Abstract
In this paper, I will trace some of the work I have been engaged in for the last decades, most recently in the context of Southern Africa within the institutional ambit of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape. The brief of the Center, founded in 2013, was to embark on a project of intellectual reorientation, namely a significant rethinking of multilingualism and the development of a new discourse with which to approach interdisciplinary work in the humanities and the education sciences.
The brief should be seen in the larger context of challenges facing contemporary South Africa in building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In Achille Mbembe’s words, such a challenge requires of us to:
tease out alternative possibilities for thinking life and human futures in this age of neoliberal individualism, /where/ we need to connect in entirely new ways the project of non-racialism to that of human mutuality. (Mbembe, 2016)
Multilingualism as a nomenclature for how the practice and representation of encounters across difference are organized linguistically ostensibly promises a site par excellence for the nurturing of new forms of human mutuality. However, constructs of multilingualism have historically been important tools for the racialized ‘othering’ of difference and a powerful mechanism, in common with other forms of neoliberal technologies of coloniality, for the reconfiguration of essential features of colonial social logics in contemporary ‘postcolonial’ societies (Stroud & Guissemo, 2015).
In this presentation, I ask what it might mean to conceive of multilingualism as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers can be troubled, and discuss some of the challenges of thinking multilingualism as a decolonial project of human mutuality.
Reference
Stroud, C. and M. Guissemo Linguistic Messianism. In Multilingual Margins: A journal of multilingualism from the periphery. 2 (2): 7-21.
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