Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 285 pp. Pb $31.99.

When I first saw Cambridge University Press's announcement of Lisa Green's book, I was quite excited, because a systematic, comprehensive introductory book on African American English had been lacking in the field for quite a while. But now one is available and – to start with my overall impression – it is very good. In what follows I survey the book's contents as well as offer critical assessment of its goals and how they are achieved.

This volume revisits, as its title states, the theory and practice of reversing language shift (RLS) first proposed by Fishman in 1991. A dozen of the original case studies are reanalyzed and several more are added, producing a rich source of detail on some of the specific situations of language shift and efforts to reverse it. Fishman contributes introductory and concluding chapters as well as one of the case studies (Yiddish); other authors cover Navajo, New York Puerto Rican Spanish, Québec French, Otomí, Quechua, Irish, Frisian, Basque, Catalán, Oko, Andamanese, Ainu, Hebrew, immigrant languages in Australia, indigenous languages in Australia, and Maori. The resulting book provides a wealth of information about language shift and public policy directed toward RLS, but its aims are broader than that.

In this article, I ask how the body is discursively constructed within the wellness industry. I analyze a corpus of articles from the Goop franchise, examining how bodies are constructed, and how subjects are impelled to act within contemporary neoliberal risk culture. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis reveals that the body is ultimately constructed as unwell and at risk, by virtue of its presence in the environment. Faced with this inescapable risk, the neoliberal citizen is responsible for managing the self in ever-increasing domains. I link the particularities of this discursive embodiment to larger cultural imperatives of self-surveillance, discipline, and control, and argue that it is particularly a white female subject who is interpellated within this discourse. Throughout, the wellness industry is revealed as propelling the interminable cycle of the project of the self, and as a contemporary mechanism for the reproduction of docile white female bodies. (Discursive embodiment, neoliberal ideology, risk society, corpus analysis, critical discourse analysis, feminist critique)*

This study explores the emergence and developments through time of a semiotic artefact, the shield, used by demonstrators in violent anti-government protests in contemporary Venezuela. Drawing on the concept of discourse itineraries (Scollon 2008), the material and semiotic transformations this artefact underwent are mapped through various protest cycles, whilst considering the semiotic enrichment of century-long traditions of shields that inform the various functions they play within current day itineraries. The study concludes by discussing the advantages of using the concept of discourse itineraries for understanding moments in the life cycle of semiotic artefacts in the linguistic landscape and outlines future opportunities to expand the analysis of shields beyond the Venezuelan case. (Linguistic landscape of protest, discourse itineraries, semiotic artefact, shields, Venezuela)*