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Article published In:
Meaning Making in the Periphery
Edited by Luiz Paulo Moita-Lopes and Mike Baynham
[AILA Review 30] 2017
► pp. 167–188

Multilingualism as utopia

Fashioning non-racial selves

| University of the Western Cape, South Africa | Stockholm University, Sweden
| University of the Western Cape, South Africa

The challenge of contemporary South Africa is that of building a (post)nation of postracial equity in a fragmented world of a globalized ethical, economic and ecological meltdown. In this paper, we seek to explore the idea of multilingualism as a technology in the conceptualization of alternative, competing futures. We suggest that multilingualism is understood in terms of how encounters across difference are mediated and structured linguistically offer a space for interrupting colonial relationships. Furthermore, we argue that multilingualism should be approached as a site where colonial power dynamics of languages and speakers are troubled, and where the potential for new empowering linguistic mediations of the mutualities of our common humanity with different others are worked out.

Keywords: multilingualism, utopia, non-racialism, afrikaans, afrikaaps, south africa
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Race and multilingualism in South Africa: The Luister (Listen) documentary
  • The Luister (Listen) documentary
  • Bodies and language ‘out of lineage’
  • (Dis)Engtanglement/(dis)engagement
  • Language in the fashioning of selves
  • Reconstructing multingualism, refiguring selves: The case of Afrikaaps
  • Opening up closures – rhizomatic lineage
  • Entanglements
  • Knowing a language bodily
  • Discussion: Hope and despair
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 15 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/aila.00008.str
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