in South Africa (Routledge).

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction

Section 1: Conceptual issues and their political predicates

1. Nick Riemer: Racism and ideology in linguistics

2. Eduardo Henrique Diniz de Figueiredo, Juliana Zeggio Martinez & Clarissa Menezes Jordão: The concept of whiteness in Applied Linguistics research within Brazil

3. Romina Istratii: The Discourse of ‘Whiteness’ and the Risk of Re-colonising through Decolonising

4. Ọbádélé Kambon: GandhiMustFall,#AugustusMustFall, Temporal Reality, Ma’at and srwḏ tꜢ n Kmt ‘Restoring the Land of Black People’

5. Joshua Babcock & Jay Ke-Schutte: Against Methodological Monolingualism: “Language,” “Race,” and Western-Intellectual Cultures of Monoglot Standardization

6. Nick Faraclas, Ian Hancock in conversation with Sinfree Makoni & Bassey E. Antia: Rethinking boundaries and the trans-national Romani experience

7. Uju Anya in conversation with the African Studies Global Virtual Forum: Blackness: multiple and scalable?

Section 2: Encounters and encountering

8. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta: Undisciplined research at the margins. (Non)-naming people’s identities in Swedish spaces

9. Daniel Ochieng Orwenjo & Rachel Muchira: On Being Black: The Linguistic Conceptualisation of Colourisms in English and German

10. Margaret Ohia-Nowak: From “Murzyn” and “Mulat” to “Czarny”. Naming Black People in Poland

11. Ajohche N. Awungjia: Race, Discourse and Friendship

12. Miché Thompson: Racialised relations: constructing the “other” through the discourse of prejudice in China Town in Cape Town South Africa

13. Kwesi Kwaa Prah in conversation with Bassey E. Antia & Sinfree Makoni: Conversations on seven decades of peripatetic activism

Section 3: Contestations within and beyond

14. Ying-Ying Tan: Race(ing) accents in Singapore

15. Cristine Gorski Severo & Sinfree Makoni: African heritage in Brazil

16. Gavin Furukawa & Mie Hiramoto: Language, race and nationalism: Views from East Asia

17. Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi & Agnes Young: To Hold or not to Hold a Placard: Transracialisation and White Grappling at Black Lives Matter Protests in Germany

18. Saffo Papantonopoulou: Anal Temporalities: Racialisation, Homosex, and the Legacy of Nation-Building in the Balkans

19. Nathan Oyori Ogechi: Relics of imperialism? Portrayal of ethnic and racial identities through code choice in multicultural Kenya

20. John Baugh in conversation with Bassey E. Antia: Linguistic Profiling

Section 4: Education and media

21. Afua Yeboah: Belonging and Not Belonging: A Personal Narrative

22. Cristine Gorski Severo and Ezra Alberto Chambal Nhampoca: Language ideologies and racialization in Mozambique: from the colonial era to contemporary bilingual education

23. Pinky Makoe & Carolyn McKinney: Race and coloniality of language policy in education

24. A comparative content analysis of cultural content in textbooks for teaching French in Ghana and Togo

25. Tamah Sherman & Jiří Homoláč: Asian or Vietnamese? The intersection of racial, ethnic and national categorization in discourses of young Vietnamese in the Czech Republic

26. Sisanda Nkoala: The Intersection of Race and Gender in Online Violence Against South African Female Journalists

27. Busi Makoni in conversation with Bassey E. Antia: The woman in the academy as a black person, student, faculty and researcher

28. Arthur Spears in conversation with Bassey E. Antia and Sinfree Makoni: Language and race in careers in the academy

Index