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Paper short abstract:

Acknowledging the dialectal, dialogical, and dialectical aspects of language, this presentation adopts a decolonial approach to unpacking how linguistic landscapes depict African descended people both across the Afro-Atlantic as well as across colonial and neocolonial paradigms of domination.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation considers the public representation of people of African descent in the Afro-Atlantic in general and in Puerto Rico in particular, from a multimodal critical discourse analysis perspective. Puerto Rico is a particularly interesting case, because: 1) during the first 350 years of its colonial history, the majority of the island’s inhabitants were of African descent, while during the following 170 years of its colonial history, conscious policies of ‘whitening’ the island by promoting immigration from Europe have been adopted first by the Spanish (1493-1898) and then by the US (1898-present) administrations; and 2) while, as is the case with many other islands of the Caribbean, Puerto Rico is still a colony in the older sense of the word, over the past decade it has also become a neo-colony under a regime of structural adjustment imposed by the US banks, similar to the regimes that have been imposed by the World Bank/IMF/WTO on the so-called ‘independent’ nations of Africa and the Americas. Responding to Bakhtin’s critique of the study of discourse for its failure to acknowledge the dialectal, dialogical, and dialectical aspects of language as a point of departure, I adopt a decolonial approach to unpacking how linguistic landscapes depict African descended people both geographically across the Afro-Atlantic as well as temporally across colonial and neocolonial paradigms of domination.