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Enslavement, forced migration, war and colonization have led to the global dispersal of Black communities and to the fragmentation of common experiences. The majority of Black language researchers explore the social and linguistic phenomena of individual Black communities, without looking at Black experiences outside a given community. This groundbreaking collection re-orders the elitist and colonial elements of language studies by drawing together the multiple perspectives of Black language researchers. In doing so, the book recognises and formalises the existence of a \"Black Linguistic Perspective\" highlights the contributions of Black language researchers in the field. Written exclusively by Black scholars on behalf of, and in collaboration with local communities, the book looks at the commonalities and differences among Black speech communities in Africa and the Diaspora. Topics include: * the OJ Simpson trial * language issues in Southern Africa and Francophone West Africa * the language of Hip Hop * the language of the Rastafaria in Jamaica With a foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the linguistic implications of colonization. Sinfree Makoni is Associate Professor in Linguistics, Applied Language Studies and African American Studies at Penn State University, USA. Geneva Smitherman is University Distinguished Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA, and Director of My Brother's Keeper Program in Detroit. Arthur K. Spears is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the City University of New York, USA. Arnetha Ball is Associate Professor of Education at Stanford University, USA. 'This book will be of interest not only to people whose focus is language varieties used by Blacks, but also to those concerned with a critical history of linguistics, to anthropologists and sociolinguists, particularly those working on language policy and planning, variation, and language in education.' - Kay McCormick, University of Cape Town

Bringing together theory, research, and practice to dismantle Anti-Black Linguistic Racism and white linguistic supremacy, this book provides ethnographic snapshots of how Black students navigate and negotiate their linguistic and racial identities across multiple contexts. By highlighting the counterstories of Black students, Baker-Bell demonstrates how traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm, internalized linguistic racism, or consequences these approaches have on Black students' sense of self and identity. This book presents Anti-Black Linguistic Racism as a framework that explicitly names and richly captures the linguistic violence, persecution, dehumanization, and marginalization Black Language-speakers endure when using their language in schools and in everyday life. To move toward Black linguistic liberation, Baker-Bell introduces a new way forward through Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy, a pedagogical approach that intentionally and unapologetically centers the linguistic, cultural, racial, intellectual, and self-confidence needs of Black students. This volume captures what Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy looks like in classrooms while simultaneously illustrating how theory, research, and practice can operate in tandem in pursuit of linguistic and racial justice. A crucial resource for educators, researchers, professors, and graduate students in language and literacy education, writing studies, sociology of education, sociolinguistics, and critical pedagogy, this book features a range of multimodal examples and practices through instructional maps, charts, artwork, and stories that reflect the urgent need for antiracist language pedagogies in our current social and political climate.

The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.

In What We Say, Who We Are: Leopold Senghor, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Philosophy of Language , Parker English explores the commonality between Leopold Senghor's concept of \"negritude\" and Zora Neale Hurston's view of \"Negro expression.\" For English, these two concepts emphasize that a person's view of herself is above all dictated by the way in.

This book examines the social cost of linguistic exceptionalism for the education of speakers of nondominant/subordinated languages in Africa and the African diaspora. The contributors take the languages of Africa, the Caribbean, and the US as cases in point to illustrate the effects of exceptionalist beliefs that these languages are inadequate for instructional purposes. They describe contravening movements toward various forms of linguistic diversity both inside and outside of school settings across these regions. Different theoretical lenses and a range of empirical data are brought to bear on investigating the role of these languages in educational policies and practices. Collectively, the chapters in this volume make the case for a comprehensive language awareness to remedy the myths of linguistic exceptionalism and to advance the affirmative dimensions of linguistic diversity.

Castañeda v. Pickard established a precedent for evaluating bilingual programs in relation to the soundness of the educational theory on which they are based. However, this notion of theoretical soundness was grounded in an underlying logic that ultimately framed emergent multilingual students as a protected class —or vulnerable population in need of Federal protection. Given the particular demographic context in which the Castañeda case emerged, this population of students was also imagined to be primarily Latinx, a category which, in turn, was imagined to exclude Black students. In this article, we interrogate this underlying logic, and we propose an expanded definition of what counts as sound theory in relation to bilingual education. In light of recent international attention to the Black Lives Matter movement, we explore the role of bilingual education in the lives of Black and Latinx students who attend schools with one another throughout the U.S. We argue that the Castañeda discourse that framed Latinx children’s emergent multilingualism as “language barriers” was—and continues to be—informed by the same logic that frames Black kids as not being bilingual (and as not belonging in bilingual education). Further, we argue that this logic has profoundly shaped a history of language policies that are primarily remedial and compensatory in nature, and that systematically exclude and/or marginalize Black students. Through an interrogation and reimagining of “sound educational theory,” we point to ways that bilingual education can encompass a more expansive view of multilingual learners that promotes linguistic solidarity between Black, Latinx, and other racialized students.

Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas brings together the original research of nineteen leading scholars on language contact and pidgin/creole genesis. In recent decades, increasing attention has been paid to the role of historical, cultural and demographic factors in language contact situations. John Victor Singler's body of work, a model of what such a research paradigm should look like, strikes a careful balance between sociohistorical and linguistic analysis. The case studies in this volume present investigations into the sociohistorical matrix of language contact and critical insights into the sociolinguistic consequences of language contact within Africa and the African Diaspora. Additionally, they contribute to ongoing debates about pidgin/creole genesis and language contact by examining and comparing analyses and linguistic outcomes of particular sociohistorical and cultural contexts, and considering less-studied factors such as speaker agency and identity in the emergence, nativization, and stabilization of contact varieties.

John McWhorter challenges an enduring paradigm among linguists in this provocative exploration of the origins of plantation creoles. Using a wealth of data--linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical--he proposes that the \"limited access model\" of creole genesis is seriously flawed. That model maintains that plantation creole languages emerged because African slaves greatly outnumbered whites on colonial plantations. Having little access to the slaveholders' European languages, the slaves were forced to build a new language from what fragments they did acquire. Not so, says McWhorter, who posits that plantation creole originated in West African trade settlements, in interactions between white traders and slaves, some of whom were eventually transported overseas. The evidence that most New World creoles were imports traceable to West Africa strongly suggests that the well-established limited access model for plantation creole needs revision. In forcing a reexamination of this basic tenet, McWhorter's book will undoubtedly cause controversy. At the same time, it makes available a vast amount of data that will be a valuable resource for further explorations of genesis theory. Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

This essay intervenes in contemporary political discourse on the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education by reclaiming the Black Language expression \"stay woke\" from its weaponization in \"anti-woke\" rhetoric. The author argues that terms like \"anti-woke\" represent a grammatical and philosophical violence, asserting that the true opposite of \"stay woke\" within Black Language is not sleep or political disagreement, but murder and social death. Employing a Black feminist writing methodology that consciously rejects traditional, white academic prose, the article performs its argument through its form. It delves into the linguistic and philosophical depths of Black Language, analyzing aspect markers such as the habitual \"be\" and \"steady\" to theorize Black Time, or chronopolitics, as a decolonial interruption of white linear narratives of progress. By tracing the genealogy of \"stay woke\" from early 20th-century blues to the Movement for Black Lives, the essay frames it as a practice of Black counter-memory. Through a final personal narrative, the author illustrates the persistence of educational racism and antiblackness in contemporary graduate education, arguing that the metaphysics of Black Language offers a grammar for Black educational futures beyond the temporal and colonial confines of the school.

Located near Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, Palenque is a former Afro-Hispanic maroon community that has recently attracted much national and international attention. The authors of this collection examine Palenque's linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins from interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives. Extensive in situ fieldwork and long-term familiarity with the Palenquero community form the basis of the seven essays, all of which are enriched by data from archival and other scholarly works. In this book, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and specialists in cultural and visual studies thereby enter into mutually enriching dialogues about the origins and nature of Palenque's unique Lengua (local creole) and culture. This rich tapestry of ideas is decidedly international, as its authors are members of academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia) is an updated translation of Palenque, Colombia: Oralidad, identidad y resistencia, 2012.