Locus Of Enunciation Research Articles

Is consumerism only what Philip Kotler says it is? A decolonial analysis on failures, hierarchies, and exclusions

ABSTRACT The mainstream area of marketing maintains that consumerism is a social movement that seeks to support consumers against corporate wrongdoings. Led by the area’s canons, particularly Philip Kotler, marketing has associated consumerist values with neoliberal-capitalist principles; however, it has failed to address the issues, realities, and contexts of consumerism and consumerists in the Global South, in their multiple and non-homogenous forms, which are onto-epistemically aligned to such realities. The present paper aims to analyse, through a decolonial perspective from Latin America, how the consumerism led in marketing by Kotler fails to promote consumer protection in multiple realities and for multiple groups, especially (if not only) in the Global South. Latin American decolonial theorisations related to hierarchies of power, locus of enunciation and universalisation of knowledge are adopted, in order to critically analyse these failures, based on a perspective that originates in a non-hegemonic context.

A case forELF feito no Brasil

AbstractThis article starts from a comment on my locus of enunciation (i.e., the context from which I speak), a key element of decoloniality as a means of resisting the idea of disembodied knowledge or neutrality promoted by modernity/coloniality. I then proceed to explain how I understand the entanglement of modernity and coloniality and why we need to break away from coloniality, both ontologically and epistemologically. It is in this entanglement where ELT is traditionally situated, and it is from such contexts that English teacher education in Brazil should be examined for its harm to local knowledges and knowers. I conclude by explaining what is meant by ELF feito no Brasil and why this may be a possibility to resist the coloniality of ELT.

From Bama’s Karukku ([1992] 2014) to Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir (2019): The Changing Nature of Dalit Feminist Consciousness

Dalit literature articulates the oppression and exploitation faced by Dalits in a caste-ridden society as it records their social and cultural lives before and after India’s independence. This cultural revolt that burgeoned in the 1970s has largely been Dalit male-centric in its orientation, adopting paternalistic and patronising tones towards Dalit women. As a consequence, Dalit women remained firmly encapsulated in the patriarchal roles of the silent, agenciless and ‘victimised sexual being,’ perpetuating thus gendered stereotypes. These accounts failed to properly address Dalit women’s predicament and the interlocking oppression of caste and gender, which compelled them to create a distinct space for themselves. Dalit women have traversed a long path over the last four decades. During this time, their consciousness has evolved in many ways as reflected in Dalit writing. Life narratives, such as Bama’s Karukku and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir, function as the locus of enunciation where agency and self-identity are attended and asserted by Dalit women, through different approaches. As the social location determines the perception of reality, this paper attempts a look at how these two texts tackle and bring to the centre the gendered nature of caste and the power relations that still affect Dalit women, from a heterogeneous standpoint. It further analyses how through form, language and subject matter, Dalit women attempt to defy generic conventions, depart from imposed identities, and build up resistance against this enduring double oppression and the forces that insist on homogenising Dalit body politics.

Epistemic Journeying across Abyssal Lines of Thinking: Towards Reclaiming Southern Voices

Cognitive injustice, which nourishes and sustains current political, social and economic injustice, has been at the centre of the knowledge production enterprise since the colonisers embarked on their project of dispossession and plunder. In order to achieve global justice, the quest for epistemic justice needs to be brought to the centre of curriculum discourses. The postcolonial critique of the canonical corpus of Euro-Western knowledge demands a change in our locus of enunciation. We seized this zeitgeist to repaint the education curriculum canvass in science professional teacher development. We leveraged theoretical constructs from Southern theory, by adopting a decolonial epistemic perspective and privileging a dialogic dynamic. Six purposefully selected, practising science teachers, who were registered to study an Honours in Education module, were engaged to generate qualitative data to respond to the following question: How do science teachers leverage indigenous knowledge to address sustainable development goals? Teachers engaged in intercultural dialogue with indigenous knowledge holders to tap into a plurality of different knowledges. The indigenous knowledge holders who participated were interested in sustainable production/cultivation of items they had used in their practice. Teachers developed portfolios of evidence and participated in focus group interviews. They experienced moments of mourning, dreaming, rediscovery and recovery. This resonated with the same categories that were previously identified by Chilisa, as teachers deconstructed and reconstructed curriculum materials collaboratively with indigenous knowledge holders. The findings reveal that the teachers viewed an indigenous understanding of the world as crucial in the achievement of sustainable development goals. The monolithic, hegemonic Euro-Western thinking was decentred but not abandoned. Instead, teachers rendered it one part of the intercultural dialogue. The study demonstrated the potential for transforming the curriculum to become inclusive of Southern voices in the production of valuable, truthful, reliable knowledge about living together sustainably.

Revisiting the true purpose of the discourse on decolonising

ABSTRACT The human and social science communities have over a long time committed themselves to the pursuit of an ever-growing list of new conceptual frameworks, but often only to rob such theories of profundity in the end. Such habits and practices reduce into ‘slogan’ ideas that otherwise hold the promise for robust interrogation of how we came to be where we are. In this article, I extend scholarly conversations in cultural discourse studies (CDS) that trouble and unsettle Westcentrism as a global discursive practice that overlooks and eclipses non-Western intellectual legacies. In contributing to the project of CDS, I discuss four key points that draw attention to a deeper understanding of the history, genealogy, contours and foundational goals of decolonising in the search for strategies we can use to redeem the field from the pitfalls of ‘sloganisation’. I invite all of us to engage in reflexive thought-work about how best to advance decolonising in ways that are committed to the pursuit of the anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic agendas advanced in CDS scholarship. I posit that decolonising is not a universal concept that can be expressed in terms of a universal academic language because there are various loci of enunciation from which to do decolonisation in praxis.

Locus of enunciation: insights for intercultural language teaching

ABSTRACT Recent articles on the problems of ‘locus of enunciation’ have focused on research and publication as well as on theoretical development of the concept. It is an issue in teaching and learning too, and this is the focus of this article which argues that to reject teaching approaches in ‘the South’ because they come from ‘the North’ is, first, counter to the principles of academic freedom upheld as much in the South as the North, second, prevents learners from having access to important knowledge and third, ignores the ways in which learners in ‘the South’ can ‘re-enunciate’ what they have learned from ‘the North’. Our argument has its origins in our own experience of censorship in the name of ‘locus of enunciation’. As language teachers, we demonstrate that internationalist and pluralist ways of thinking can and should lead to cultural, intellectual humility and that this is a better basis for making judgements than a preference for ‘our’ locus of enunciation over ‘theirs’. We illustrate our argument with the pedagogic project that gave rise to the use of ‘locus of enunciation’ as the basis for rejection of our teaching, to show how the project can be read ‘otherwise’.

Marginalising Within The Margins: The Evolution of Dalit Women’s (Mis) Representation in Narendra Jadhav’s Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey Out Of The Caste System In Modern India (2005) And Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (2008)

"Dalit women have traversed a long path over the last four decades. During this time their consciousness has evolved in many ways as reflected in Dalit writing. Life narratives function as the locus of enunciation where agency and self-identity are attended and asserted by Dalit women, through different approaches. As the social location determines the perception of reality, this paper attempts a look at how Narendra Jadhav and Baby Kamble tackle and bring to the centre the gendered nature of caste and the power-relations that still affect Dalit women. Form, language and subject matter are some of the resources that Dalit women use to defy generic conventions, depart from imposed identities, and build up resistance against an enduring double oppression which insists on homogenising Dalit body politics."

Thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research

This thirty-year retrospective on language, gender and sexuality research, launched in anticipation of the thirtieth anniversary of the 1992 Berkeley Women and Language Conference, showcases essays by luminaries who presented papers at the conference as well as allied scholars who have taken the field in new directions. Revitalising a tradition set out by the First Berkeley Women and Language Conference in 1985, the four biennial Berkeley conferences held in the 1990s led to the establishment of the International Gender and Language Association and subsequently of the journal Gender and Language, contributing to the field’s institutionalisation and its current panglobal character. Retrospective essays addressing the themes of Politics, Practice, Intersectionality and Place will be published across four issues of the journal in 2021. The final issue of our thirty-year retrospective shows how studies of language, gender and sexuality may be enlivened by seriously engaging with the notion of place – understood as one’s geographical location, locus of enunciation and/or position within the field. Bonnie S. McElhinny and María Amelia Viteri scrutinise lingering effects of colonialism and advocate for hope as a central affective dimension of decolonial practice. Drawing upon Black feminisms, Busi Makoni discusses the embodiment of refusal to racialised forms of patriarchy and Sonja L. Lanehart underlines the importance of bringing African American Women’s Language more centrally into the field’s remit. The next three essays move their foci to specific regions: Pia Pichler reflects on the entanglement of place, race and intersectionality in the UK; Janet S. Shibamoto-Smith warns against the dangers of reifying essentialised categories in Japanese language and gender research; Fatima Sadiqi criticises the underrepresentation of North Africa in the field by reviewing the emergence and resilience of feminist linguistics in the region. The two final essays highlight the importance of sociolinguistic activism and the urgent need of moving beyond the field’s Global North emphasis. Amiena Peck discusses the power of digital activism and the way it has reignited her passion for engaged scholarship. Ana Cristina Ostermann advocates for micro-interactional analysis as a method for illuminating Southern epistemologies of gender and sexuality. The theme series also pays tribute to significant scholars present at the 1992 Berkeley conference who are no longer with us; in this issue, Rusty Barrett and Robin Queen offer a lively account of the life and work of linguist and novelist Anna Livia.

Possible Impossibilities of Peace Construction in ELT: Profiling the Field

When referring to peace, peacebuilding, and peace education, among others, some similarities and differences among them appear. Although some consider ELT as a peripheral field regarding peace construction, diverse enunciation modalities profile this interest. Inquiring into what, where, when and who, I analyzed 55 articles and 36 presentation abstracts for this qualitative study to unveil what is understood as peace construction in ELT. This revision presents six tendencies. Gaps and opportunities of research action for teachers are synthesized. Time/space coordinates of enunciation modalities in peace construction are displayed. I describe who the teachers behind some studies might be, regarding their locus of enunciation. Conclusion remarks around the diverse nature of peace construction are discussed, as representing those links between imagined separated fields.

Geopolitics of Power and Knowledge in the COVID-19 Pandemic: Decolonial Reflections on a Global Crisis

This article offers a provisional decolonial reading of the crisis created by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The article performs five interrelated tasks. The first task addresses the question of knowledge and theorizing during exceptional moments. A decolonial case is made for seeking mitigations and solutions to COVID-19 based on the African knowledge and epistemologies from the Global South. Africa in particular and the Global South in general have the richest histories and experiences of epidemics and pandemics. This moment of the COVID-19 pandemic raises questions about the geopolitics of knowledge (which historical archive do we run to, who should learn from whom, and which epistemology is privileged?). The second task is to outline how the triple concepts of paradox, crisis, and crossroads (PCC) can help us to gain a better understanding of the issues cascading in this moment of the COVID-19 pandemic. The third task is a critique of lockdowns as knee-jerk reactions in Africa, since they are not sustainable, and they impinge on life, security, freedom, and economy in fragile African environments. The fourth task is to introduce 10 Ds of the decolonial turn —Deimperialization, De-Westernization, Depatriachization, Deracialization, Debourgeoisement, Decorporatization, Democratization, Deborderization, Decanonization, and Desecularization—which help in envisioning a post-COVID-19 decolonial world order. The final task is to propose decolonial love as the soul of the post-COVID-19 world order based on a new ethics for living together, economies of care, a politics of conviviality, and hospitality as opposed to enmity. Africa in particular and the Global South in general constitute the author’s locus of enunciation.

Unsettling the boundaries of Latin America: Rapa Nui and the refusal of Chilean settler colonialism

ABSTRACT Latin America is popularly imagined territorialized by continental Central and South America, extending to the Caribbean Islands; however, from the vantage of the Chilean government, Latin America expands thousands of miles into the Pacific Ocean within an area it legalizes as ‘the Chilean Sea’ (El Mar Chileno) given its control of ‘Easter Island’ (Isla de Pascua). Since 1888, despite persistent resistance by the Indigenous Polynesian Rapa Nui people, Chile has imposed colonial rule on the island through a variety of administrative strategies. This paper illuminates how state construction of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) around Rapa Nui can be understood as a biopolitical strategy of environmentality that strengthens Chilean settler colonialism in Rapa Nui. While settler colonialism has been rightly analyzed in terms of control of land, herein the ‘transit of Empire’ from Indigenous loci of enunciation appears to also articulate through the ocean. Despite the MPA, forces of Rapa Nui biopower mobilizing new Indigenous institutions and practices of self-determination are shown resilient in El Mar Chileno; the boundaries of settler colonial Latin America are unsettled.

Reflections on decolonial feminist political philosophy: a reply to Alcoff, Arya and Táíwò

ABSTRACT I discuss the issues raised by Alcoff, Arya, and Táíwò in their responses to Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. I pay special attention to a fact I think all nonideal theorists, particularly ones who care about reducing oppression, must take seriously: the fact that oppression characteristically faces its victims with tradeoffs such that attempts to advance their interests usually come with significant costs. I discuss how this fact bears on the situations of poor women and those oppressed by sexism and imperialism simultaneously. I also discuss how the nonideal universalist perspective I develop in Decolonizing Universalism supports criticism of neoliberalism, how it takes seriously concerns about the locus of enunciation in Latin American decolonial theory, how it supports transnational solidarities, and its upshots for thinking the relationships between feminism, culture, and modernity.

Time-space politics and heritagisation in Africa: understanding where to begin decolonisation

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on how heritage knowledge is built around time-space discourses. It takes a Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) position to examine heritage knowledge systems through the lenses of Walter Mignolo’s decolonial praxis on ‘locus of enunciation’ and Tim Ingold’s exegesis on ‘dwelling perspectives’. Drawing from ethnographic evidence collected among the Igbo of Nigeria, the study engages Indigenous concepts and heritage ontologies in the context of time and space in heritage making in Africa. Secondly, it interrogates the evidence with the continuity that occurs in society through intergenerational knowledge systems that began with known ancestors. Thirdly, such sustainability mechanisms are examined using what I call ‘territorial communion’ – the ways in which those local knowledge systems are ‘printed’ on the landscape through human-nature ‘relational ontologies’, and how such pictured living holds heritage in a continuum. Finally, the paper contends that a good knowledge of intergenerational ‘dwelling perspectives’ from different loci of enunciation would begin the decoloniality of heritage in Africa.

LEARNING FROM THE SUBALTERN: WHAT DOES MARIA LINDALVA TEACH US ABOUT HEGEMONIC-COMMON-SENSE-IDEOLOGY AND TEXT SELECTION FOR ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING MATERIALS?

ABSTRACT In the scope of vocational critical language teaching materials, designing lessons that meet professional requirements at public technical high schools committed with the agenda of critical education for citizenship is something that deserves attention. If, on the one hand, the Critical Literacy framework substantiates practices that engage us with social changes (LUKE; FREEBODY, 1997), promote opportunities for developing critical views over dominant ideologies, cultures, economies, institutions and political systems (TILIO, 2013, 2017), and examine our loci of enunciation in order that we unlearn our privileges and learn from the subaltern (ANDREOTTI, 2007); on the other, the lesson materials available for technical high-school courses seem not to take these premises into account, especially the latter. In order to bridge this gap, I designed a lesson unit (Society Matters?), aimed at technical high-school 3rd graders, wherein Maria Lindalva’s autobiography, a subaltern ex-landless activist, creates opportunities for discussions over the ideals of work, effort and success that challenge hegemonic-common-sense ideology. Resorting to constructivist bricolage (DENZIN; LINCOLN, 2005) involving her video-autobiography, the language teaching unit, the memories of my pedagogic encounters with learners from 2015 to 2018, and two different lines of interpretation that were recurrently raised throughout, I examined to what extent the interpretations over Maria Lindalva’s narrative reflect and refract neoliberal capitalist ideologies, thus contributing to developing critical posture, as well as to the selection of texts for critical language teaching materials. The results showed the analysis that validates Maria Lindalva’s achievements may be confronted by the viewpoint of her relationship with scarcity (SANTOS, 2017), which favored learners’ developing critical posture; and, finally, that it was possible to take her narrative a step further showing what Maria Lindalva teaches us about selecting texts for critical language teaching materials.

Mapping the interstices: intertextuality, language, and authorial voice in Zapatista poetics

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the Zapatista use of the Word as weapon and as world-making. In particular, we focus on narrative devices and discursive strategies that reveal the locus of enunciation from which the Zapatistas, via Marcos, speak. This Word emerges from, and is situated at, the interstices of Western and Mayan worlds. In the Zapatista stories this is evident through a transmodern use of intertextuality; the critique of “false language” and the eruption of an-other grammar; and a dynamic authorial performance that shifts between Marcos-el Sup as narrator vis-à-vis Marcos as author, spokesperson, and Subcomandante of the EZLN.

Financial Provision and Participation as Catalysts for Women Economic Empowerment in Zimbabwe

One of the pillars aims of the liberations struggle in then Rhodesia was equal opportunities for all with restoration of the economic reigns to the native population who had been marginalized for decades. The marginalization and lack of access was between whites and Blacks and at independence everyone was celebrating independence from colonialism and embracing rights of ownership of the economic means, access to education, national identification cards and an opportunity to vote and exercise democratic rights. It was however observed that within the opened democratic space in the independent Zimbabwe there were gross inequalities between men and women perpetuated by cultural practices supported by a partriachical society where women status was lower than that of man. that needed to be addressed deliberately. Since the turning of the new millennium, the Zimbabwean government has been active in implementing affirmative action programs and gender policies aimed at empowering women economically and socially. Despite a plethora of ways to empower women, challenges still remain in so far as the holistic empowerment of women in the economic arena is concerned. Women constitute 52% of the Zimbabwean population with the majority of them living under the poverty datum line. It is generally considered that access to means of production, resources and household decision making has a direct impact on poverty reduction with participation in the financial sector as an entrympoint for individual and household economic activity. Statistics shows that despite the increase in number of Banks in Zimbabwe, there remains marginalization of the poor the majority of whom are women due to rigid account opening requirements and preconditions for one to access a loan. Access to finance offers the poor an opportunity to engage in economic activities that raise income that can offer opportunities for a better life. Mainstream Banks have been known to exclude the low income as they do not meet the minimum know your customer requirements. Microfinance is banking with the poor, an upside down way of banking. It has been embraced and deployed by many governments across the globe as a tool enhancing financial inclusion and access to finance for the poor and for economic empowerment. This study therefore examined the impact of microfinance to the socio- economic empowerment of women in Zimbabwe by selecting the Women’s Microfinance Bank in Zimbabwe as a case analysis. The Bank was set up by the Government through the Ministry of Women affairs supported by the Central Bank as a tool for financial inclusion responding to the needs of the excluded women. The deprivation of women and poverty within the context of Zimbabwe is the locus of enunciation in this study. The mixed method was adopted where questionnaire and interview guide were administered to beneficiaries of the Women’s microfinance Bank and other selected respondents. The findings from the study revealed that provision of enabling financial services with the appropriate products that respond to the cause of exclusion of certain groups encouraged participation and access to finance thereby contributing immensely to the economic empowerment of women although a lot still needs to be done. The study therefore recommends a deliberate extension of financial services to the grassroots as a deliberate game changer to expand the participation of all. It recommends a deliberate financial provision especially for the Zimbabwe Women’s Microfinance Bank, to extend more banking services and credit facilities to women who are still largely on the bottom of the heap in terms of access to resources. Finally, for more participation in the economic empowerment initiatives from the Bank and any other players, there is need to provide more training programs to women in order to improve their entrepreneurial skills and as an economic empowerment strategy.

The Locus of Enunciation as a Way to Confront Epistemological Racism and Decolonize Scholarly Knowledge

AbstractIn this forum article, we seek to contribute to the discussion initiated by Kubota (in the article entitled ‘Confronting epistemological racism, decolonizing scholarly knowledge: race and gender in applied linguistics’) on how to confront epistemological racism and to decolonize scholarly knowledge. We begin by endorsing Kubota’s three recommendations on how to achieve such goals, as we feel they are an important step to challenge the abyssal line that exists between knowledges that are considered scientific and universal and those that are regarded as peripheral. We then propose a fourth suggestion that we feel is important to complement what is put forth by Kubota: that scholars expose their own loci of enunciation (as well as that of others) in order to localize knowledges that are often taken as global and all-encompassing. By doing so, we argue, academics in applied linguistics and other fields are able to acknowledge the limits of their claims and to present their research in ways that can shift the universality of white Eurocentric knowledge.

When Did the Masks of Coloniality Begin to Fall? Decolonial Reflections on the Bandung Spirit of Decolonization

The ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ pre-dates and post-dates the physicality of the Bandung Conference of 1955. The concept of the ‘spirit’ encapsulates a melange of resistance and struggles against colonial encounters, colonialism, and coloniality—going as far back as the time of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This article posits that to gain a deeper appreciation of the significance of the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ it is vital to begin with an analysis of technologies of the invention of the Global South within global coloniality. The ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ gains a broader canvas as a name for the long standing anti-colonial resistances and decolonial struggles not only against global imperial designs and breaking from Cold War coloniality but also as a terrain of self-invention in opposition to the Northern domination. Thus, this article performs the following tasks: conceptually, it frames the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ with decolonial theory; historically, it traces the politics and technologies of the invention of the global South together with its entrapment in global coloniality and empirically, it lays out the long-standing struggles for liberation beginning with the Haitian Revolution right up to the post-1945 decolonization and pan-African initiatives in Africa. Africa is the author’s locus of enunciation of the ‘Bandung spirit of decolonization’ without delinking it from the rest of the Global South.

Conocimiento y escritura coloniales en la obra del jesuita Alonso de Ovalle

Este artí­culo se propone contribuir a las discusiones en torno a la construcción del conocimiento sobre el Nuevo Mundo a partir del análisis de una de las más reconocidas obras de la historiografí­a colonial chilena: Histórica relación del Reino de Chile (1646), del jesuita Alonso de Ovalle. Propongo que el conocimiento sobre Chile desplegado en el texto se modela a partir de dos determinantes: el lugar de enunciación del texto y el uso de fuentes de información o de autoridad. De este modo, se problematiza el hecho de que el criollo jesuita hable sobre su patria desde Europa y para los europeos, es decir, que presente lo familiar ante una mirada ajena.

Learning through Linguistic citizenship: Finding the “I” of the essay

In recent years, the South African higher education system has seen growing calls for broadened epistemic access, decolonised curricula and transformed institutions. Scholars across South Africa have taken up the challenge and are working on new theoretical approaches to teaching and learning in higher education. In this paper, we reflect on students’ experiences of a multilingual, multimodal module called Reimagining Multilingualisms, which was jointly offered by the Universities of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch in April and May of 2018. In this paper, we provide an overview of the module and the different types of activities it involved. We reflect on these experiences using the theoretical lenses of decolonial scholar Mignolo (2009) on the ‘locus of enunciation’, and Stroud (2018) on ‘Linguistic Citizenship’. We present extracts from focus group interviews with students from both campuses to illustrate the involvement of ‘the body’ in ‘knowing’ and the ways in which the module enabled different ‘voices’ to emerge. We focus particularly on the role played by students’ perceived ‘vulnerability’ in the transformative benefits of the module and discuss this by way of conclusion. In sum, we suggest how the centring of multilingualism and diversity – not only as core pedagogic principles, but also as a methodology for transformation – may be used to enhance access and recapture voice in the building of a more integrated and just society.