ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a review of selected studies on language textbooks that have adopted a critical perspective. They have offered research tools for analysis that have helped to uncover gender, racial and cultural bias and other kinds of exclusion and inequalities that appear in textbooks. Nonetheless, the emphasis on identity or recognition politics (gender issues, racial differences, culturalist approaches or the postmodern concepts of identity and ethnicity) may hide the most important injustice in our capitalist societies, located in the socioeconomic dimension. This is why, in the second part of the chapter, the focus is on an emergent field of language textbooks studies that engage with questions related to social class, consumerist practices and entrepreneurial values. The chapter concludes with a call for a reorientation in this field towards an approach more centered on political economic issues.
