reading list + Other Resources

Keep reading to learn more about the texts and other works that served as inspiration for the contributors to this archive.

Rather than a synopsis or summary, texts and other resources are followed by a list of questions that the authors/creators guide us in asking. These questions are partial and evocative, not comprehensive. In other words, these aren’t the only questions that can be asked, nor are the answers prescribed in advance.

Texts are listed alphabetically by authors’ surnames. This does not reflect the order in which they were read during the Fall 2021 Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies course.

Readings

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity.

What are the everyday codings of race? Where do these codings appear? Where do they disappear? How do machine technologies co-participate in the reproduction of racism and racial inequity? Whose biases get encoded in machine technologies? How do we know? How do we challenge this as analysts, and who is already challenging this from other perspectives or positions (e.g. as activists, practitioners/designers, policymakers, advocates, etc.)?

Gershon, Ilana. 2010. “Media Ideologies: An Introduction.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20 (2): 283–293.

How do ideas about media technologies shape the ways that media are designed, used, and consumed? What kind of default user gets assumed by the design of a media form? When and how do the actual uses and users of these media differ from the assumed, default user?

Goh, Colin and Woo Yen Yen. 2009. The Coxford Singlish Dictionary, 2nd Edition. Angsana Books.

How can users of a nonstandardized variety of English mobilize the dictionary to subvert and refuse the state’s regimenting efforts in legislating and policing the bounds of “Good English”? From the Annotator: “Nonstandardized” just means that a language variety has not become the target of management by standardizing institutions—not that it is “incorrect,” “bad,” “broken,” etc. A question: similar to the Willinsky text, below, how can we further examine the naturalization of a raciolinguistic Chinese-Singaporeanness as the default here? Note in particular the presence of terms that are explicitly labeled as “racist” or as “mispronunciations”/“misspellings” of minority group names or words/phrases from minoritized languages.

Heller, Monica and Bonnie McIlhinny. 2017. Language, Capitalism, and Colonialism: Toward a Critical History. University of Toronto Press.

(Focus on Chapter 4, “Language and European Notions of Nation and State“ and Chapter 6, “The Cold War: Surveillance, Structuralism, and Security”) What are the convergences among censuses, standardized language varieties, literacy practices/institutions, scientists, and colonial state practices that worked to naturalize ideas about what a European “nation” is, as well as to naturalize the global connections between “nation” and “state”?

Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. University of California Press.

How did spatial and documentary practices converge in the efforts to produce colonial-imperial modernity? How did media ideologies about maps, files, and built environments shape practices of both planning and statecraft? Where do race and language appear in these projects—as state effects that manifest as much in their invisibility as in their visibility?

Igo, Sarah E. 2007. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Harvard University Press.

How did the advent of new technologies (together with ideas about those technologies; see Gershon 2010, above) afford the ability to conceptualize and imagine a totality or “mass” society? How were perceptions of racial and linguistic difference transformed by these media ideologies?

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. 2010. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard University Press.

(Focus on Introduction, “The Mismeasure of Crime” and Chapter 1, “Saving the Nation: The Racial Data Revolution and the Negro Problem”) How was difference not just located both spatially and sociologically, but also racialized: rendered a feature or fact of racialized populations, rather than an effect of history? How did anti-Blackness draw on multiple concurrent, even incompatible, forms to sustain institutionalized racism in the form of anti-Black public rhetorics, state effects, and media ideologies of “scientific objectivity”?

Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford University Press.

How do changes in the census reveal the politics of race, political representation, citizenship, and national belonging? How do censuses co-produce group identities? What are the limits of this production? From the Annotator: among other things, this text offers an example of what Rosa and Flores (2017, below) call “contestation[s] of racial and linguistic power formations” (637). In other words, new racial categories in the census didn’t challenge the raciolinguistic ideologies that were deployed and institutionalized by the state. Rather, they multiplied the categories while keeping the underlying logics intact.

PuruShotam, Nirmala. 1998. “Disciplining Difference: Race in Singapore.” In Southeast Asian Identities, edited by Joel S. Kahn, pp 51–92. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies/St. Martin’s Press.

How did colonial encounters shape the conditions of possibility for raciolinguistic identity in the present? How does this afford or constrain the ability to resist disciplinary power?

Rosa, Jonathan and Nelson Flores. 2017. “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective.” Language in Society 46 (5): 621–647.

How have language and race been co-naturalized in historical, institutional, and interactional perspectives? Who perceives linguistic and racial difference? Whose perceptions become authoritative? How do racial and linguistic categories get defined, policed, and institutionalized? How do racial and linguistic categories intersect or otherwise mutually support one another, despite (or even because of) efforts to maintain their distinctness? How do racial and linguistic formations get challenged? Who challenges them? What are the effects of these challenges—e.g. do they subvert or maintain authoritative perspectives?

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind.” Current Anthropology 42 (1): 125–133.

Where does the state manifest? Through what effects does it become perceivable? Where else—beyond state bureaucracies and institutions—do state effects get produced? How has the state been transformed under conditions of globalization? How has it not?

Willinsky, John. 1994. Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. Princeton University Press.

What are the institutional networks and intersecting projects through which linguistic authority gets produced? How does the dictionary become a self-authorizing model for understanding what language is, and how does it continually fail on its own terms? From the Annotator: how can we further examine the naturalization of a white-raciolinguistic English-ness as a default in the dictionary?

Yeoh, Brenda S. A. 1996. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. National University of Singapore Press.

How are representations of space themselves an artifact of colonial/imperial modernity? Where does resistance become visible, and how can we account for unequal power relations without marginalizing or erasing acts of placemaking from below? Where and how do race and language become important for shaping built environments—especially built environments in colonial cities, which are always structured by relationships of enforced dependency, domination, extraction, and the imperatives of hierarchy formation/maintenance and subordination?

Other resources + inspirations