Illinois Global Institute

As the home to the area and global studies centers and thematic programs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Illinois Global Institute is dedicated to fostering an environment where international perspectives are integral to teaching and research.

Center for African Studies * Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies * Center for Global Studies * Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies * Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies * Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity * European Union Center * LAS Global Studies * Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies * Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center * The Program in Arms Control and Domestic and International Security

 

Adrienne Washington | "A world beyond this one": Sustaining afro-brasilidade through language, ritual, and culture teaching in northeastern Brazil

Feb 1, 2024   4:00 pm  
Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics Building, Room 1080
Lecture
picture of Adrienne Washington
Sponsor
Department of Spanish & Portuguese and Linguistics
Speaker
Adrienne Ronee Washington
Views
179
Originating Calendar
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

Theories on the intersections of language and race (raciolinguistics, Alim et al., 2016; Flores & Rosa, 2015) and on the semiotics of race (raciosemiotics, Smalls, 2015, 2020) are positioned well to understand how multiple identities co-craft personhood—that is, how language informs race, ethnoracial formations, and racism, and also how they recursively shape language. Yet suchtheories have not been regularly applied in exploring the place of religion (along with language and race) in identity co-construction, including intersectional hierarchies and the contestations of such hegemonic power formations by members of multiply marginalized groups.  

Building upon language and religion scholarship and raciolinguistics (including principally raciosemiotics), this research advances racioreligious linguistic ideologies as a concept to examine the discursive processes through which language, race, and spirituality become entangled within cultural lenses. I begin by exploring racialization of Yoruba-inspired (Nagô in Bahia) spiritualities and linguistic/semiotic practices under colonialism and racial slavery and then continue into the modern context, where Nagô/Yoruba has come to epitomize Blackness. I present an extended example of racioreligious linguistic ideologies in the Brazilian city of Salvador within a school where educators teach Nagô/Yoruba as part of an effort to inform students about African-matrix histories and cultures and develop positive identities. 

Qualitative analyses of interview, participant observation, and photographic data highlight how interlocutors in this community, working within affirmative racioreligious linguistic ideologies and the values they assign to personhood, ritual knowledge, and language practices, engage in education as racioreligious identity work to resist systemic racial, religious, and linguistic prejudices, sustain traditional knowledge, and affirm Blackness. This work is instructive for other contexts where religious thinking has inspired ideas of essentialized differences, and it opens space for an explicit interrogation of how religious supremacy, in cooperation with systemic racial and linguistic privileges, has participated in subordination and has necessitated counterdiscursive strategies.

 

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