This book, which combines scholarly articles with interviews, seeks to imagine a decolonized sociolinguistics. All the chapters are firmly grounded in southern approaches to knowledge production, focusing not only on epistemology but also on the complex relationship between epistemology and ontology. The chapters address issues ranging from author positionality to the central theorists of a southern sociolinguistics, and roam from the language classroom to the church, in ways which invite us to begin to decolonize ourselves and rethink normative assumptions about everything from academic writing to research methods and language teaching. The book provides scholars and teachers with inspiration for how to teach linguistics in ways that challenge colonial hegemonies and that allow one to ‘do’ sociolinguistics otherwise. It also makes a powerful argument that debates about decolonization, southern theory and social justice are not just academic pursuits: what is at stake is our future and how we imagine it.
Table of Contents:
Contributors
Preface
Chapter 1. Ana Deumert and Sinfree Makoni: Introduction: From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics
Chapter 2. Jaspal Naveel Singh: ‘Purifying’ Hindi Translanguaging from English and Urdu Emblems: A Sociolinguistic Decolonization of the Hindu Right?
Chapter 3. Pia Lane: The South in the North: Colonization and Decolonization of the Mind
Chapter 4. Conversation with Ellen Cushman
Chapter 5. Alastair Pennycook: From Douglas Firs to Giant Cuttlefish: Reimagining Language Learning
Chapter 6. Nana Aba Appiah Amfo and Dorothy Pokua Agyepong: Making the Secular Sacred: Sociolinguistic Domains and Performance in Christian Worship
Chapter 7. Cristine Severo and Sinfree Makoni: The Relevance of Experience: Decolonial and Southern Indigenous Perspectives of Language
Chapter 8. Alan S.R. Carneiro and Daniel N. Silva: From Anthropophagy to the Anthropocene: On the Challenges of Doing Research in Language and Society in Brazil and the Global South
Chapter 9. Jane Akinyi Ngala Oduor: Localizing National Multilingualism in Some Countries in East Africa
Chapter 10. Conversation with Lynn Mario Menezes De Souza
Chapter 11. Sibonile Mpendukana and Christopher Stroud: Thoughts on 'Love' and Linguistic Citizenship in Decolonial (Socio)linguistics
Chapter 12. Marcelyn Oostendorp: ‘Sociolinguistics Maak My Skaam [Sociolinguistics Makes Me Ashamed]’: Humour as Decolonial Methodology
Chapter 13. Ana Deumert and Sinfree Makoni: Decolonial Praxis and Pedagogy in Sociolinguistics: Concluding Reflections
Chapter 14. Crispin Thurlow: Commentary: From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics – A Radical Listening
Chapter 15. Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta: Commentary: Mobile Gazing, On Ethical Viability and Epistemological Sustainability
Index
About the Author :
Ana Deumert is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research is located in the broad field of African sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. She is co-editor of Struggles for Multilingualism and Linguistic Citizenship (2022, Multilingual Matters) and Colonial and Decolonial Linguistics: Knowledges and Epistemes (2020, Oxford University Press).
Sinfree Makoni is Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and Program in African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA, and is an Extraordinary Professor at North West University and University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa. His main research interests are language and politics and Southern Theories. He is co-editor of the Multilingual Matters series Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies.
Review :
This book is a bold and timely contribution to debates about the role of power, privilege and perspective in the creation of knowledge. Particularly impressive is how contributors weave moving and personal stories of their experiences as scholars together with their empirically rich and theoretically complex accounts of their scholarship. This volume is a generously provocative intervention that provides a compass for future journeys in the field.
Akin to a capoeirista who swerves and slides and swings in syncopated disobedience to colonial oppression, this book has ginga. Each chapter engages southern theory not in mere references here and there but as integral to a project of rethinking language, re-shaping unjust worlds, and reimagining futures beyond our troubled times. The authors powerfully show how to decolonize our minds and de-Westernize our eyes and ears towards a sociolinguistic praxis that moves, grooves, and nourishes us.
In this critical and exciting collection, Deumert and Makoni introduce us, through the multiple voices and perspectives of authors from a variety of disciplinary and geographical positions, to different forms of disciplinary disobedience and epistemological delinking that provide a new foundation for the project of decolonizing sociolinguistics. A fascinating volume and a must read for those interested in the decolonial turn in the social sciences.
Each chapter offers deep engagement with the contributing authors’ histories through narration of their personal experiences. Deumert and Makoni invite us to find our own paths through this text, to navigate a non-linear chronology of its contents, as each of its chapters stands alone as equally insightful, timely, and pertinent [...] This is a book that can not only be approached as multi-stop journey and a guided tour of critical debates from a multiplicity of perspectives, but also may be regarded as a leisure tour that invites sight-seeing and impromptu detours along the way.
...an extremely interesting volume that shows the relevance of Southern thinking today, not only in critically reading mainstream sociolinguistics but also in proposing new paths for sociolinguistic thinking.
