The compelling calls from universities for decoloniality in higher education pose a radical challenge to the construction of higher education in the South with North/West-centric epistemologies. As an exploration into the transformative potential of multilingualism, this edited collection is an important contribution to sociolinguistics. The volume's key strength is its treatment of situated and local practices as well as language users, offering significant insights into meaning-making and pedagogy in settings where reflexive investigation into processes of colonization reveals ‘a plurality and diversity of previously subjugated knowledges deemed invisible and non-existent’ (xvi). Adopting a critical approach towards mainstream ‘theories of diversity, translingualism, and English as a lingua franca’, the authors set out to ‘identify, interrogate and interrupt the coloniality present’ in these fields that ‘speak in universal terms’ and fail to recognise the knowledges of the South—it is precisely here that the book comes across as an enabling decolonial project defying ‘an unspoken and unchallenged valorization of the universal’ (xx–xi).
First, Christopher Stroud & Zannie Bock's chapter elaborates on the potentiality of linguistic citizenship to ‘enhance the many entanglements that bind us together across the categories of identity and language’, and it highlights ‘the importance of love’ for setting a decolonial agenda for (applied) linguists and educationalists. Next, Stroud & Caroline Kerfoot dwell on the ways language and multilingualism can promote epistemic justice. Then, Antjie Krog illustrates how Indigenous texts as new knowledge systems, which unearth the struggles of historically oppressed and muted voices, can be used to fracture hegemonic ideas and offer multiversality through decolonial interventions.
Chapters 4–6 shift the lens to accounts of interventionist pedagogies. Miki Flockemann explores how a theatre performance that creates affective encounters and demands students’ reflexive participation can lead to engagement and affinity across difference, and transcend identity politics. Focusing on complex multimodal articulations in fostering agency and voice away from linguistic colonialities, Quentin Williams discusses how teaching hip hop culture becomes a decolonial communicative act that serves relationality and interculturality. In Marijke du Toit's ‘teaching experiment’ that introduces texts from multilingual and indigenous language newspapers, critical citizenship urges students to react to ‘their own relationships’ with history agentively, and to question the status quo of languages in higher education institutions (111–13).
The volume continues with case studies whereby Soraya Abdulatief, Xolisa Guzula, & Carolyn McKinney illustrate how translanguaging in teacher education enables learners to ‘disrupt the dominant hierarchies of language and culture’ (155); Marcelyn Oostendorp, Lulu Duke, Simangele Mashazi, & Charné Pretorius reflect on an exhibition of multimodal and multilateral artefacts as a form of content delivery and academic assessment for linguistics modules and how it creates new spaces of multivocality and transformation through discomfort; Bock explores production of a linguistics textbook that centres ‘local knowledge and voices’ in practices and curriculum content and shifts disciplinary paradigms (181–82); and Duncan Brown, drawing examples from African languages, considers the relevance of multilingual citizenship for thinking about environmental issues.
Overall, while the book is rooted in the South African higher education context, the chapters carry far-reaching implications for transformative pedagogy, knowledge, and politics of affinity across wider Southern landscapes.
