The Otherness of Talk: Raciolinguistics and the White Foreign Body of English in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Though race is rooted in ideas of biological essentialism, language is one of the key modalities through which it is realised in everyday practice. Recent attention in linguistic anthropology has been directed at raciolinguistics: the ways race is constructed as a social category through discourse and interaction. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in English language schools located in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, I explore the ways language practices are ascribed to groups of people based on racialised appearances through the schools’ promotional activities. Advertising for these schools juxtaposes images of white bodies with brand names that performatively invoke a range of modernising sentiments, establishing an indexical connection between foreign language and new forms of subjectivity. Against the backdrop of Chinese discourses of neoliberal self-improvement, English allows people to narrate their transformations from local to global social actors while transcending the limitations of their own ethnic identities.