Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil(Routledge Advances in Second Language Studies)

*Winner of the 2019 AAAL First Book Award* Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil provides a critical overview and original sociolinguistic analysis of the African American experience in second language learning. More broadly, this book introduces the idea of second language learning as "transformative socialization": how learners, instructors, and their communities shape new communicative selves as they collaboratively construct and negotiate race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class identities. Uju Anya’s study follows African American college students learning Portuguese in Afro-Brazilian communities, and their journeys in learning to do and speak blackness in Brazil. Video-recorded interactions, student journals, interviews, and writing assignments show how multiple intersecting identities are enacted and challenged in second language learning. Thematic, critical, and conversation analyses describe ways black Americans learn to speak their material, ideological, and symbolic selves in Portuguese and how linguistic action reproduces or resists power and inequity. The book addresses key questions on how learners can authentically and effectively participate in classrooms and target language communities to show that black students' racialized identities and investments in these communities greatly influence their success in second language learning and how successful others perceive them to be.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why a book on race in language learning? Chapter 1: The African American experience in language study: A review of the research Chapter 2: Translanguaging identities Chapter 3: Telling black stories in language learning research Chapter 4: Nina’s story: Race and ethnicity in classrooms and outside Chapter 5: Didier’s story: Translanguaging black manhood in multicultural contexts Chapter 6: Leti’s story: The racialized, gendered, and social classed body Chapter 7: Rose’s story: Redefining participation and success Chapter 8: Communities and investments in learning a new language

About the Author :
Uju Anya is Assistant Professor of Second Language Learning in the College of Education at Pennsylvania State University

Review :
"This compelling and erudite volume should be required reading for foreign language educators and study abroad professionals." –Celeste Kinginger, Department of Applied Linguistics, Pennsylvania State University, USA