Angela Reyes

Introduction: Complicating race: Articulating race across multiple social dimensions

This introduction to the special issue, ‘Complicating Race: Articulating Race Across Multiple Social Dimensions’, situates the collection of articles with respect to the wider body of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological work on race in US contexts. The articles not only explode the myth of the ‘postracial’, but also seek to recast the relationship between language and race by demonstrating how race is inextricably bound with multiple, intersecting social dimensions and power relations.

‘Racist!’: Metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse by Asian American youth

This study illustrates how Asian American youth participate in the ongoing formation of linguistic and racial ideologies in the USA through the metapragmatic regimentation of racist discourse (Silverstein, 1993). After presenting examples of crying ‘racist’ in US politics and entertainment, this article examines ethnographic and discourse data in which Korean American boys ‘decode’ (Hill, 2009) certain uses of the term ‘black’ as ‘racist’.The analysis illustrates how the regimentation of racist discourse relies on the indexical construal of broader oppositions that link ‘black’ to negative racialized qualities, including deviance, violence, and insults. This article argues that ‘racist’ cries by Asian American youth challenge language ideologies of referentialism and personalism and racial ideologies of colorblindness and postrace. Crying ‘racist’ becomes a rich resource for achieving a number of interactional effects that renegotiate the position of Asian American youth with respect to the range of racial categories that circulate throughout US society.

Corporations are people: Emblematic scales of brand personification among Asian American youth

This article examines the use of corporate names as personal nicknames for AsianAmericanyouth.Theanalysistracesthemeaningsofthesenicknaming practices through the concepts of BRAND PERSONIFICATION (how figures of personhood are recruited as embodiments of corporate brands) and EMBLEMATIC SCALES (how signs of personhood emerge acrosstrajectories of use and scales of time). Within the crossracial institutional structure of an Asian American supplementary school, these nicknaming practices not only formulate speech, participants, relationships, and settings as informal, but also infuse the nicknamed with brand qualities linked to race, nation, class, and status. Thesepractices alsogenerate fleetingandstableframeworksofgroupdistinction and adequation that operate simultaneously or cyclically and that maintain or transgress classroom roles and racial boundaries. This article demonstrates how an attention to temporal dimensions enables researchers to explore the ways in which small-scale activities accumulate across events and assemble into wider scale structural change. (Nickname, brand, emblem, timescale, trajectory, Asian American youth, race, classroom discourse)*

Ontology of Fake: Discerning the Philippine Elite

Hilary Putnam (1975) proposes that a “natural kind” term relies on a division of linguistic labor in which experts discern what is or is not a member of a kind. Centering on a Philippine-elite social kind term, this essay examines how self-appointed experts develop and share “scientific” instruments, or tests, that discern whether someone is a “real” or “fake” elite. These tests report about signs of realness and fakeness by assigning “gentle” and “rough” qualities to speech and body of differentiated social types. This essay demonstrates that such qualia are central to shaping ontologies of social types; that the discerning subject, who speaks from an elevated social position as reflexive expert, is critical to this process; and that the discerner shares expertise by developing tests that rest on different ontologies of emblem. The essay argues that discerning Philippine elite types and their aspiring subtypes and countertypes presupposes an overarching ontology of fake that already renders real elites as fakes.

JAKE HARWOOD AND HOWARD GILES (eds.), Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives

Jake Harwood and Howard Giles (eds.), Intergroup communication: Multiple perspectives . New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. viii, 277. Pb

Appropriation of African American slang by Asian American youth1

29.95. Social psychologists have long been concerned with the ways in which group categories operate in the organization of social life, but communication scholars have been slower to examine such intergroup processes. Editors Jake Harwood and Howard Giles present a pioneering collection on intergroup communication, which, they argue, deserves to stand on its own as a distinct research area. It is notable that while this volume examines intergroup issues, this endeavor is – in and of itself – intergroup in nature, bringing together the fields of social psychology and communication. Covering an impressive breadth of social groups and contexts, the chapters in this collection draw heavily on social identity theory (SIT) in the study of intergroup communication. Linguistic anthropologists and qualitative sociolinguists investigate many of the same issues covered in this volume – most notably culture, gender, sexuality, and multilingualism – with vastly different theoretical models and methodological tools. Still, this book should appeal to all types of scholars who may be at the very least curious about how theoretical trends in social psychology and communication might inform shared areas of concern, despite what may be irreconcilable ontological differences.