ABSTRACT
The intersections of Southern perspectives on applied linguistics with decolonial thinking reveal the precarity of trespassing epistemic borders in search of other geoepistemic centers of gravity as a strategy for sorting out the colonial matrix of knowledge and power that organize contemporary life. Coloniality itself thrives on its propensity to selectively appropriate—and therefore, dismantle—its own dissent, a strategy that recursively (re)produces images of Eurocentric universalism through an unrelenting politics of occlusion. Southern perspectives reveal the epistemic significance of this politics in the colonial invention of so-called indigenous languages and its appropriation in education (e.g., in bilingual and mother tongue-based multilingual education). But the transformation of indigenous linguistic ecologies, by way of invention, occurs in tandem with the transmogrification of knowledge, knowing, and educational processes, by way of institutionalization, through the same standardizing, universalizing, colonizing matrix. Thus, the project of “disinventing and reconstituting languages” must unfold simultaneously with the deinstitutionalization of knowledge and education, an entangled agenda that needs a recalibrated focus on interspaces to extend the border gnosis of decolonial thinking.
