This short book by Alison Phipps (2019) is a guided autoethnographic journey through postcolonial locales and a manifesto to decolonize body, heart, and mind in pursuit of multilingual justice. In format, the text links prose and verse in the mode of haibun (combination of prose and haiku) in the travel diaries of the 17th-century Japanese literary master Bashō. The format does aid the message in this case. The act of literary risk-taking meshes well with the risks involved in challenging established Western ways of knowing and in pushing us toward decreation, the idea of “exile from the self” (2019, p. 43) articulated by 20th-century French mystic and activist Simone Weil. Phipps’s volume is the first publication in the Writing Without Borders series from Multilingual Matters, which urges experimental writing and “new ways of thinking or creating knowledge.” A professor of languages and intercultural studies at the University of Glasgow and UNESCO chair in refugee integration through languages and the arts, Phipps furnishes the book with nine of her poems and numerous photographs. The blending of genres pleasantly destabilizes the reader and, more important, emphasizes that cultivating discomfort with traditional academic practice—a deliberate move away from “firewall-protected double-blind peer-reviewed articles in top-ranked journals” (2019, p. 6)—is part of what is involved in decolonizing work.

In its interdisciplinarity and use of multiple theoretical frameworks, Decolonising Multilingualism will not be unfamiliar or conceptually jarring for educators and researchers working at the intersection of multilingualism and justice. In fact, as Zentella (1997) outfitted her informants with backpack-borne tape recorders in el bloque, a Puerto Rican neighborhood in New York, Phipps performs a similar service here in sharing intimately from field notes she has compiled from many travels. Rather than showing a concern for code switching or linguistic socialization, however, Phipps privileges situations of displacement. And she emphasizes her own awkwardness and vulnerability, rather than any perceived lack among her interlocutors. This lifting of marginalized groups and their existential situations, too, will be applicable to realms of multilingual education. In research perspective, Phipps announces early that she is non-, or anti-Western. In the Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Body, Law, and the State project, which Phipps directed, arts- or dance-driven interpretations were celebrated, with the mother tongues of performers given precedence over English. For readers versed in theological strands of thought, this favoring of the global South, which the book reflects, will sound like the “preferential option for the poor” that has been part of Catholic social teaching (though Phipps likely would object to this framing that implies a charitable orientation). Indeed, Phipps mentions her personal connections to the Iona Community, an ecumenical Christian movement and hospitality center off the west coast of Scotland. To be clear, though, this is not a book that advances or dwells on organized religion. It does, however, explicitly encourage attention to spiritual dimensions of language learning, particularly as modeled in Phipps’s brief experiment with studying te reo, the language of the Māori.

Among these displaced southern populations, Phipps finds the substance of a decolonizing manifesto that opens the book (the manifesto is also online). The essence behind the call to action—“The only way to decolonize is to do it” (2019, p. 5), reads the manifesto’s opening—comes from committed ethnographic observation of the world’s autochthonous peoples, many now on the move, having been colonized and displaced, their languages and lifeways at risk. The legacy of language loss and commitment to language revitalization are concerns, too, that will resonate with those studying cases of subtractive multilingualism worldwide. “This disconnection from the land,” Phipps explains, “is the primary violence of settler colonialism, cultural, technocratic and linguistic colonialism” (2019, pp. 14–15). Thus, the path to remedy, among other strategies, lies in citing multilingual scholarship, deemphasizing text-based literacies, accepting new collaborations, honoring artists and poets, and seeking out vernacular naming practices and using those names. One of the vernaculars that Phipps raises to prominence is the Shona saying chitsva chiri mutsoka, or “gifts are in the feet.” The grounded metaphor calls our attention to the soil that receives colonizing violence. A more specific case in Decolonising Multilingualism comes from Phipps’s ethnographic noticing while spending time with female Eritrean refugees in an apartment block in an unnamed city. Painting of the feet and ankles with henna can signal the “possibility of mobility” (2019, p. 56), perhaps a wedding, a reunion with family.

This short residence with the women of Eritrea offers the reader a rendering of how decolonizing is experienced in the senses and at the seat of emotions. In a confined linguistic landscape of Tigrinya and Bilen, Phipps has crossed a threshold where her multilingual self and “the eloquence which allows for power, presentation and performance, and which sustains and perpetuates domination” (2019, p. 44) are no longer of use. Anyone who has been in a situation of not being able to comprehend the language or languages circulating around them will relate to the “muted vulnerability” that Phipps describes. The lack of language is experienced as “an active, exhausting performance of my own body” (2019, p. 41). Later, she expands on the bodily origins of language and says of her own self, in this apartment with women awaiting any news of their families or migration status, “Mostly I dwell in a state of mild frustration and feel rather awkward, ungainly, deeply unattractive” (2019, p. 69). These decolonizing moments suggest a pathway to the key insight of decreation, which the poet Anne Carson has written about and which poses a fundamental challenge to Western thinking. First, Phipps cites Joseph-Achille Mbembé, a Cameroonian political theorist, whose own writing on decolonization has expressed the difficulties Western philosophy has with the “I” of the Other. An answer to this historical addiction to domination, as Phipps discovers, is to be positioned in a way that permits dislocation from one’s own self, one’s language. In other work, Phipps (2013) has extolled the value of “linguistic incompetence” in doing multilingual research. The construct breaks deliberately from much language pedagogy that judges “competence” as the sine qua non of linguistic achievement.

In decolonizing and in decreation, the word that Phipps consistently revisits is “risk.” For those in academia, deliberately taking the role of non-knower over expert may be the very definition of “risk.” What is lacking in Phipps’s account is an assessment of how she has reached this threshold of willingness to decreate, and whether decreation is something that only manifests at the level of individual choice or whether it might be pursued institutionally as well. What have been Phipps’s shortcomings as decolonizer? What internal resistance has she encountered? And how might she critique the academic environment in which we reside for its own failure to raise up scholars and structures willing to decolonize by doing it? One gets some inkling of Phipps’s journey in her attempt, in Chapter 12, to craft a personal mihi (Phipps, 2014b), a Māori form of greeting that involves recitation of ancestry, landmarks, and other touchstones of identity. In her case, the university is credited with sending her “back out into the world—a vessel for grief, a vulnerable observer, a witness of words” (2019, p. 81). We can wish this sensitizing for all of us, although it might be contingent on the variables of personal biography. Or is it? In the concluding chapter, Phipps reckons with the fact that the “languaged realities of the world” (2019, p. 91) no longer confine multilingualism to certain far-flung territories, but that decolonizing work might occur close to home, perhaps in learning the languages of arriving refugees where one lives.

Another scholarly domain with which Decolonising Multilingualism makes contact is that of intercultural communication. It is fair to say that Phipps submits the precepts of intercultural communicative competence to strong questioning. She has also done this elsewhere, stating that in zones of occupation and severe power imbalance, the notion of intercultural dialogue has become more of a slogan, serving “the maintenance of a violent system of global inequality by focusing attention away from that inequality” (2014a, p. 112). In the book under review, Phipps questions, as mentioned above, the “competence” standard, implying that such competence mainly serves the dominant presence in the interaction. Further, judgments about competence typically concern a person, whereas multilingual meanings of the sort in which Phipps is interested occur at the level of the collective. She desires that intercultural communication take place when competence, at least on the part of the representative of colonial authority, has been abandoned. One of Phipps’s early insights comes while working on a dance production in Accra, Ghana. She falls off a curb, badly spraining her ankle. The best option for recovery is the massaging technique of a local healer, who is also Phipps’s driver. It is a moment for risk, because the healer has promised that his efforts will bring pain, but ultimately relief. “[M]y white skin,” Phipps reflects, “marked me fully as someone who would not be at all likely to respect the traditional wisdom being offered by a multilingual, subaltern taxi driver” (2019, p. 20). The excruciating treatment takes away Phipps’s power of speech. Yet in the loss of “word, self and voice” (2019, p. 24), a space of acceptance opens, permitting new relationships born of pain shared and relieved.

The ethnographic comparison that Phipps makes is with the Clifford Geertz essay “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in which Geertz runs from police breaking up an illegal cockfighting venue and finds a new acceptance in having taken the side of those he is there to study. Phipps blends her voice with many others in this text—with the decolonizing work of Frantz Fanon and the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the ontological investigations of Hannah Arendt, the praxis-based pedagogy of Paulo Freire, and the Māori scholars Ranganui Walker, Mason Durie, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In these gestures, she emulates one of the recommended ways for pushing beyond a European model of multilingualism and demonstrates how to build connections with less-cited non-Western voices, who may or may not be working in English. The book, therefore, constitutes a practical move toward solidarity and, in Phipps’s words, responds to “critics who may see as naïve and unattainable the fond hope I hold for a shifting away from the all too colonial language legacies in our Western schooling, towards ecologies of neighbourliness, dialogue and decreation” (2019, p. 15).

References

Phipps, A. (2013). Linguistic incompetence: Giving an account of researching multilingually. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 23(3), 329–341. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijal.12042

Phipps, A. (2014a). “They are bombing now”: “Intercultural dialogue” in times of conflict. Language and Intercultural Communication, 14(1), 108–124. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2013.866127

Phipps, A. (2014b, Spring). Mihi . . . Coracle, 59(4), 17. https://iona.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2015/03/Spring-Coracle-2014.pdf

Phipps, A. (2019). Decolonising multilingualism: Struggles to decreate. Multilingual Matters.

Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Blackwell.