Archakis, A., & Tsakona, V. (eds.). (2024). Exploring the Ambivalence of Liquid Racism: In Between Antiracist and Racist Discourse

Inherently racist assumptions and ideologies seep into discourses which seek to dismantle racism, drip into campaigns which decry discrimination, and flow alongside streams of thought that overtly combat prejudice.This is the premise of this volume; racism is liquid, if not flooding then at least dampening even anti-racist discourses.The goal of this book is to bring readers to a critical examination of how racism is reproduced through ambiguities in language and culture, and also to recognize that anti-racist intent does not ensure anti-racist content.The research presented in this volume falls within the rubric of Critical Discourse Analysis, but a narrow view of this label would belie the many different approaches to discourse analysis found in these studies.With a first chapter which gives an in-depth introduction to the study of discourse, and in particular the scholarship on the many faces of racist discourse, the subsequent chapters each take a particular theoretical and methodological approach to the data.All of the contributions focus on a particular aspect of a particular discourse: the presence of underlying racism in texts which are putatively anti-racist.The term liquid racism (Weaver 2016) has been used to talk about how the ambiguity inherent to language, especially prominent in late modernity, provides the opportunity for reproducing racism within anti-racist discourses.While foundational work using this concept focused on humor and addressed how ambiguity plays a role in the interpretation of jokes, satirical texts, cartoons and the like, the current volume expands the scope of this body of research to include texts and talk which are not intended to amuse but deliver serious content.The discussion of different forms of racism is laid out most clearly in the introductory chapter, but individual chapters also include sophisticated theoretical explorations of the different types of racist discourse.While all racist discourse serves to establish the social superiority of particular dominant groups, many types of racist discourse are not overtly racist and offer the opportunity for deniability or lack of acknowledgement.For example, in everyday racism, practices which perpetuate inequality function under the radar and are not recognized as discrimination; in silent racism, negative thoughts and beliefs about racialized groups fuel discrimination even when they are not uttered.While antiracist discourses seek to actively work against racism, because ideologies about race have been naturalized, it is common to find