Between race and class: a critical review of linguistic scholarship on African continuities in Brazilian Portuguese

• Autor(a) principal: Avelar, Marcus Vinicius
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Domínios de Lingu@gem
• Texto Completo: https://seer.ufu.br/index.php/dominiosdelinguagem/article/view/46553
• topic: Africanismos; Raça; Classe social; Ideologias semióticas; Ideologias linguísticas; Africanisms; Race; Social class; Semiotic ideologies; Language ideologies

In this essay, I investigate (socio)linguistic scholarship on African continuities in Brazilian Portuguese to analyze the semiotic ideologies that inform academic literature on this topic. I argue that there are two main schools of thought within this field: the one that sees race as a prominent analytical category, and the one that favors social class over race. I claim that there are three commonalities to different frameworks analyzed here: (1) racialized speech is often equated with Africannes; (2) Africanness is commonly treated as an index of pre-modern times; and (3) Africanness is perceived as foreign to the modern present. In addition, I also suggest that authors who privilege social class over race – as an analytical tool – might be aligned with the ideology of racial democracy.