Language and race

1. Enlightenment
 Civilizing mission → justified subjugation through imperial language.
 Race/language connection?
 Black/white binarism.
 Ex. English ‘black’ negative connotations-
 Kant’s hierarchy
 Chromatic signifiers in language
 Arbitrariness of the signifiers: race misleading but focus of representation
 Aryan/Semites
 Race: reveals the function of language in constructing the most profound and pervasive category of
human difference. Lang of race instrumental in post-colonial language. Unveils the difficulties in
other categories of human discrimination and identification : race/culture.
 ‘Race’ timeline.
o 1508→ First used in the English language by Dunbar in a poem as a literary
word denoting a class of persons or things. Remained throughout
seventeenth and eighteenth century.
o Late 1600s→ Bernier’s categories based on facial character and skin color.
o 1764→ Kant ‘races of mankind’. Biologically or physically distinctive
categories of human beings. Inserted it into a vocabulary of discrimination.
o Late 1700→ widespread interest between language and race.
o 1800s→ Relation external/inner capacities. Freeman “natural instinct of
mankind connects race and language”.
 Language one feature of concepts to the racial grouping and inheritance idea elaboration.
2. Ernest Rénan and the racial origin of language
 Language determines world view / social and cultural being determines language.
 Rénan conflated `race’ and ‘culture’.
 Rejected the notion of biological races, proffering the theory of ‘linguistic races’.
 Language is key.
 ‘Race’: physical race/cultural race.
 Five ‘documents’ which determine a race within the human species:

o separate language,
o literature with identifiable characteristics,
o religion,
o history,
o civilization.
 Arbitrariness of skin color related to dominance.
 Which comes first, language or culture?
 Language to which a culture gives birth becomes its restraint and limit.
 Grammar/race relation.
 Ethnocentric assumption.
 Language is deterministically connected to world view: privileges static and rigid.
 Seligman: language not adequate guide to race. Communalist / ecumenical languages.
3. Philology and race
 Developed out of an interest in the link between language and the essential identity of communities.
 Interest arose as a result of the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages and the
emergence of the theory that all European languages developed from Sanskrit.
  Science of linguistic absorbed in the doctrine of ‘racial anthropology’.
 Confusion between language and race underpinned by the need of imperial powers to find basis for
defining their dominance over their colonial populations.
 A scientific basis for comparative linguistics.
 Competing imperial pretensions. Opposition to slavery.
 Monogenism and polygenism.
 Doctrine of racialist thinking.
 Church→ purity of language.
4. Sartre, Fanon and the decolonization of race
 Race thinking.
 Sartre: black poetry as a response to the inadequacy of language.
 Language is not transparent for the black writer.
 Fanon means proficiency in language represents civilization. Use of language makes a person signifier
of the culture.
 Slavery for the black man/slavery for the white man.
5. Race and writing
 Problems of race are problems of language.
 Gates identifies the function of post-colonial and ‘black’ language: the insertion of difference.
 Dominance discourse constructs its others.
 Post-colonial criticism: theory does not exist in a vacuum.
 ‘Race’ becomes, according to Brathwaite, an organic feature of literary representation.