ABSTRACT
This book foregrounds contributions to research on Black languages by Black scholars in Africa and the Americas. It identifies key epistemological and political underpinnings of what we are here calling “Black Linguistics”: a postcolonial scholarship that seeks to celebrate and create room for insurgent knowledge about Black languages. Black Linguistics is committed to studies of Black languages by Black speakers and to analyses of the sociopolitical consequences of varying conceptualizations of and research on Black languages. The overall goal of Black Linguistics is to expunge and reorder elitist and colonial elements within language studies. In so doing, Black Linguistic scholarship will contribute to a rethinking of the discipline. By challenging conventional constructs such as multilingualism, indigenous languages, linguistic human rights-and even the term “language” itself-Black Linguistics research will contribute to the formation of a new intellectual climate. Black Linguistics seeks to argue that a notion such as multilingualism, unless handled carefully, becomes a plural variant of monolingualism, that indigenous language is itself a product of colonial language ideology, and that it is unrealistic to imagine that social equality can be realized through linguistic human rights when notions about “language” and “rights” are both open to contestation. In this introductory essay, we examine the effects of a Black Linguistics perspective on the nature and type of research we conduct and the ways we communicate our work to our constituencies in and outside of the Academy.
