ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how poststructuralist approaches to the analysis of language, diaspora, and migration can critically reframe understandings of linguistic practices and social identities. Rather than taking diasporas for granted as naturally occurring phenomena, we point to institutional frameworks, cultural ideologies, and politico-economic structures that organize processes of diasporization. Such an analysis of diasporization makes it possible to understand how particular languages and populations are recognized as diasporic or domestic – foreign or indigenous – in ways that often erase their histories in a given context. Thus, for example, English language use is not typically interpreted as a sign of diaspora in the United States despite its anchoring in histories of migration and displacement in this settler colonial context. In contrast, although Spanish language use predates English language use in the United States, it is often framed as a “foreign” language and its users are seen as (im)migrant, transnational, and diasporic regardless of whether they were born and raised within the fifty states or other US territories. Moreover, indigenous languages and their users occupy a precarious status vis-à-vis histories of colonialism and ongoing reconfigurations thereof that organize conceptions of the legitimacy of particular populations and practices within a given political context. These fraught dynamics illustrate the importance of carefully tracking the uneven ways in which processes of diasporization organize language hierarchies and societal inclusion and exclusion.
