The main outcome of the sabbatical is the production of a number of sole and co-authored articles and edited book collections and a manuscript nearing completion of a sole authored volume entitled Linguistic Citizenship: Subsequent Subjectivities to be submitted. The title captures the thrust of the project, that is, to rethink language in order to reimagine ourselves as human. This involves deconstructing discourses and practices of language, which, honed through centuries of (neo)colonial exploitation, continue to racialize, dehumanize, and estrange different others through the ‘coloniality of language’. Moving beyond linguistic coloniality involves understanding how language informs how, and in what ways we inhabit our bodies and engage with others racially. More precisely, it obliges us to develop a decolonial (socio)linguistics that has its centerpiece a theory and practice of selfhood – that is, subsequent subjectivities. Selfhood in a decolonial (socio)linguistics must tackle the problem of how selves can become something else than they are. How might racialized meetings of tense(d) subjectivities – formed through repeated moments of painful colonial and apartheid trauma - become moments of entanglement? How can we excise what it means to be Human from, what Sylvia Wynter (2003), a Caribbean author and philosopher, calls (the ethnoclass) Man, the White Bourgeois Male? These are questions that need answers if we are to rehabilitate the loving relationships between self and others that in itself is the very foundation of language and homo sapien amans.. Compounding ‘linguistic’ with ‘citizenship’ underscores that we are in this world in the close company of others with whom our foremost means of engagement is language. In its most common guise, citizenship presents as ‘nation-state’ citizenship, the territorial mechanism through which rights to material, economic, judicial and other societal and individual values are differentially distributed across social representations (birthplace, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality). It is a citizenship based on relations of inclusion/exclusion, and kept alive through cruel mechanisms for sorting and discarding those whose colonial/class inheritance is to be forever excluded. However, while a notion of nation-state citizenship may be the edifice on which much of the world is built, it does not exhaust the potential of citizenship for other meanings. Citizenship is also a constructive trope for thinking about (co)existence, offering registers for imagining different ways of a shared being-in-the-world, involving care for the commons, including the dreams, hopes and aspirations of a better world, materially and otherwise, built collectively. Citizenship understood in this sense comprises a political locus for hope. It distils the understanding that recognition by a plurality of others is a precondition of being heard thereby laying the ground for the exercise of agency and the living of ethical lives. It is a sense of citizenship permitting new ontologies of self and others, living in socialities of otherness and difference that are populated by possibility and the engaged human means of its actualization. This is the sense of citizenship articulated in the idea of LC. Language is at the centre of citizenship; ontologically refashioned selves require refashioned languages, just as the refashioning of languages needs new speakers.
The focus of the sabbatical project has been on how speakers address and recuperate the lost semiotics of historically marginalized linguistic agency and voices in transforming societies. It has been about how speakers use, practice, perform and think with and through language(s) as both target for change and simultaneous medium for transformation of self and others, crafting new, emergent subjectivities of (political) speaker-hood with the potential to create new constituencies. The volume explores how acts of LC are enacted by speakers to bring languages into recognition on their own terms and in ways that ultimately serve to transform historical structures of inequity by (re)establishing audibility of different voices and agencies together with the material means that sustain them. Not surprisingly, given how much language-ing has historically been used to silence voice, and the resulting ‘communicational impasse’ that cripples the possibility for true ‘decolonial dialogue’, many acts of LC take place in modalities beyond what can be fully captured by liberal models of language and politics in institutionalized public spheres. The emphasis of LC on features of multilingual choices and uses of language on the margin opens up the potential for understanding the rhetorical foundation of radically different types of speaker agency that go ’against the grain’ (of a conventional politics of language).
Three key constructs that circumscribe LC and that the volume develops across its three major sections (metadiscourses) are love, hope and care. These are the biological fundamentals of Umberto Maturana’s homo sapiens amans - ‘loving human’ – out of which language likely first emerged in contexts of convivial, hopeful and caring collaboration.
Love
Articulations of voice and enactments of agency require ‘recognition’ by others on public arenas. Recognition in LC is where speakers and languages are recognized on their own terms and in ways that ultimately serve to transform historical structures of inequity by (re)establishing audibility of different voices and agencies. The recognition sought through acts of LC, recognition in difference, is therefore an affirmation of the un-like, and acts of LC are fundamentally about the various linguistic/semiotic practices for building communities of plural others in collective processes of becoming-with, the dynamic interchange with others in ongoing and shifting construals of the self and its joint memberships that define our humanity. LC is about letting others ‘appear’ in ways they wish to be recognized, rather than as identities and roles determined by institutional fiat, a process akin to what Michael Hardt (2016) has referred to as ‘love as a genre of politics’, an unselfish recognition of the Other as an autonomous agent, distinct from the self of the loving ego, although ‘in co-existence with Self’.
Hope
A second core dimension dealt with in the volume is hope (the utopic). It is through language and its acts of LC that homo narrans (‘the human storyteller’) imagines new futures and hopes for a better world. Acts of LC articulate the potentials for living otherwise, and give substance to the ‘utopian surplus’ the dreams, and collective aspirations, and the awareness of past and present ‘realities’, pregnant with possible novel ways of living in shared futures, that is inherent in the notion of citizenship generally. In particular focus here is the colonial chronotopics of language. This refers to how liberal-modernist discourses have tended to locate colonized languages ‘out of time’, as inadequate for ‘modern’ societies. Language activism for repatriated futures in, for example, many revitalization programs, language maintenance, or mother tongue education tend to undertake future-oriented modernizing projects on the same modernist idea of language that has disqualified them originally. Indiginization is one instance of a strategy that seeks to return a language to a more authentic condition through the expansion of registers with more home-grown options, but runs the risk of falling short of articulating speakers’ creativity, agency and value systems. Likewise, scripting of language activism in terms of tropes of modernization/intellectualization risks overlooking the dynamism, adaptability, and innovation in how speakers use their languages on an everyday basis in all works of life. This section explores the implication for language activism of a different set of assumptions encapsulated in LC, namely one
where speakers themselves exercise control over their language, deciding what languages are, and what they might mean, and where language issues are discursively tied to a range of social issues – policy issues and questions of equity (Stroud, 2001: 353).
Care
A third dimension is care. An important aspect of citizenship in articulating new and better futures involves care for others, selves and the world in which we live, that is, curation of the ‘commons’, the material and immaterial resources in the world that ‘belong’ to all of humanity, that cannot be appropriated for profit, and that are essential ‘to name and struggle for a particular future and way of life’ . Care is the ethical compass by means of which our dreams and aspirations inform our actions and engagements.
Multilingual education has a crucial role to play in care-ful education given the urgency of engaging with different others in our lived situation of (post)colonial precarity. It can offer a critical space for developing a joint care for ‘the commons’, by bringing into meeting different ways of engaging with the world and different systems of thought and ethical stance through practices of world traveling. LC with its emphasis on plurality of voice has a contribution to make in respect of wider epistemic engagements. As with questions of language policy and language activism, issues of multilingualism in education have historically been dominated by models of linguistic coloniality and its (neo)liberal off-shoots. This section explores how a multilingual education informed by LC would aid the return of other ways of knowing by going beyond the monovocality of singular appropriations of knowledges, and recognizing the plurality of voice and authorship in becoming-with.
Each chapter engages with postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, and covers case studies of LC in practice.