Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning

Book excerpt: *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.