Southern Multilingualisms and Transperipheral Knowledge Circulation (20254)
SS25 Thematic Colloquium
Southern Multilingualisms and Transperipheral Knowledge Circulation
South-south knowledge circulation offers a powerful way of disrupting dominant paradigms in language studies, as well as bringing together scholars who are differently positioned within global “peripheries”. In our collective approach, we avoid treating peripheries as places of need where well intentioned policy makers and scholars must bring missing resources, including (standard) language, expertise, cultural capital, leisure, etc. Instead, peripheries are places of intense potency (Franco, 2018). Peripheral spaces are created by residents themselves (Caldeira, 2017) through a collective agency that enables innovative linguistic flows, develops local solutions (for income, housing, culture, etc.), and produces intense collaborations with other peripheries as well as other social spaces, including the university. In view of this great creativity, the present colloquium showcases examples of what we are terming 'transperipheral' knowledge exchange (Windle et al., 2020), with further examination of recent “trans” concepts that are useful to this task, including transknowledging and translanguaging constructs (Heugh, 2021). The colloquium offers an opportunity for dialogue amongst researchers working with contemporary social movements in the peripheries of Brazil, Australia and Africa, and across a range of socio-linguistic formations in these settings.
References
Caldeira, T. P. R. (2017). Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3–20.
Franco, M. (2018). After the take-over: Mobilizing the political creativity of Brazil’s favelas. New Left Review, 110, 135–140.
Heugh, K. (2021). Southern multilingualisms, translanguaging and transknowledging in inclusive and sustainable education. In Harding-Esch, P., & Coleman, H. (Eds) Language and the sustainable development goals, 37-47. British Council.
Windle, J., Souza, A. L. S., Silva, D. D. N., Zaidan, J. M., Maia, J. D. O., Muniz, K., & Lorenso, S. (2020). Towards a transperipheral paradigm: An agenda for socially engaged research. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada, 59, 1563-1576.
Paper 1: Multilingualisms, masking and multitasking - spaces of hopefulness
Mei French (mei.french@unisa.edu.au), Necia Stanford Billinghurst (necia.billinghurst@mymail.unisa.edu.au) & Janet Armitage (janet.armitage@unisa.edu.au)
Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering, and their linguistic versatility as a product of hopelessness and vulnerability. In this presentation we bring vignettes from women living in Australia, who despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. We introduce women through ‘small stories’ which they have strategically offered in conversations of complicity and trust with the researchers. In the first story, Anangu women in remote central Australia engage in a strong tjukurpa yarning circle in which they steer conversations through Aboriginal English, Pitjantjatjara and English, while ensuring ngapartji ngapartji (reciprocity) of communication and knowledge exchange. The second uncovers the resilience of young women living overseas away from their families, who carry weighty responsibilities for family, school, friends and self. In the third, women who have survived perilous journeys to Australia portray themselves as agents, strategically playing with the intersection of language and appearance in order to mask themselves and increase mobility in spaces of precarity. Mindful of ‘decolonizing methodologies’, the authors hope that in stepping lightly towards private or public spaces, we can turn a lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.
Paper 2. Southern feminist perspectives on transperipheral knowledge exchange
Pamela Maseko, Nelson Mandela University
Kathleen Heugh, University of South Australia
Marcelyn Oostendorp, Stellenbosch University
Silvia Quattrini, University of South Australia
Silvia.quattrinin@mymail.unisa.edu.au
This paper comprises a conversation among four sociolinguists who have lived among multilingual women activists, observing agency, care, hopefulness and voicing of their own epistemic centres during periods of intense social and political upheaval and often displacement. The conversation brings together a long history of women who have contributed to African feminism in languages of Africa since Fatima al-Fihriya’s founding of the al-Qarawiyyin University Mosque in 9th C Fez, and the life works of Nana Asma’u in 18th C Hausa Land. The conversation crosses to pre-and post-apartheid eras in South Africa, and the legacy of a powerful cry of resistance, ‘Wathint' Abafazi, Wathint' Imbokodo' (You strike the women, you strike the rock) carried by women in 1956. We weave our conversation forward through periods of ongoing marginalisation of Amazigh communities and oppression of queer women in Morocco and Tunisia, and back again to southern Africa. We consider multilingualism and resistance through lenses that often go unnoticed in mainstream sociolinguistics, yet important for southern women's lived experiences and black feminist theorisers. This includes poetry, humour, hair, and food. The conversation turns towards knowledge exchange, and hopefulness that emerges through opportunities in transperipheral transknowledging engagement.
Refs:
Heugh, K. (2022). Linguistic and Epistemic Erasure in Africa: Coloniality, Linguistic Human Rights and Decoloniality. The Handbook of Linguistic Human Rights, 55-70.
Maseko, P. (2018). Language as source of revitalisation and reclamation of Indigenous epistemologies. Whose history counts: Decolonising African pre-colonial historiography, 3, 35-55.
Mestiri, S. (2016). Décoloniser le féminisme. VRIN, Paris.
Oostendorp, M. 2023. ‘Sociolinguistics Maak My Skaam [Sociolinguistics Makes Me Ashamed]’: Humour as Decolonial Methodology. In Makoni, S. & Deumert, A. (eds). From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics: Voices, Questions and Alternatives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.
Sadiqi, F. (2014). Moroccan Feminist Discourses. Palgrave Macmillan.
Paper 3
The digitalization of grassroots activism: transperipheral cooperation, scaling and the enactment of hope in Rio de Janeiro
Junot Maia, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, UFMG, Brazil (junotmaia@ufmg.br)
Daniel N. Silva, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp, Brazil (dnsfortal@gmail.com)
Here, we compare data that we have gathered with actors that engage in tactics of counter-securitization in Rio de Janeiro. (In)securitization may be defined as the “a practice of making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics displacing the democratic principles of freedom and justice” (Huysmans, 2014:3). Residents of favelas (neighborhoods built by residents themselves) have been the targets of tough (in)securitizing practices, including exceptional policing, everyday armed management by extra-legal regimes, and a consequent stifling of political expressions. Counter-security contests the state (and private) logic of security as exceptional use of surveillance and force by instead advancing respect for human rights. We have collectively but also separately documented counter-securitizing work by three (groups of) actors in Rio de Janeiro: Mariluce Mariá and Kleber Souza; Coletivo Papo Reto, and Cecillia Olliveira. They have variously tailored affordances of digitalization, enregisterment, and transperipheral cooperation to counter Rio’s violent management of favelas. Mariluce Mariá and Kleber Souza have devised “digital rockets”, i.e. alarms for surviving armed power on digital networks; Coletivo Papo Reto has tailored a similar technology on WhatsApp groups and social media, and combined it with affordances of enregisterment, including through “speaking to the point” with residents; and Cecilia Oliveira, a Black journalist working for the Intercept Brazil, has scaled up these grassroots initiatives by developing the Fogo Cruzado (Crossfire) digital app, a resource that uses the input of users to offer real time information on shootings and other events. These counter-security tactics have reached different publics and provided minorities with possibilities of resisting legacies of colonialism, slavery and the plantation.
Paper 4
Afro-diasporic identities and transperipheral activist positions on Black Portuguese
Gabriel Nascimento, Federal University of Southern Bahia (gabriel.santos@csc.ufsb.edu.br) & Joel Windle, University of South Australia (jawindle@gmail.com)
This presentation examines ways in which identities and knowledge from the African diaspora are present and recognised in Afro-Brazilian influenced speech and metapragmatics. To do so we draw on the contributions of activist and scholar Lélia Gonzalez, who develop a range of concepts relevant to a transperipheral perspective. These include Pretuguês (Black Portuguese) and Amefricanidade (Amefricanity - A Black Latin American identity category). We then analyse ways in which Gonzalez’s intellectual and political projects are taken up in contemporary Brazilian language studies, including via the “Black as life” over a “Black as object” orientation to research. Methodologically, the paper offers a survey of recent academic production and auto-ethnographic accounts of our involvement as actors in the field of language studies from different racialised positions.
Paper 5
Enactive-performative translingual crossings in linguistic education: decolonial perspectives on curricula and on Portuguese as an additional language materials for migrants and refugees in Brazil
Claudia Hilsdorf Rocha, University of Campinas, UNICAMP, Brazil (chr@unicamp.br)
Marcella dos Santos Abreu, Federal University of Piaui, UFPI, Brazil (marcella.abreu@ufpi.edu.br)
This paper focuses on the debate of curricular proposals and teaching materials related to linguistic education in Portuguese as an additional language. More specifically the educational context is concerned with people living as migrants and refugees in Brazil. We evaluate those artifacts based on an enactive-performative translingual approach (Aden & Eschenauer, 2020), which unites the biological roots and the aesthetic roots of poetic languages (Maturana & Varela, 1987). Such crossings allowed the creation of a translingual theoretical-analytical framework, through which the power of the aesthetic, emerging, experiential, embodied, and transformative composition of decolonizing educational experiences (Rufino, 2019, 2021; Walsh, 2019) can insurge. Furthermore, the confrontation with compartmentalization, assimilationism, and scriptural monolingualism, which characterize the educational material under analysis, allows the expansion of transgressive, translingual, and decolonial praxis (Freire, 2014 [1992]; hooks, 2017; García & Alvis, 2019) in the field of Portuguese as an additional language in contexts of social and economic vulnerability. Such expansion is nurtured by the adoption of decolonial analytical lenses that accept, among others, complexity, relationality, critical interculturality, and affect as constitutive elements of our experiences in transformative linguistic education.
Discussant
Angel Lin, Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Plurilingual and Intercultural Education, Simon Fraser University.
