AAAL 2025: Invited Colloquium
Convened by Tasha Austin and Aris Clemons
The Wilga Rivers Invited Colloquium:
Contesting Culturelessness: Developing Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogies in World Language Education
Conveners:
Aris Clemons, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Tasha Austin, University of Buffalo
Discussant:
L J Randolph Jr., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Colloquium Abstract
Language education in the U.S. presently reflects exclusionary and socially stratifying practices rooted in its larger historical and sociopolitical formation. Drawing on established literature of Culturally Relevant Pedagogies (CRP) in education, this colloquium explores the ways that Black educators develop and implement humanizing pedagogies for all students by centering Black language practices. We draw on language research traditions across world language education, linguistics, and literacy to address the disproportionate representation of white middle-class monolingual participants in applied language research. Importantly, the authors challenge the deficit understandings of Black languaging practices by contesting theoretical frameworks grounded in discursive entity-based notions of culture to justify the uneven distribution of resources in educational contexts (Austin, 2023).
Together, the papers represent a trend toward the development of Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogies (HBLP) , which encompass any pedagogical practice aimed at expanding notions of Blackness (and Black language ability) by providing more comprehensive histories and understandings of how the racial category was created and mobilized through language practices in post-colonial contexts (Clemons, 2021). The papers offer an expansive treatment of Black language practices within and beyond the US, while simultaneously contesting said practices as monolingual, and in need of remediation. Since HBLPs require a variationist approach validating language practices of a wide and heterogenous group of languagers, the papers assert that attending to the needs of Black languagers through a recognizing the necessary interplay between racialization and culture particularly in U.S. contexts, benefits learners across various classroom types and spaces.
Each presenter (including the two co-organizers) will provide a 20-minute commentary focusing on the expansiveness of culturally contextualized Black language practices in the fields of world language teaching, linguistics, and literacy studies. The presentations will be followed with a 15-minute commentary from our discussant who will emphasize the impact of centering Black language within applied linguistics. With the remaining 25 minutes, we will invite a conversation between the attendees and panelists.
“Speak to me, my pikin”: Nigerian immigrant youths’ intergenerational multilingual practices
Dr. Lakeya Afolalu, University of Washington
Language scholars have documented immigrant families’ intergenerational multilingual language practices. While African youth have immigrated to the U.S. at unparalleled rates over the last few decades, language scholarship has yet to fully capture their multilingual practices across generations. Drawing on raciolinguistic and Black geographic theories, this critical ethnographic study explores the intergenerational multilingual practices of three Nigerian youths. Through analysis of home visit observations, semi-structured interviews, and artifacts, I argue that the Nigerian youths’ homes and community cultural spaces served as protective incubators against raciolinguistic ideologies that, outside of these contexts, often coerce African immigrant youth to shed their heritage languages. Amid an abundance of research focused on African immigrant youths’ linguistic limitations, I call for language research and education to reposition African immigrant youth and families as more than just ‘English language learners’. The findings from this study offer theoretical and methodological implications for recognizing and honoring African families’ rich, agentive, and diverse multilingual practices outside of traditional school spaces.
Reinscribing Translanguaging Imaginaries of Black Linguistic Innocence
Dr. Patriann Smith, University of South Florida
This presentation introduces the notion of inonsans linguistic jan nwè, Saint Lucian French Creole for “Black linguistic innocence” to refer to the inherently imbued capacity of institutional-individual spaces created by Black students which operates legitimately sans white gaze – spaces juxtaposed against and which disrupt the long-standing societally imposed “Black abstraction” that has for so long operated legally and otherwise to uphold an imagined “White innocence” (Ross, 1990). Informed by the long-standing prism of the Black immigrant as identified by sociologist Dr. Roy Simon Bryce-Laporte, I use a nuanced (decolonizing) interpretive approach, to show how Black immigrant youth leverage their self-determination to reclaim their linguistic and broader semiotic – semiolingual -- innocence while working towards imagined futures even as they simultaneously engage with the influence of institutional factors, raciolinguistically and raciosemiotically, on their literacies across transnational contexts. Relying on the intersecting lenses of translanguaging with Englishes, multiliteracies, and a raciolinguistic perspective in concert with transracialization to explore the insights of these youth, I demonstrate how the fields of language and literacy are positioned to disrupt what have long been considered as dichotomies that characterize the academic and invisible literacies of youth, and extend beyond tensions concerning such dichotomies to focus instead on notions such as language architecture as well as raciosemiotic architecture and their affordances for understanding the multiliteracies of Black youth. Making visible awareness of instances where the Black Language -- Englishes (i.e., E-languages), and Black Semiotics -- other semiotic resources (i.e., E-semiotics), of Black immigrant youth may be racialized by institutions and society even as they engage in architecture, I illustrate in this presentation that transraciolinguistics and transsemiotizing function in the semiolingual repertoires of these youth as a function of their transcendent literacies, illuminating the multiple capacities of Black personhoods, pre white gaze.
Keywords: literacy, race, language, multilingualism, intersectionality, immigration, transnational, Black language, Black Englishes, Black innocence, sans white gaze
Reconceptualizing language and culture for the 21st century: A call to action in language education
Shondel Nero, Ed.D. , New York University
My early work on the (mis)placement of Caribbean Creole English (CCE) speakers in ESL remedial writing classes in a New York City college sparked a range of theoretical and practical questions, and contested deeply held, taken-for-granted, concepts such as the “native speaker” and “culture” in the field of language education. The work also challenged us to re-examine traditional, socially constructed, monoglossic and stratified conceptualizations of language and culture that often marginalize speakers from lower socioeconomic classes, and non-White groups worldwide. Such understandings are out of step with the complexity of language and cultural practices in our 21st century interconnected world that are at once translingual, transnational, and transcultural, both physically and virtually.
In this paper, I argue that the richness and diversity of Black language and cultural practices, using CCE speakers as an example, offer an appropriate entry point for language education to reconceptualize language and culture in ways that are more reflective of said practices, and disruptive of traditional understandings of language and culture that were codified in the colonial era and continue to be practiced in schools worldwide, often to the detriment of Black language users. I call for language education to take up a more expansive, heteroglossic understanding of language (as noun and verb) (García, 2009), as the norm; language not only as structure, but as practices; not singular, but multiple; not fixed, but evolving; not separate, but trans/intersecting. Similarly, taking up cultures as simultaneously enduring and evolving complex behaviors, beliefs, values, norms, and practices (such as language), histories, and systems of knowledge that are common to all peoples regardless of race/ethnicity. Such reconceptualization would entail difficult but necessary shifts in dispositions, language research and methodologies, pedagogy, and assessment, but is likely to generate more inclusive and equitable practices in language education, attuned to the 21st century.
Reference:
García, O. (2009) Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
“I Just Felt Cheated:” Black Spanish Teachers Using Identity as a Resource to Contest Raciolinguistic Erasure
Tasha Austin, University at Buffalo
Aris Clemons, University of Tennessee Knoxville
The scant presence of Black world language teachers is often attributed to a lack of interest, ability or access (Anya & Randolph, 2019). Access to formal Spanish language study beyond elite communities and schools is limited in the U.S., yet Black Spanish teachers both exist in stark contrast to these discourses of deficiency and navigate complex structural and societal forces which perpetuate antiBlack narratives. Such narratives contend that these teachers 1) cannot be both Black and Hispanophone, 2) are destined to never achieve Spanish language proficiency and 3) are not legitimate users, let alone teachers, of any language. In drawing from their identities as a resource, this qualitative study analyzes interview transcripts from eight Black Spanish teachers to reveal how their conceptions of self elevate their craft. These conceptions include shifting confined categories of Blackness and Spanish(es) across ethnoracial and raciolinguistic boundaries. As participants acknowledge Black cultures as impacted by processes of racialization (Austin, 2023), our thematic grounded analysis reveals the contestation of racial and linguistic power formations (Rosa & Flores, 2017). Across various regions of the U.S., levels of instruction and community types, the participants, inclusive of the authors, describe their ongoing (re)formulations of self and depictions of Black Spanish possibilities. These (re)made understandings reflect considerations of contexts, diasporic and cross-ethnic welcomings, and expansive Black language practices. Study findings, as derived from a larger study on Hemispheric Black Language Pedagogies (Clemons, 2021), suggest that the dynamic engagement between Spanish language teachers racialized as Black and their students, elevates the language and lifeways of Black Spanish users. This elevation occurs through earnest mappings of Afrodiasporic existence which upend regimented racial and linguistic categories. Implications for resisting antiBlackness through identity-based curricula and pedagogies and its role in Black linguistic self-determination are discussed.
Associated plenary: Dr. L. J. Randolph Jr.