Book Review: Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

I find it most useful, or apt, to think of Jonathan Rosa’s Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race (2019) first and foremost as a gift. Generosity characterizes every aspect of the book—its methodological attention and formal construction; its interdisciplinary range; and its ability and willingness to examine children, families, institutions, and educational personnel in a variety of settings and perspectives. When I say, in the context of a review for Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, that this book is a gift, I mean that it offers readers something special and somewhat unexpected, a spectacular kind of permission to pursue customary interests in unaccustomed directions, along unfamiliar routes, with newly attuned ears and eyes to which interests might address themselves.