The Poetics of Race and Ethnicity

This review explores how attention to poetics, broadly conceived as the aesthetic ordering of communication and the reflexive shaping thereof, can offer productive understandings of how race and ethnicity are constituted. We link research on poetics with research on race and ethnicity in linguistic anthropology and adjacent disciplines, describing scholarship in which these topics have intersected both explicitly and implicitly. In particular, semiotically oriented research has demonstrated how people wield the patterning of communication across various modalities to instantiate and transform ideologies about race and ethnicity. We propose that the poetics of race and ethnicity can describe the mutually constitutive, reflexive shaping of both communicative form and ethnoracial formations, focusing especially on the potential for poetically informed studies of music, sound, and aesthesis more broadly to generate vantages upon processes of identity ascription.