This chapter asks how literature and literary criticism contribute to the understanding of Asian American racialization. It traces the emergence of the panethnic construct of Asian America as a radical exercise of global, anticolonial imagination, exploring how Asian Americans are racialized as intermediaries within the United States. Asian American literature captures the dynamism of this construct, Rana argues, drawing out an allegory for literary analysis from Chang-rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker. The tragic characterization of the novel’s protagonist – a spy cast as analyst – renders the model minority myth as mythos, reorienting its trajectory of assimilation and incorporation toward the broader interpretive totality of US militarism and empire. Asian American literature thus enables readers to trace the cocreative relationship between social formations and literary forms, to read not for the representation but for the refiguration of race.

This introduction to the volume provides background on common themes that appear across its chapters. First, it contextualizes the notions of heritage languages and heritage speakers before providing reasons why research on heritage sound systems has lagged behind work on other linguistic areas. It then offers an overview of what we have discovered to date about heritage sound systems, while also pointing out gaps and topics that merit further exploration. Motivated by the discussion in the first portion of this piece, the latter half covers the breadth, goals, and novel aspects of the current volume before providing brief summaries of the empirical studies carried out in each of its seventeen chapters.

Gilles Forlot, also denounces French monolingualism and a homogenizing view of the Republic. He  advocates fighting off these “zombies” as he describes them by dealing with ‘the attention to exceptions in language systems, the illegitimacy of all forms of language contact, [and] a supposedly necessary balanced set of skills when one learns/speaks a language.”

Through the perspectives of raciolinguistics, language ideology, power, and identity, Kendall King explores the tectonics of theoretical changes in applied linguistics over the last thirty years. She challenges the concepts of the native speaker, motivation, and even the notion of language itself. From the study of language loss, maintenance, and revitalization, she moved to superdiverse contexts. She discovered the hybridity and fluidity of languages and cultures, and shifted toward a more holistic view of bilingualism and bilinguals.

Chapter 18 first identifies the theoretical framework and key components of a pronunciation learning approach. It then shares the results of a small-scale study that investigated the efficacy of the approach in a tutoring setting. The results provided empirical evidence supporting the approach and revealed seven factors that contributed to changes in the tutors’ perceptions of their expert knowledge, agency, and professional identity as pronunciation teachers.