Heritage Language, Racialization, and (Post)colonialism

Abstract (English)

What is heritage language and how do framings and contestations around the notions of “heritage” inform, reproduce, and confound ways of organizing difference and belonging in what are claimed to be "post" colonial contexts? What institutions, practices, and actors have a stake in defining heritage and the value of particular languages and dialects for demarcating contemporary ways of organizing around difference and similarity, and in relation to which social, political, cultural, and economic projects? This panel will examine how notions of heritage, language, and race become bundled together in educational and other settings in ways that can reproduce colonial hierarchies even when projects attempt to legitimate themselves as multicultural and/or as post-, de-, or anti-colonial. Each of the four papers on this panel explores these questions and issues in different ways. In line with the Heritage and Memory track’s focus on how language intersects with power and the making of social difference and inequality in relation to history, colonialism, and capitalism, this panel brings together papers that problematize the production of “heritage language” as a means for the reproduction or contestation of racializing ideologies and processes in relation to postcolonial nation-building and other political, economic, and social projects. Each of the papers offers diverse epistemological standpoints and theoretical and methodological approaches on the
question of heritage language, racialization and postcolonialism, including but not limited to areas such as: applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, autoethnography, postcolonial semiotics, critical discourse analysis, language policy and planning, and classroom discourse analysis. A focus on the robust analysis of language and discourse in relation to social and cultural processes unites these papers with respect to the chosen conference track.