In search of the ‘embodied’ Pretoguês: language education and the Portuguese language spoken by Afro-Brazilian communities

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Black Culture as Resistance in Education Across the African Diaspora: Transnational Solidarities in Brazil, South Africa, U.S., and Caribbean

Proposal

Nearly 56% of total population identify black in Brazil, making up most of Brazilians in accordance with last censuses. Following around four centuries of enslavement, white people are in charge in the country, since livelihood opportunities to highly paid salaries of top officials in markets and governments, leaving black communities under precariousness, unemployment, mass incarceration, and poverty. Recent sociolinguistic accounts have been contending the possibility of a legitimate language that has been originated from Africans who were forcibly brought from their ethnicities in Africa and enslaved. On the other hand, Africans not only brought their Niger-Congo family languages, but developed out linguistic practices in their communities to the point that our Portuguese moved over from European Portuguese toward becoming what black anthropologist Lélia González (1988) termed Pretoguês. Rather than theorizing creolization as did recent accounts in sociolinguistics, I draw on González to urge a Pretoguês which works as a technology for the speaking of Portuguese language by enslaved Africans in the past and Afro-Brazilians nowadays, bringing our bodies back from the power of coloniality. In doing so, this paper seeks to analyze the perceptions of Pretoguês language in Brazil where monolingualism is set as an invented, monoglossic and racist language ideology. On confronting those ideologies, I assume our Afro-Brazilian Portuguese emerges from our black ‘embodiments’ resulted from the rituals and the ancestral way of looking at languages as discourse and not as linguistic function (Makoni&Mashiri, 2007) that regards language structure and patterns as perceived prior to language use. Mufwene (2001) questions the sense of creoles as understood like a structural process, thus helping us face variationist studies used to deny the existence of creoles in Brazil. The push for a Brazilian Portuguese with no undergone influences from enslaved Africans is connected to the racist ideologies of miscegenation that demanded the necessity of whitening in Brazil. Therefore, whereas reclaiming the absence of legitimate aspects of Afro-Brazilian linguistic practices, white linguists such as Naro&Scherre (2007) overvalue European Portuguese at the level of gazing at creolized structural processes which obviously could not be observed in African crowds since black communities were forced to survive in a whitening world. On overvaluing European Portuguese, they undermine the “embodied” Brazilian Portuguese spoken by black communities across the country. The results report the much needed recognition of black student’s sense of speech community and put forward the uses of Pretoguês that, neither creolized not assimilated, look strategic, situated and overarching for the way black communities have to deal with a white supremacist country they live in.

Author

• GABRIEL NASCIMENTO, FEDERAL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN BAHIA, BRAZIL