Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education

Reclaiming Voices from the South

Zannie Bock, Christopher Stroud

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350049116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Études supérieures

Language and Decoloniality in Higher Education brings together a collection of diverse papers that address, from various angles, the issue of decoloniality, language and transformation in higher education. It reflects the authors' cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Distilled as case studies, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning, and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. Besides a number of decolonial persepectives which readers will be familiar with, this volume also explores a conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed over the past two decades by scholars in southern Africa. In this collection, Linguistic Citizenship is used as a lens to 'think beyond' the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries, and to 're-imagine' multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice. Although each chapter has firm roots in the South African context, these studies have much to offer others in their 'quest for better worlds'. Of particular interest to global scholars are the authors' recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country's multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.

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Loving and Languaging in Higher Education: A Decolonial Horizon

Christopher Stroud and Zannie Bock

Introduction

This volume brings together a collection of diverse chapters, all centring on language, decoloniality and higher education. It brings together a set of different voices that reflect the authors’ cumulative years of experience as educators in higher education in different southern contexts. Using case studies of praxis and explorations of different epistemic perspectives, the authors use a range of decolonial lenses to reflect on questions of knowledge, language and learning in higher education and to build a reflexive praxis of decoloniality through multilingualism. While some of these lenses would be familiar to readers (e.g. the writings of Walter Mignolo, Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Catherine Walsh), this volume also explores an emerging conceptual framework, Linguistic Citizenship, developed, over the past two decades, by scholars in southern Africa (see below and extended discussions in Chapters 2, 5 and 9). In this collection, we use Linguistic Citizenship as a lens to ‘think beyond’ the inherited colonial matrices of language which have shaped this region (and many other southern contexts) for centuries and to ‘re-imagine’ multilingualism – and semiotics, more broadly – as a transformative resource in the broader project of social justice.

In this sense, then, the case studies in this volume offer insights for educators working in a globally transforming world, which, in recent years, has begun to confront a host of social issues, including inequality, racism, migration, poverty, pandemics and environmental sustainability. Given that South Africa has been grappling with these issues for decades (and particularly since the first democratic elections in 1994), the chapters in this volume would have relevance to other contexts undergoing similar socio-economic transformations. All chapters explore the issue of ‘voice’, and the conditions under which students and educators make themselves heard and visible. Some reflect directly on teaching praxis, others consider local and marginalized sources of knowledge and the validation of different world views and ways of relating, while others focus on the histories of ‘language making’ and ‘the literacies of place’ that shape these contexts. What may be of particular interest to global scholars are authors’ recounts of how they have grappled with leveraging the country’s multilingual resources in the project of promoting academic access and success in the face of historical hierarchies of language and social power.

The authors in this volume speak from a particular geographic ‘locus’ as educators in South African universities, in particular, from the Western Cape region. All authors (with the exception of Lynn Mario Menezes de Souza) are (or were) based at one of three regional universities: the University of the Western Cape (UWC), Stellenbosch University (SU) and the University of Cape Town (UCT). All three institutions have very different histories: the first, UWC, was established in 1960 by the Apartheid state for people designated ‘coloured’, as part of the grand scheme of ‘separate education for separate races’.¹ Since then, UWC has emerged as a leading ‘historically disadvantaged’ institution, both in terms of the number of black students that it graduates each year and in terms of its research rankings. Both SU and UCT are leading ‘historically advantaged’ universities established over a century ago for people considered ‘white’ under both the former colonial structures and the more recent Apartheid regime (1948–94). SU has historically catered for Afrikaans-speaking white students, and UCT for English-speaking white students. Thus, the South African higher education landscape reflects more than a century of stratification based on racial and linguistic privilege, and all institutions have had to grapple with how to transform their historical identities and positions and become more inclusive in the face of rising pressures for socio-economic justice and student calls for decolonization. This history, then, provides the backdrop to the case studies in this volume which chart the different authors’ journeys towards ‘decolonial horizons’ (Walsh (2014)).

Loving and languaging in higher education

A prerequisite for an education which is capable of driving a new benevolent human relationality is an adequate understanding of the role of language and, in particular, multilingualism in human relations. In this chapter, we wish to explore the thinking of several (lesser known) Chilean neurobiologists, Maturana and Cabezon (2001) and Maturana and Varela (1980), and their work on language and the biological basis of human relations. We refer to their work as it offers a theory of language emerging as a species-specific, structured system of coordination between humans. At the same time, they link language to the biological basis of communication among all species. These close, cooperative engagements, they argue, are the prerequisites for the survival of the species. Among humans, they argue, language emerged in this context of ‘loving’ and social engagement. We find this a useful overarching frame for the chapters in this volume as it foregrounds the importance of language in social relationalities. This is the hallmark of Linguistic Citizenship, which we see as a tool to pursue educational goals, which would hopefully lead to the creation of new voices, new knowledges and stronger, more cohesive societies.

Maturana and Cabezon (2001) characterize the human condition as caught between the forces of Homo Sapiens Amans and those of Homo Sapiens Arrogans or, in their terms, as lives lived between a culture founded in love and one of patriarchy. ‘Patriarchy’ is the culture ‘founded in the negation of the other, that emphasized relationships of appropriation, competitiveness, struggle, success and control’ (Maturana and Cabezon, 2001: 244). On the other hand, ‘love’, in Maturana and Cabezon’s (2001) usage, refers neither to the physical relationship between intimates, nor to any religious significance. It is rather ‘the biological dynamic system that constitutes trust and mutual acceptance in body and spiritual relations of nearness and intimacy’ (Maturana and Cabezon, 2001: 242) – ‘the biological basis of social phenomena’ (Maturana and Varela, 1980: 268–9). We might hazard the guess that patriarchy is recognizable as what many other authors would call coloniality-modernity, the dark global forces of human and environmental destruction, which manifested (historically) as slavery and colonization and today as (neo)capitalism and environmental destruction.

Such a stance informs a particular interpretation of ‘decoloniality’, which would then comprise a ‘delinking’ of our humanity (Mignolo, 2007) from patriarchy (the inheritance of coloniality) in order to reinstate a ‘culture of love’ and relink with the memories, praxes of living and thinking that were disavowed by coloniality-modernity. Recapturing a life in love would mean an approach to social and personal transformation that is significantly about recalibrating relationships among selves and others and vanquishing or banishing the arrogance and spite that conserves oppressive orders and their institutions. In the particular South African context, a decoloniality of this cut would acknowledge the historical entanglements of life and thought among diverse people and would seek to dismantle categories that divide, such as race, ethnicity and sexuality. Taking account of Fanon’s (1967) observation that black and white subjectivities are constructed in spaces of non-relationality, the decolonial project would involve re-crafting the human to create liveable worlds constituted by cooperation, mutual recognition and non-racialism. It would, quite simply, imply recovering entanglements that bind us together, which in turn would open spaces of relationality. If we are who we are because of our entanglements with others, it is our relationships to others that must be foremost. This would mean engaging critically with ideas and practices that deny, obscure or obfuscate those historical entanglements. The question must be: how can this happen? Through what means can we relearn how to love?

While there is no obvious blueprint for establishing a decoloniality based in ‘loving relationships’, it is clear what does not constitute a way forward. This cannot be a decoloniality of repatriation and restitution of essentialized identities and distinct knowledges, but a search for historical entanglements across imaginary social and epistemological divides. It cannot be a decoloniality that focuses its energies solely on the ‘capture’ of institutions and structures such as universities and schools. For example, the point cannot be to merely replace existing curricula and content with other knowledges or introduce new languages that themselves have long histories of colonial engineering in the hope that they will act as catalysts for change. Although change in curricula and languages must and should happen, experience shows these strategies do not in themselves guarantee a decolonial outcome. Throughout history, countless social movements and innumerable initiatives of individuals and groups have demonstrated time and again that change does not come about easily through protest, political transformation or institutional engagement alone. Racism, sexism and climatism remain scourges of our time (depressingly so, even within the very movements that advocate decolonial delinking). This has prompted Papadopoulos (2018: 3) to ask

what if we approach social movement action not as targeting existing political power but as experimenting with worlds? What if we see social movement action not as addressing existing institutions for redistributing justice but as the creation of alternative forms of existence that reclaim material justice from below?

To the extent that existing institutions are in the hands of our worst selves, Homo Sapiens Arrogans, our decolonial futures lie beyond the structured and institutional present. This does not mean, however, that institutional change should not also be a priority. Rescaling the decolonial project to the human – or better still the relational – does not mean denying the importance of structural and institutional transformation. It does mean, however, vigilance as to how established structures work to accommodate and defuse the potentiality for radical structural transformation in, what Papadopoulos calls, ‘a politics of irregularity’. This is where divergence and difference in thinking and being find affirmation, are co-opted and accommodated, in extant workings of system without fundamental change to these systems (cf. Papadopoulos, 2018: 58). It is to recognize that there are many ways of engaging thinking and knowing, and many modes of thought in the ‘mundane ontologies of everyday life’ (Papadopoulos, 2018: 58, 213) that are ‘invisible’ to the workings of formal structures.

In fact, there is an excess of ways of knowing and relating – what the German philosopher Ernst Bloch would call ‘utopian’, that is, a better way of living that is ‘foreshadowed’ in the present (as in the past) but as yet ‘unrealized’ (cf. Anderson, 2008). Utopian foreshadowings do not fit well with regulated, formal procedures, but inhabit rhizomatically the cracks, fissures and joins that permeate all such structures. It is these utopian seams that must be ‘mined’ for radical, transformational potential and that will ultimately change the structures and institutions in ways not possible to imagine in the current order of doing and thinking.

Decoloniality in this sense comprises the imaginations, creativities and practical crafting of the everyday and its relationships – the getting by, getting along – for which there can be no formal prescription or one size that fits all. The radical utopian possibilities come out of ‘the making of invisible alternative spaces’ – what Bayat (2010) calls ‘social non-movements’, the grassroots socialities that allow people to relate variously, that craft new actors, agencies and forms of awareness out of which alternative ways of relating are made possible when building a world with its own emerging logic and dynamics. It is this that subsequently, and often imperceptibly, supersedes conventional ways of doing things and forces a redesign of existing structures. (On the link between everyday life and social transformation, cf. also Savransky, 2017.)

Acknowledging others (and oneself) through love should lie at the very core of an education which should provide a space for ‘experimentation’. Education is ‘the process by means of which adequate relational behaviors (i.e. cognitive, affective and psychomotor behaviors) are triggered through which another (or oneself) arises as a legitimate other in coexistence with oneself’ (Maturana and Cabezon, 2001: 245). For Maturana and Cabezon, life and cognition are inseparably linked and to ‘learn is to live together’ (2001: 244). They go on to note with respect to intelligence that it is about coordination and acknowledgement rather than (as we tend to assume) about solving (difficult) problems with facility. It is ‘the capacity to participate in a new or old consensual domain that a person, or in general any living being, may exhibit in the course of its interactions’ (2001: 240). Once again, Maturana and Cabezon point to the centrality of love as paramount: ‘Only love expands intelligence, because love as the domain of those behaviors through which the other arises as a legitimate other in co-existence with oneself, opens a human being to see and enter in collaboration’ (2001: 243).

Such a stance on education, love and the human also informs Maturana and Cabezon’s understanding of ‘language’. Although there is an increasing emphasis on the centrality of language in decoloniality, few have interrogated in depth what the idea and practice of decolonial ‘languaging’ require. Not surprisingly, for Maturana and Cabezon, there is an essential link between language and love in the sense of the consensual coordinations of relationality between self and others. Humans are essentially ‘loving, languaging animals’ and the evolutionary history of humans is ‘a history of social life centered on consensuality and cooperation, not on competition or aggressive strife’ (2001: 243). At the same time, human beings exist in language – every facet of our lives is permeated by languaging. Thus, language as a ‘manner of loving must have arisen in the history that gave origins to humans some three million years ago’ (Maturana and Cabezon, 2001: 242).

Thus, if decoloniality is ‘about recovering and conserving what makes us human’, then language has an absolutely key role to play – a much larger part than we are accustomed to accord it. Language as ‘love’ rather than ‘label’ (i.e. language as ‘human relationality’ rather than ‘named entities’) is the means, modality and medium, where energies and relationalities are mobilized in ways that ‘generate alternative and autonomous spaces of existence’ (Papadopoulos, 2018: 3, our emphasis). Together with others, Papadopolous refers to these ‘spaces of otherwise’ as ‘new ontologies’ or, in Crain Soudien’s words, ‘ontological refashionings’ (Soudien, 2014). Maturana and Varela (1980) also inform us that the understanding of language as a domain where relationality with self and others is coordinated in emotions of love requires a theory of language beyond ‘language as a tool of communication’ or symbolization. It also involves recognizing that the idea we have of language and the way we politicize and practise it is still determined by coloniality and its beneficiary lineage, the Homo Sapiens Arrogans.

Linguistic Citizenship

A view of language and multilingualism that is commensurate with relationality is that of Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud, 2001, 2018). Linguistic Citizenship was originally coined out of research into multilingual educational contexts in the geopolitical South (Mozambique and South Africa) (Stroud, 2001, 2009; Stroud and Heugh, 2004; Kerfoot, 2011; Williams and Stroud, 2015) and further developed elsewhere (Lim et al., 2018; Milani and Jonsson, 2018; Rampton et al., 2018). It attempts to capture precisely the essential relationality of language, in particular multilingualism, thereby addressing Maturana and Varela’s (1980) point that humans live in the relational space of language. Its point of departure is the critique of a politics of language (e.g. one defined by a notion of Linguistic Human Rights) that is institutionally driven and which understands language as a particular sort of ‘object’ delimited by ‘rights discourses’. Studying acts of Linguistic Citizenship is thus an attempt to reach an understanding of what language is – what comprises its particular form of relationality.

Acts of Linguistic Citizenship are the semiotic means whereby speakers create transient or more permanent interpersonal engagements, feelings of conviviality and belonging, and a sense of mutual care. They craft new subjectivities that do not necessarily need to be immediately recognized or represented as such in formally regulated Habermasian public spaces. Rather, through exercising – or creating a Linguistic Citizenship – speakers use language to create new sensibilities and open up possibilities for imagining themselves differently – as actors and agents in the process of becoming. Acts of Linguistic Citizenship are at root processes of ‘ontological refashioning’, where speakers approach and ‘redefine’ both the nature of themselves and their circumstances alternatively. They involve the expansion or ‘retooling’ of available linguistic resources and implicate language both as a ‘target’ of change and as a ‘medium’ for social, ontological and epistemic transformation. This is why Linguistic Citizenship, where language is both medium and message, is key to understanding language in the context of education. Thus, approaching education through Linguistic Citizenship mean...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors
• Foreword: A Decolonial Project
• 1 Loving and Languaging in Higher Education: A Decolonial Horizon
• 2 Decolonizing Higher Education: Multilingualism, Linguistic Citizenship and Epistemic Justice
• 3 Indigenous Texts, Rich Points and Pluriversal Sources of Knowledge: Siswana-sibomvana
• 4 Affect, Performance and Language: Implications for an Embodied and Interventionist Pedagogy
• 5 Linguistic Citizenship as Decoloniality: Teaching Hip Hop Culture at an Historically Black University
• 6 Teaching Modern South African History in the Aftermath of the Marikana Massacre: A Multimodal Pedagogy for Critical Citizenship
• 7 Delinking from Colonial Language Ideologies: Creating Third Spaces in Teacher Education
• 8 When Linguists Become Artists: An Exercise in Boundaries, Borders and Vulnerabilities
• 9 Decolonizing Linguistics: A Southern African Textbook Project
• 10 Afterthoughts: Multilingual Citizenship, Humans, Environments and Histories
• Index
• Imprint