Sounding human the raciolinguistic genealogy of black speakerhood and white-duplicity Justin Lance Pannell

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Pannell, Justin Lance, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Education., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Education.

Black studies.

African American studies.

Language.

0515.

0325.

0296.

0679.

Local Subjects:

Education.

Black studies.

African American studies.

Language.

0515.

0325.

0296.

0679.

Genre:

Academic theses

Physical Description:

1 online resource (286 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 87-12A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2026

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation bridges educational linguistics and Black Studies to trace a genealogy of Black speakerhood, conceptions of language, and their imbrications from early theological and proto-racial formations in late antiquity to contemporary educational linguistics. Its goal is to denaturalize long-standing anti-Black raciolinguistic ideologies while mobilizing Black language practices and epistemologies as sites of ideological critique. As a raciolinguistic genealogy, it focuses on the intersections of race and language, demonstrating the contours and contingency of hegemonic raciolinguistic ideologies and highlighting alternative and marginalized ways of imagining language, speakerhood, culture, and Blackness. Employing Sylvia Wynter's framework of modernist genres of humanness-or "Man"-this dissertation develops several linked theoretical interventions, including language ideologies of humanness, ideologies of fungible Black sound, and white-duplicity. Language ideologies of humanness register the co-constitution of models of personhood and speakerhood. Ideologies of fungible Black sound account for the mutating ways in which Blackness has been disarticulated from models of personhood through the denial of Black speakerhood. White-duplicity explains the structural logic that simultaneously requires the negation and recognition of Blackness within these models. It further indicates how this structural feature generates subjectivities and praxes that enable forms of Black critique outside of the terms of Man. While theorizing these interventions, this project analyzes a wide variety of archives including premodern religious texts, Enlightenment philosophy, narratives of Middle Passage and enslavement, nineteenth-century evolutionist philology, biology, and philosophy, twentieth-century anthropology, linguistics, education, psychology, and foundational texts of educational linguistics. Ultimately, the dissertation argues that educational linguistics has inherited and reproduced anti-Black presumptions of linguistic deficit that belong to a much longer genealogy of Black speakerhood. By situating educational linguistics within this longer genealogy, this dissertation reconfigures debates centered on themes such as language competence, deficit, and appropriateness as symptomatic of deeper ontological presumptions that underlie modernist models of race, language, personhood, and speakerhood. It concludes by reflecting on how both educational linguistics and Black Studies can more fully conceptualize and intervene in the historical and contemporary entanglements of Blackness and language

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 87-12, Section: A.

Advisors: Flores, Nelson Committee members: Williams, Heather; Cioè-Peña, María

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2026

Vendor supplied data

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798247973799

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license