Public Applied Linguistics in Action: A Conversation Between Emile YX? Jansen and Quentin Williams on Hip Hop Culture & Activism, Afrikaaps, Indigeneity, and Decolonial Futures

Abstract

Emile YX? & Quentin Williams: We are two activists working towards the same goal, with slightly different tools of description and analysis. Emile YX?: I bring Hip Hop culture, Knowledge of Self and Education are my tools. For me biography, a definition of activism and an understanding of the importance of language, indigeneity. and what our futures will look like as marginalized speakers are important. [Co-author]: Aweh (that’s real). I like that. I guess I trained first as an applied linguist and then as a sociolinguist in post-apartheid, decolonial South Africa, I always push an egalitarian view on language and multilingualism in education and other institutional contexts and all that informs my activism. In this conversation, we expound on what [Co-author] has come to define as public applied linguistics (see Wiliams 2021). Our work has always been public. It has to be because the speakers we talk to, not about, want us to explain how the analytical and descriptive tools we use could benefit their identity projects to emancipate them as individuals and communities. Hip Hop cultural practices and an egalitarian linguistics, in the way that the two coalesce, provide us with the rhetorics and practice strategies to advance public applied linguistics. Os wieties hie oorie belangrikheid van Hip Hop culture en activism. Oo Afrikaaps innie skool, virrie mense (osse mense), wat academia moet vestaan en doen as julle saam met communities soes Hip Hop culture academia moet an wêk, en hoe osse decolonial toekoms—of soes Emile YX? dit sit, rehumanization—moet lyk. Alles dai is hie onne. (Below we chop it up on the importance of Hip Hop and activism, about Afrikaaps in the school, for the people (our people), what academia has to do to understand together communities like practice Hip Hop culture, the relationship that needs to be built between academia and Hip Hop, and what our decolonial futures, or rehumanization as Emile YX? puts it, should look like. All of that below).