The Bloomsbury Handbook of Discourse Analysis by Hyland Ken;Paltridge Brian;Wong Lillian;

Author:Hyland, Ken;Paltridge, Brian;Wong, Lillian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Discourse and race

ANGEL M. Y. LIN AND RYUKO KUBOTA

INTRODUCTION

Many researchers have investigated the idea of ‘race’ as something constructed in discourse (i.e. a discursive construction), how discourse pigeon-holes people into racial categories (i.e. racialization processes), and the perpetuation and reproduction of racial stereotypes and discrimination of marginalized groups in society. In this body of work, researchers have often drawn on cultural studies, critical race theory and postcolonial studies, apart from the analytical tools of different approaches to discourse analysis. In this chapter we outline key studies which have contributed to this topic. Instead of attempting to be exhaustive, we aim at highlighting intellectual milestones in this area and pointing towards some directions for future research.

DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF RACE: PRODUCTION OF ‘SELF’ AND ‘OTHER’

Early critical studies have exposed the historical emergence of the ideology of racism by analysing how the white European colonialist discourse of race was formed both in conjunction with and in support of the slave trade and slavery institutions. Frey (1984), in his book on Black history, documented and critiqued the discourses of key figures in the colonialist era in the development of the ideology of racism. He pointed out:

Once the English slave trade, English sugar-producing plantation slavery, and English manufacturing industry had begun to operate as a trebly profitable interlocking system, the economic basis had been laid for all those ancient scraps of myth and prejudice to be woven into a more or less coherent racist ideology: a mythology of race.

(Frey 1984: 134)

Cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy are two key figures in problematizing the discursive construction of ‘the West and the Rest’ (Hall 1992: 276), and the concept of ‘race’ (Gilroy 2002: 36). Hall pointed out that ‘the West’ is not a fact of geography, but a historical construct discursively produced and reproduced in colonialist discourses and it functions to classify societies and people into different simplified and fixed (i.e. essentialist) categories. It produces knowledge about the superior (White) West and the inferior (non-White) Rest; it discursively constructs both the binary categories of cultural ‘Self’ and ‘Other’ and binary sets of knowledge about them (e.g. the civilized, advanced, superior West vs the uncivilized, primitive, inferior Rest).

Similarly, ‘race’ is also a concept constructed in these colonialist discourses. As Gilroy (2002) observed:

Accepting that skin “color”, however, meaningless we know it to be, has a strictly limited basis in biology, opens up the possibility of engaging with theories of signification which can highlight the elasticity and the emptiness of “racial” signifiers as well as the ideological work which has to be done in order to turn them into signifiers in the first place. This perspective underscores the definition of “race” as an open political category, for it is struggle that determines which definition of “race” will prevail and the conditions under which they will endure or wither away.

(Gilroy 2002: 36)

Gilroy’s point is that racial terms (i.e. ‘racial signifiers’) do not have biological basis but are politically constructed in ideological discourses to denigrate and label groups of people marginalized in society.

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