Paper short abstract:

Grounded in ethnography, this paper documents identity politics of the African diaspora in the Czech Republic. Theoretically grounded in raciolinguistics, we provide narratives of African individuals who experience that there are limits to the significance of language against the power of race.

Paper long abstract:

Grounded in ethnography, this paper emerges from a project which aims at developing a nuanced account of the social and linguistic identity politics of Africans in the Czech Republic. Some studies have addressed historical trajectories of people with African heritage in Czechia, but there has been no systematic attempt to examine their contemporary lives. While Czech society has remained more linguistically and racially homogenous than most other European nation states, there is now a noticeable presence of African diasporic people living in the country. In this paper, we provide narratives of African individuals living in the Czech Republic who have varying degrees of Czech language competencies and multiple linguistic life trajectories. Theoretically grounded in raciolinguistics and an approach which sees language and race as co-constituents in dynamics of Othering, we examine the lived realities of Africans in the Czech Republic through a multidisciplinary and ethnographic lens. The study brings to the fore complex racialization processes and linguistic challenges among African residents in the country. Preliminary findings suggest that while there are many instances of racism individuals experience, it is also the lack of Czech language competencies which cause various forms of discrimination. The findings also suggest that on the one hand, there are instances where Czech language skills have the capacity to mitigate the challenges in racial discourses. On the other hand, however, there are limits to the power of language in face of racial prejudices and discrimination.