Decolonial Voices, Language and Race: (1 Global Forum on Southern Epistemologies)

In the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, #rhodesmustfall and the Covid-19 pandemic, this groundbreaking book echoes the growing demand for decolonization of the production and dissemination of academic knowledge. Reflecting the dynamic and collaborative nature of online discussion, this conversational book features interviews with globally-renowned scholars working on language and race and the interactive discussion that followed and accompanied these interviews. Participants address issues including decoloniality; the interface of language, development and higher education; race and ethnicity in the justice system; lateral thinking and the intellectual history of linguistics; and race and gender in a biopolitics of knowledge production. Their discussion crosses disciplinary boundaries and is a vital step towards fracturing racialized and gendered epistemic systems and creating a decolonized academia.

Table of Contents:
Contributors Acknowledgements Foreword Sinfree Makoni, Magda Madany-Saa, Bassey E. Antia, Rafael Lomeu Gomes: Introduction Chapter 1. Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Language and Decolonization in Institutions of Higher Learning in Africa Chapter 2. Christopher Hutton: Linguistics, Race and Fascism Chapter 3. Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny: Struggle, Voice, Justice: A Conversation and Some Words of Caution about the Sociolinguistics We Hope For    Chapter 4. Robbie Shilliam: Black Bodies Chapter 5. John Baugh: Linguistics for Legal Purposes Bassey E. Antia: Epilogue: Transcending Metonymic Reason: Foregrounding Southern Coordinates of Sociolinguistic Thought and Rethinking Academic Cultures Index

About the Author :
Sinfree Makoni is Professor in Applied Linguistics and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA, and is an extraordinary professor at the University of the North West, South Africa. His main research interests are language and politics and Southern Theories. He is the author of Innovations and Challenges to Applied Linguistics from the Global South (co-authored with Alastair Pennycook, 2020, Routledge). Magda Madany-Saa is a PhD Candidate in Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education, and a TESL Instructor at Pennsylvania State University, USA. Her research interests include decolonial theory and methodology, critical interculturality, language policy and translingualism. She has experience teaching Spanish in Poland and English in Ecuador, as well as training in-service English teachers in Latin America. Bassey E. Antia is Professor of Linguistics at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His teaching and research interests span multilingualism (in higher education), language policy, terminology, health communication, corpus linguistics, decoloniality, political economy of English, French as a foreign language and translation studies. He is co-editor of Corpus Linguistics and African Englishes (with Alexandra U. Esimaje and Ulrike Gut, 2019, John Benjamins). Rafael Lomeu Gomes is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MultiLing - Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan in the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway. His research interests include multilingualism, social theory, immigration, digitally-mediated communication, and media discourses.

Review :
This collection of chapters and comments provides potent and polyphonic examples of how collaborative thinking may contribute to decolonizing our structures of knowledge production and dissemination. By focusing on global and common themes, this book opens up space for an ethical and political dialogue between the North and the South. It offers inspiring examples on how we can challenge the capitalist face of scholarship. How sociolinguistics would look if it were conceptualized through Southern discourses is the running thread throughout not just this volume but, so far, the entire decolonial series of the Global Forum from which the volume is derived. This book is a must-read for scholars in both the North and South interested in the decolonizing of Northern sociolinguistics. This book is a thorough deconstruction and articulation of complex topics including language, decolonization, race, struggle, justice, Black bodies, and the role of language in judicial proceedings.