143095 KU Decolonising Multilingualism (2025S)

In 2019, Alison Phipps published a slim 102-page work (Decolonising Mulitlingualism - Struggles to Decree). Like many before her, Phipps deals with language policy issues in (post-)colonialism, but ventures into a different terrain. She uses self-reflexive auto-ethnographic narratives, poems and some theoretical arguments to focus the lens of enquiry on the historically colonised subject. She asks: How can one decolonise when one speaks far too many colonial languages? She answers this question in three parts. In Part 1, the author takes her experience of treatment for an injury she sustained while travelling in Ghana as a starting point for decolonising certain forms of knowledge. Part 2 explores the politics of linguistic vulnerability and offers reflections on the author's experience of painting herself with henna and dressing in blen clothing. In Part 3, the author reflects on her experiences of learning te reo, the Maori language. The author uses her own experiences as a professor, refugee advocate and holder of the UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration to position herself as a non-speaker of the languages of refugees, asylum seekers and communities she has come into contact with.

She argues that not knowing a language is a way of breaking through language hierarchies, decentring the historically colonial subject, deconstructing the world imposed on it by the languages it possesses and is possessed by, and bringing about a general ‘ontological deconstruction’ of colonial ways of being.

In this course, we will bring Phipp's arguments into dialogue with authors who have written on issues around postcoloniality and language in African Studies.

Possible reading for discussion:
Anchimbe, Eric; Mforteh Stephen A. Postcolonial linguistic voices: identity choices and representations. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Britton, Celia. 1999. Edouard Glissant and postcolonial theory: strategies of language and resistance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Ndhlovu, Finex; Makalela, Leketi. 2021. Decolonising Multilingualism in Africa: Recentering Silenced Voices from the Global South. Bristol: Channel View Publications.