Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South

Alastair Pennycook, Sinfree Makoni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138593503
• eBook ISBN: 9780429951763
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South provides an original appraisal of the latest innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the perspective of the Global South. Global South perspectives are encapsulated in struggles for basic, economic, political and social transformation in an inequitable world, and are not confined to the geographical South. Taking a critical perspective on Southern theories, demonstrating why it is important to view the world from Southern perspectives and why such positions must be open to critical investigation, this book:

• charts the impacts of these theories on approaches to multilingualism, language learning, language in education, literacy and diversity, language rights and language policy;
• provides broad historical and geographical understandings of the movement towards a Southern perspective and draws on Indigenous and Southern ways of thinking that challenge mainstream viewpoints;
• seeks to develop alternative understandings of applied linguistics, expand the intellectual repertoires of the discipline, and challenge the complicities between applied linguistics, colonialism, and capitalism.

Written by two renowned scholars in the field, Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South is key reading for advanced students and researchers of applied linguistics, multilingualism, language and education, language policy and planning, and language and identity.

1

INTRODUCTION: GAZING FROM THE SOUTH

This book looks at applied linguistics from a southern perspective. This is not just a case of adding some perspectives from the South, or including various southern people who are often forgotten, or incorporating geographical areas or topics occluded from analysis in Global Northern applied linguistics. What we’re addressing here, by contrast, is a much more far-reaching set of challenges to what applied linguistics means, what it encompasses, what its central concerns are, what it regards as its antecedents and historical pedigree, and what ideas and traditions it therefore draws on. The innovations and challenges we want to bring to applied linguistics in this book extend far beyond an agenda that seeks to redress various exclusions; rather, these are deep-seated challenges to some of the core tenets of applied linguistics as well as new directions for theories and practices in the field. Acknowledging the complicities of applied linguistics with a history of colonialism and capitalism and a range of contemporary inequalities, this book encourages us to rethink and remake applied linguistics at a global level in open-ended ways. This chapter lays out the basic concerns and background to the book, making a case for the need for alternative understandings of applied linguistics and the importance of the contribution of the Global South to Global North scholarship.

What, then, is the Global South? It is not, it must be said, an idea without its own challenges and contradictions, though it is no less important as a result. Simply put, the Global South refers to the people, places, and ideas that have been left out of the grand narrative of modernity. It may at times refer quite literally to the South, to regions of South America and much of Africa, for example, that have not been part of the upward march of economic, social, and political ‘progress’ in wealthier nations. More importantly, however, the Global South refers to broader histories of exclusion and disenfranchisement, and thus might equally refer to Indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, Australia, China, Laos, or America. Indeed, the idea of the Global South may be applied to the urban poor in cities in the northern hemisphere rather than to wealthy elites in the southern hemisphere. The South, from Santos’ (2012) perspective, refers both to the conditions of suffering and inequality brought about by capitalism and colonialism and to the resistance to such conditions. The South therefore also exists in “the global North, in the form of excluded, silenced and marginalized populations, such as undocumented immigrants, the unemployed, ethnic or religious minorities, and victims of sexism, homophobia and racism” (Santos, 2012, p.51).

Two of the important texts that instigated this move to think in terms of southern theories are Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory and Jean and John Comaroff’s (2011) Theory from the South. For Connell, focusing particularly on social theory, the central concern is “the erasure of the experience of the majority of human kind from the foundations of social thought” (p.46). Similarly, for the Comaroffs, the principal focus is the ways in which “Western enlightenment thought has, from the first, posited itself as the wellspring of universal learning, of Science and Philosophy” (2012 p.113). For both Connell and the Comaroffs the issue was not only a critique of the dominance of theory and knowledge from the North but also the fundamental need to reverse this relationship, to open up alternative ways of knowing from southern perspectives. On the one hand, then, is the tendency to universalize findings from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) contexts to the rest of the world (Henrich et al., 2010) and on the other the concomitant exclusion of the majority world from social scientific theorizing. It is particularly in the work of Santos (2012, 2018) on southern epistemologies that these arguments have taken shape over the last decade, with his insistence on understanding the Global South in terms of multifaceted relations of global inequalities and on the need to develop alternative, southern epistemologies: “The epistemologies of the South concern the production and validation of knowledges anchored in the experiences of resistance of all those social groups that have systematically suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy” (2018, p1).

From the outset, then, it is clear that the Global South refers not so much to a geographical region, and to more than merely a set of geopolitical inequalities. As is also evident, it brings in a range of other concerns, including Indigeneity, race, class, sexuality, poverty, gender, and colonialism. The idea of the Global South is heir to a range of previous forms of work that have sought to address global inequalities of both material and intellectual goods, from a focus on dependency theory (how so-called developing nations are forced to be dependent on so-called developed nations for anything from the price of coffee to the ways sociology is done), Third World scholarship, postcolonial theory, and much more (see Chapter 2). This also intersects with decolonial perspectives (Mignolo, 2011a; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018), Indigenous standpoints (Nakata, 2007), and other projects to both decentralize northern or western epistemologies and to construct intellectual sovereignty in the Global South. The challenges such a project faces are many. As Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2017) points out, any project to develop intellectual sovereignty in Africa has to escape the weight of intellectual neocolonialism that always defers to knowledge production from elsewhere, devaluing Indigenous knowledge systems in favour of received knowledge.

Such processes are compounded by institutional racism, the languages in which such knowledge is often expressed (received knowledge in received languages), and the interests of local elites in extending the life of colonial culture and knowledge derived from the metropolitan centres of culture and power in the contemporary world. For Prah ( 2017, p.20), the goal is to “achieve a universalism which has equal space for all voices, and not a universalism under restrictive Western hegemony”, and to this end “the centre of gravity of knowledge production about Africa and Africans must be situated in Africa, so that the ‘otherness’ of the subject of scholarship which Western hegemony has imposed on Africa and Africans is eliminated”. Such projects raise further complications, however: Should a project to include multiple voices rather than only those of a hegemonic North attempt to seek a more inclusive universalism, or should it seek to undermine calls for universalism? And if, as Santos (2018, p.3) asserts, southern epistemologies may be “ways of knowing, rather than knowledges”, the question is not merely one of adding new ideas to the archives of existing knowledge but of changing what counts as knowledge, of developing a relation between existing knowledge and “artisanal knowledges” (p.43).

The challenge of thinking about applied linguistics from a southern perspective, therefore, raises questions that run far deeper than a set of additive concerns about contexts we may have missed out in our research. It asks much more difficult questions about that research itself, and who is doing it, with what assumptions, for whom, with whom, and for what purposes. The idea of the Global South therefore encompasses far broader issues than an attempt just to redress global exclusions: It addresses contemporary and historical ways in which forms of knowledge have been developed and valued, as well as the larger colonial, economic, and political forces that lead to these epistemological imbalances. For applied linguistics, the questions raised by southern perspectives address not only its colonial past and contemporary location in neo-liberal times, but also its key tenets about language, knowledge, and education. We shall return in much more depth to this background in the next chapter, and to concerns about language, education, and research in the following chapters. First, however, we shall consider in greater depth some of the tensions around the Global South framework, before outlining both some of the useful questions these perspectives can open up (innovations) as well as some of the challenges this poses for applied linguistics.

North and South: Geographical, geopolitical, and decolonial concerns

There is an immediate concern that emerges when we talk of the Global South: Although the term is intended geopolitically, metaphorically, and epistemologically, it cannot at times escape its geographical reference. While Global South scholars are insistent that it is a geopolitical concept referring to struggles against inequality, there is often at the same time a pull towards the South. This is not surprising both because the term ‘south’ is always likely to orient us in that direction and because, given the historical development of colonialism and capitalism, “the epistemological South and the geographical South partially overlap, particularly as regards those countries that were subjected to historical colonialism” (Santos, 2018, p1). Yet this becomes complex when regions that are clearly very far south geographically (Australia and New Zealand being obvious examples) are not considered to be in the Global South, or when regions considered north in relation to others (North Africa, for example) are considered part of the Global South, or indeed when regions that are almost defined by their geographical northerness (the lands of Indigenous people within the Arctic Circle, for example) may also be considered in political terms as part of the Global South.

In Levon’s (2017) critique of the northern bias of Coupland’s (2016) edited book on sociolinguistic debates, the problem is explained in terms of “the geopolitical positioning of the various contributions” (p.280) being almost exclusively in the North: The effects of the overwhelming majority of contributors being located in the Global North (and primarily in North America and Western Europe), he suggests, are twofold: On the one hand “it makes it seem as if sociolinguistics does not take place outside of North America and Western Europe, whereas this is clearly not the case”. It is unfortunate and limiting that sociolinguists from elsewhere – Africa, South America, or South and East Asia – are not included. On the other hand, this absence perpetuates “a particular geopolitics of knowledge that privileges Northern perspectives and prevents Southern scholars from contributing a differently positioned interpretation of events and practices that concern them” (pp.280–281). This critique, which closely aligns with many issues we will be dealing with in this book, points to two kinds of omission: First, scholars from outside Europe and North America are not included, which means generally that these contexts of research are also not included; and second, alternative epistemologies that might derive from these southern contexts (southern epistemologies) are not as a result given any space.

It is important to note that the two issues are different: Scholars in the geographical South may well do research on local contexts but may do so from what might be called northern perspectives. Trained in the major institutions of the North (or in departments in the South that have nonetheless adopted these knowledge frameworks), these academics’ intellectual capital is based on the goods they have gained through an elite education. Thus, being from the geographical South, and even looking at southern contexts, is by no means a guarantor of southern epistemologies. And in any case, if the Global South may include regions of the geographical North, then we need to consider this issue from a more complex perspective. Certainly on the one hand, there is a problem that a book such as Coupland (2016) – a book which from most other perspectives is a key text in the discipline – does not engage with southern perspectives, or include contexts from the Global South, even though it does include authors located geographically in the South. On this point Levon’s (2017) critique seems equivocal as to whether the issue is geographical or geopolitical, since it suggests Australia and Singapore (this latter falling below the North–South line that is usually used to divide the world geopolitically) may be in the South. Yet should we not also consider, on the other hand, the focus of the texts themselves? Is perhaps a discussion of the inequality before the law of Indigenous Australians (Eades, 2016) a southern perspective, even if Australia is considered to be in the Global North and the author herself is not Indigenous Australian (we return to questions of positionality below)?

Here, then, we can see the complexity and challenges of the idea of the Global South: It is one thing to critique a sociolinguistics text for its exclusion of scholars, contexts, and frameworks from the geopolitical South, but it is a more complex question to decide what constitutes a southern context or perspective, once it is acknowledged that the South may also be in the North, and that the geographical South by no means guarantees a southern viewpoint. A book on the sociolinguistics of global cities (Smakman and Heinrich, 2018) approaches this slightly differently: The editors divide the book into North and South perspectives. This division (Archer, 2013) locates ‘world cities’ in the global North – “affluent and increasingly post-industrial countries” – and ‘megacities’ in the global South – “relatively poor and often post-colonial countries” (Smakman and Heinrich, 2018, p.6). From this perspective, Sydney sits firmly in the Global North – ranked 15th in the world (one behind Los Angeles) in terms of its ‘magneticism’ (its capacity to attract businesses and people from around the world) – along with London, Tokyo, Paris, the Randstad area of the Netherlands, Los Angeles, and Moscow. This makes a clear statement about the geopolitical framework of the book – the cities in the Global South are Cairo, Mexico, São Paulo, Dubai, and Kohima (India) – while also drawing attention to the point that the Global South does not mean south of the equator (Sydney is south of the equator while Cairo, Mexico, Dubai, and Kohima are to the north). Dubai, however, is a more difficult city to locate in geopolitical terms. Only São Paulo, as one of the vast, expanding, and troubled megacities of the world, is firmly in the South in all senses.

Just as the wealthy cities of the South may be positioned in the North, so southern perspectives may be brought to bear on places located in the North, nowhere more obviously than when dealing with the circumpolar North regions such as Finnmark (northern Norway) or Northern Canada within the Arctic Circle (Hayman et al., 2018; Lane and Makihara, 2017). This is where the issues shared by many Indigenous people (Indigenous Australians, First Nations people in North America, or Sámi in the far north of Europe) can come together under a Global South perspective (Fourth World was a related term within the First/Second/Third World framework; see Chapter 2). These are people sharing similar concerns of a settler colonial history – and for many the ‘postcolonial’ label is roundly rejected: As Indigenous Australian Bobbi Sykes asked, “What? Postcolonialism? Have they left?” (cited in Smith, 2012, p.25) – of continued poverty, battles over land rights, problems of health, substance abuse and unemployment, and struggles to maintain linguistic and cultural practices in the face of entrenched discrimination. The very commonality of Indigenous struggles points to the importance of a common term to describe them. Clearly, however, the Global South or southern perspectives terminology is straining here to refer to people whose geographical northernness, and solidarity with other Indigenous inhabitants of the circumpolar North, also seems to define them.

Relatedly, then, Indigenous Australians may be in the Global South while Sydney is in the Global North. It is a long journey from rural New South Wales to Sydney – and if this remark seems flippant, it is also very true for many people. This gets more complex if we try to allocate Indigenous Australians living in Sydney into a North/South categorization (about one third – around 70,000 – of the Indigenous population in New South Wales lives in Sydney; Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018). We therefore have to be careful about lumping cities or countries into these broad categories. A similar and often unacknowledged problem occurs in the World Englishes framework, where alongside the lack of clarity as to whether we were dealing with history, politics, varieties of language, or speakers (Bruthiaux, 2003), the problem of placing countries into circles overlooks considerable internal variation. Malaysia, for example, has generally been located in the Outer Circle, with its colonial history and its recognizable variety of English used internally, but for whom is English a second-language variety? For a rural Malay or an urban Chinese middle-class family? It is on these grounds that Tupas and Rubdy (2015) urge us to think in terms of ‘unequal Englishes’ rather than nation-based varieties: Who has access to what kinds of English and how are different types of English valued? A problem for both areas of work – Southern Theory and World Englishes – is therefore the continuing states-centric focus of many studies of global relations. An emphasis on national GDP, for example, suggests that when it rises above a certain point, a country may move into the Global North (various South American countries, such as Chile, are sometimes now shown as part of the Global North), overlooking the deep internal inequalities within nations.

Likewise, then, we need to be cautious about placing cities or countries into our North/South divide. This became an issue in attempts to understand the metrolingual practices of a city such as Sydney (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2018). The argument about studying metrolingual practices – local language practices in the city – is that we have to look at specific sites of linguistic interaction rather than demolinguistic mapping of ethnic groupings. In that paper, we focused on Chinese market gardeners and Bangladeshi-owned stores. Of course, both groups of people benefited from the advantages of working in a global city such as Sydney (in the Global North), but these were also people very much at the lower end of the economy, working very long hours, struggling at times to get by. And as we looked at the networks of food production both within the local region (local vegetables grown for local markets) and internationally (dried fish imported from Myanmar), it was clear that these complex relations of economy and work intertwined with globalization from below (Mathews and Vega, 2012), ethnicity and migration. We thus seemed to end up with elements of the Global South (struggles to overcome conditions of inequality in the periphery) within a city of the Global North (a wealthy city with high indicators of social and economic privilege) located in the geographical South.

These tensions are evident throughout much of the writing on the Global South. Even when authors more explicitly point to the Global South, there may also be a tendency to locate it in an ambivalent geographical/geopolitical sense. Ndhlovu (2017), for example, argues for the importance of “the burgeoning scholarship from the Global South (Asia, Africa and Latin America) in calling for pluralization of toolkits we use to look at development discourse” (p.92). Thus, at the same time that he argues for southern epistemologies and a focus on the “affordances and promises that African linguistic diversity and cultural resources hold for creativity and innovation – the key drivers of sustainable economic development and social progress” (p.89), he also adds a geopolitical gloss (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) that locates these epistemologies in particular regions. To be clear, we are very much in accord with Ndhlovu’s arguments here – innovation in applied linguistics can indeed be driven precisely by African linguistic diversity and cultural resources – but we also note that the overlap between the geographical South and the Global South may also be potentially exclusionary: The ‘Asia, Africa, and Latin America’ gloss also overlooks Indigenous and other disenfranchised people located in other parts of the world.

The issue that emerges, then, is that in many cases the ‘southern’ label is doing various kinds of work: It is a label of political economy that refers to impoverished regions of the world; it is a term for geopolitical relations, with the South starting not below the equator but somewhere south of where the money is (roughly along the Tropic of Cancer, running through Egypt, North India, Bangladesh, South China, and Mexico); it is a term for political struggle, including diverse clashes against poverty, patriarchy, environmental destruction, and discrimination; and it is a term for alternative ways of knowing, of different cosmovisions. As Mignolo (2011b, 2014) reminds us, while the East/West divide was based around a Christian/colonial partition of the world, the North/South divide is a post-WWII division of the world along developed/developing lines. Depending on the locus of enunciation, the Global South may refer to underdeveloped and emerging economies (from a Global North perspective) or, from a southern perspective, to “epistemic places where global futures are being forged by delinking from the colonial matrix of power” (2011b, p.184). Ultimately, however, for Mignolo, a decolonizing project has to step outside this framework since neither East and West nor North and South are positions that a decolonial project can sustain: “decoloniality will no longer be identified with the ‘Global South’ but it will be in the interstices of a global order that was once divided into ‘East’ and ‘West’ and more recently ‘North’ and ‘South’” (2014, VII).

We raise these complications not by any means to undermine the idea of southern perspectives, but rather to draw attention to some of the complexities ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Gazing from the South
• 2. The making of the South in applied linguistics
• 3. Southern multilingualisms
• 4. Language endangerment, vitality, and reclamation
• 5. Decolonizing language in education
• 6. Challenging the northern research gaze
• 7. Applied linguistics from a southern perspective
• References
• Index