Hearing voices and reading agency: Frontiers in southern multilingualisms

Drawing on a growing body of de-colonial literature that invokes the term ‘southern’ to emphasise hegemonic relationships that both exclude and appropriate knowledge, theory and expertise generated beyond the metropole, we... [ view full abstract ]

Drawing on a growing body of de-colonial literature that invokes the term ‘southern’ to emphasise hegemonic relationships that both exclude and appropriate knowledge, theory and expertise generated beyond the metropole, we continue a long history of alternative debates. Their sources, traced through centuries of scholarly works in Africa, Asia and the Middle East (e.g. Heugh, 2017), have recently become associated with ‘de-coloniality’ (e.g. Kusch, 1970; Smith, 1999; Mignolo, 2011), ‘southern theory’ (Connell, 2007), and ‘southern epistemologies’ (Santos, 2012). Together, these authors argue that the art of listening to and being able to read and understand systems of knowledge beyond the metropole has been lost within ‘North Atlantic’ academia since the 19^th century.

We illustrate disconnected discourses between communities positioned by others as being on the periphery or the metropole. We do this by re-examining the ethics and appropriacy of how theories, policies, plans and methodologies ‘for multilingual’ contexts are transported from one context to another. We do so through close examination of these phenomena as they appear in the ‘borderland’ and ‘fragile’ contexts of East Africa, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and Nepal. We illustrate how community stakeholders recontextualise, remember, resist or appropriate these discourses through de-colonial practices. Through close examination of conversations with Māori (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Anangu (remote South Australia) agents, we re-consider the ethics of research practice and a reversal of centre and periphery perspectives. In this we draw attention to how we understand learning to hear, comprehend and translate southern knowledge and agency.

References

Connell, R. 2007. Southern Theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Heugh, K. 2017. Re-placing and re-centring Southern multilingualisms. A de-colonial project, pp. 209-229. In C. Kerfoot & K. Hyltenstam (eds). Entangled discourses. South-North orders of visibility. New York & London: Routledge.

Kusch, R. [1970] 2010. Indigenous and popular thinking in América. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Santos, B. 2012. Public sphere and epistemologies of the South. Africa Development 37(1): 4–67.

Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books