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Translingual and Decolonial Approaches

to Meaning Making

Ellen Cushman

When the languages and categories begin to be activated in order to build a world in which
many worlds will co-exist, by social actors aiming at de-colonization of knowledge and being
and of de-linking from the imperial modernity, the splendors of human imagination and
creativity will open up.
Walter Mignolo Delinking p. 498

open with this inspirational quote from Walter Mignolo because it begs the
question, to what extent might translingual approaches to language teaching
and learning allow for pluriversal splendors of human imagination and creativity to open up? This question stems from the problems of linguistic and
social hierarchy that index imperialist legacies central to the history of the United
States generally and manifested in composition and rhetoric specifically: how can
teachers and scholars move beyond the presumption that English is the only language
of knowledge making and learning? This is an exciting question, one that is premised on the understanding that languages are not something human beings have
but what human beings are (Tlostanova and Mignolo 61). In many respects, this
understanding of language provides a connection to identity and being in the world
that resonates with Lu and Horners understanding, as described in their introduction to this special issue, of translingual approaches to composition as performative,
transformative, ideological, context bound, and indicative of difference as the norm.
If languages are something human beings are, then it behooves scholars and teachers
to consider seriously what methodological and pedagogical possibilities for decolonizing knowledge translingualism can potentially offer.

Cherokee Nation citizen and member of NCTE since 2000, E l le n Cus hm a n is Deans Professor of
Civic Sustainability and Director of Civic Sustainability, Diversity, and Inclusion Initiatives at Northeastern
University. With Mary Juzwik, she serves as co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. She is also
co-editing, with Chris Haas and Mike Rose, the second edition of Literacy: a Critical Sourcebook(Bedford).

College English, Volume 78, Number 3, January 2016

Copyright 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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Translingual approaches can work at the level of paradigm to hasten the process
of revealing and potentially transforming colonial matrices of power that maintain
hierarchies of knowledges and languages (see Mignolo Darker Side of Western Modernity for more on colonial matrices of power). Translingual approaches can also
work at the level of pedagogy wherein students languages and categories of understanding can be expressed in the classroom in ways that allow these knowledges and
practices to persevere.
In this essay, I define three key aspects of translingual approaches to composition
and rhetoric that can potentially involve scholars and students in meaning making that
attempts to level linguistic and knowledge hierarchies that always indicate imperialist
legacies of thought and deed. As it stands now, translingualism can be defined as those
meaning making processes that involve students and scholars in translanguaging,
translating, and dwelling in borders. These three epistemological and pedagogical
moves imagine translingual approaches to meaning making that might further epistemic delinking and border thinking (Mignolo Delinking). Such delinking efforts
have sewn the seeds of pluriversal realities within composition studies, realities that
could well change both the disciplinary and pedagogical tenets and content of the
field. In the future, translingual approaches can continue to develop these and more
decolonial possibilities through research and teaching that are dedicated to leveling
the social, epistemic, semiotic, and linguistic hierarchies that (de)humanize us all.
Languaging

With its focus on language as performance that relies on making visible the multiple
choices, values, and historical importance of registers and forms, translanguaging
centers on making visible the structuring principles that stage the instrumental,
historical, and cultural values and practices associated with each tool selected when
meaning making (Lu and Horner). The focus here is on the performance and instrumentality of meaning making, as these contribute to agency and power relations, a
focus which begins the work of unveiling colonial matrices of power.
Elsewhere, the translingual approach has taken up Paul Matsudas challenge
to the field to move beyond the monolinguistic assumption of English as the most
important, primary language to which all other languages are subordinate (Myth).
Decentering the primacy of English as the lingua franca of composition studies in
educational economies means an explicit valuation of all languages in the writing and
readings assigned to students, spoken in the classroom, and produced in scholarly
work. This is not to imply that translanguaging is the same as multilingualism, as
Matsuda recently warned (Lure 480). Heritage languages and scripts that were
lost or are being eroded and (re)learned alongside English could become a schol-

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arly, curricular, and pedagogical focus (McCarty and Lee; McCarty and Nicholas).
English would be seen as one of many language assets available to writers in this
world. Its place as a lingua franca (May) could be questioned, equalized, and replaced
with a more cosmopolitan understanding (De Costa; Campano, Ghiso and Sanchez;
Canagarajah) of Englishs place alongside and equal to a pluriversality of languages.
AAE speakers and English language learners could ideally see their home languages
valued, taught, and practiced in reading and writing assignments and classroom
discussions in ways that sustain this as one of many Englishes (Perryman-Clark;
Wetzl; Young and Martinez; Richardson).
Simultaneously, a translingual approach to meaning making evokes a decolonial
lens with its focus on the ideologies implicit in any tool chosen for meaning making
(be it mode, media, or genre), as these are always laden with cultural, historical, and
instrumental import for the people who use them (see Shipka and Bawarshi 2016; and
Cushman, Cherokee). Its not altogether clear the extent to which translingualism is,
thus far, in a decolonial moment rather than a post-monolinguistic moment, as the
symposium leaders have suggested. Certainly, a better understanding of languages and
their scripts is needed by scholars in the field, but this is more than just a disciplinary
call to go West into the linguistic frontier (Matsuda Its the Wild West). Matsudas
choice of an imperialist metaphor could, in fact, limit the decolonial possibilities of
translingualism by associating it again with a change to disciplinary content without
addressing change to the tenets of disciplines (i.e., the epistemological underpinnings of whats valued, understood, and practiced). To realize a decolonial potential,
translingual approaches need to avoid simply changing the content of what is studied
and taught and work toward dwelling in the borders to revise the paradigmatic tenets
of thought structuring everyday practices. The primacy of English in composition
studies and classrooms at its very heart maintains an imperialist legacy that dehumanizes everyone in different and differing ways. What would our classrooms and
scholarship be like if teachers and students spoke, read, wrote, and listened to more
than one language? The possibilities are exciting and promising.
Imagine the historical moment when National Council of Teachers of English
is renamed to replace English with Languaging, or Languaging Arts, or Meaning.
The National Council of Teachers of Languaging Arts. Imagine the convergence
of literature, language, writing, and communication as disciplinary fields. Imagine
scholars with multiple disciplinary homes and students with majors created from
selections of courses based on questions, projects, or real-world problems and solutions. Each could move laterally across disciplinary silos, languages, and symbolic
systems. Imagine all the languages valued equally, multiple scripts and media used
routinely, and new genres flourishing in ways that recreate institutional and disciplinary contexts. You may say I am a dreamer. But Im not the only one.

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Translating

Insofar as the translingual approach asks for writers and composers to consider and
make explicit how their performances are situated and constitutive of their own
multiple social positions, the translingual approach aspires to the proposition that
revealing and leveling colonial matrices of power might be possible. These moments
of epistemic delinking in composition studies classrooms, scholarship, and public
engagements help to rewrite authorized contexts or genres for expression. One
strategy of de-linking is to de-naturalize concepts and conceptual fields that totalize
A reality (Mignolo Delinking 459). What if the academic essay, no matter the
discipline, was denaturalized as a generic form that totalizes the reality of university
knowledge making to become an agentive performance, as Anis Bawarshi proposes
in this issue? Writers in classrooms, for instance, have begun shifting what counts
as an academic essay in what forms of representation, to rearrange the material
consequences in the world (see Donahue; Lorimer; Young and Martinez; Berry,
Hawisher and Selfe for examples of this work underway). The unveiling of how
language decisions are shaped by contexts of utterances must also be accompanied
by deliberation about doing, then doing in order to reform and recreate classrooms,
institutions, and communities. Doing so might help reform, from within, the contexts
for writing that are understood by students like Mina and those occupying these
spaces, as described by Guerra in this issue.
The focus on trans- actions, that include translating, transforming, and transfer
(see Lorimer Leonard and Nowacek), could begin to unveil the ways that colonial
matrices of power are built on intersecting, mutually sustaining nodes of everyday
logics of practice that form disciplines and universities. Translingual approaches
undertaken in classrooms and scholarship could begin the work of decolonizing
Eurocentric paradigms because these approaches seem to enact at least two procedures necessary for epistemic delinking. Transforming, translating, and transacting
could begin by asking of a language or dialect, for example, the instrumental question, What is its grammar (that is, its vocabulary, syntax and semantics)? (Mignolo
Delinking 485). From there, two additional analytical moves are needed to a)
understand how the language is located within theo [religion] and ego [subjectivity] politics of knowledge and understanding and to b) offer growth and expansion
of the geo and body-politics of knowledge and understanding. Both are delinking
procedures (485). In a world where English has become the global lingua franca and
difference is erased or subordinated in the push for a universally shared language, the
epistemological transactions, transformations, and translations possible in scholarship and classrooms can take steps toward enacting the pluralistic practices possible
through decolonial options.

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D w e ll i n g

in the

Borders

Translingualism seems to offer an approach to difference that is imbued in all languages, media, and modalities. Difference in expression becomes a content of study
and pedagogy, it seems, that is surfaced when tracing legitimate and creative expressions that depart from acceptable forms of discourse. The inter and intra forms of
representation and communicative practices gesture toward the type of epistemic
delinking when decolonizing Western thought (see for instance Villanueva; Baca
and Villanueva; Baca; Greene; Cushman, Cherokee).
The translingual approach, though, still needs to envision difference as heterogeneous, as differences, better thought of in the plural. Many Native peoples for
instance identify themselves by place and tribe, by clan, by their actions and roles and
are not one thing: American Indians. Understanding the differences within difference
as the norms of all utterances can help imagine one type of epistemic delinking that
invites a pluriversality of knowledges and languages. Given recent edited collections,
conferences, and the convergence of several lines of scholarship toward this possible
end, it seems to offer promising steps in this direction. However, as I consider the
potentially decolonial implications of translingualism, I want to anticipate potential
limitations we learn from the example set by previous critical emancipatory projects
in English and composition studies.
I m p e r i a l i s m a n d t h e P r o bl e m o f
C r i t i c a l E m a n c i p a t o r y P r o j e ct s

Insofar as composition studies centers itself as a discipline dedicated to the study

and maintenance of one of the primary, modern imperial languages and its academic
texts, composition studies itself sits at the intersection of several structuring nodes in
the colonial matrix of power that include authority, knowledge, gender and sexuality, economy, and racism. Mignolos earlier work elucidates the tight connection
between imperialist projects of colonization and the role that imperialist languages
and literacy have played in the destruction of Amerindians texts, knowledge, and
languages (The Darker Side of the Renaissance). Though much work in the field has
been done to redress issues of inequity that have stemmed from the imperialism of
English, the problem that most critical theory projects face remains.
Marxism, postcolonialism, and critical emancipatory epistemologies that have
sought to change paradigms of knowledge making in English studies have fallen
short of their liberating mark. These emancipatory projects havent yet addressed
the imperialist underpinnings of modernist thought but have instead sought change
by replacing one content with another. As Mignolo notes, For that reason, early
de-linking projects were not radical de-linking but rather radical emancipation within

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the rhetoric of modernity and logic of coloniality (Delinking 461-2). In the case
of Marxism, for example, the communal replaces the individual as social organizing
force, but does little to address racism, sexism, homophobia, ethnocide, genocide,
and ecocide. In other words, de-linking could hardly be thought out from a Marxist
perspective, because Marxism offers a different content but not a different logic
(462). The problem with Marxism, and the same might be said for emancipatory
projects within composition studies that derive from it, is that they have only partially
realized potential change. If a liberation project can be realized through curricular,
pedagogical, or structural change, it needs both to reveal the ideologies established
in modernitys colonial matrix of power and to generate pluriversal understandings,
values, and practices (Mignolo The Darker Side of Modernity). So how to characterize
the colonial matrix of power?
Dualistic thinking is foundational to the colonial matrix of power because
it maintains the center/periphery of knowledge-making effortsin other words,
knowledge reproduces itself by creating necessary others through other forms of
thought or expression. The colonial matrix of power includes several interconnected heterogeneous historical-structural nodes, bounded by the / that divides
and unites modernity/coloniality, imperial laws/colonial rules, center/peripheries,
that are the consequence of global linear thinking in the foundation of the modern/
colonial world (Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity 16-17). These nodes
of social and institutional organization include any number of structuring tenets
central to Western modernity: such as, religion, race, class, gender, divisions of labor,
governance, aesthetics, disciplines, subjectivity, and environment as natural resource
(17-20). Emancipatory projects in composition studies fall short of their social justice
goals because they critique a content or place of practice without revealing and altering their own structuring tenets. For example, the literacy narrative went through
a fairly large revision within the freshman composition class when service learning,
outreach, and community literacy projects emerged more than a decade ago. In early
iterations of this curricular revision, the literacy narrative became a different kind
of reflective essay, but remained an equally problematic genre (Feldman). Service
learning replaced the content of freshman composition with papers written after
reflection on experiences gained when students worked with/in communities. It
did so, though, without naming and altering the fundamental tenets that structure
the understandings, values, and practices of first year writing courses or the genres
taught therein and their important place in maintaining the social inequities that
perpetuate them.1 The translingual approach to meaning making in composition
studies faces these same sorts of obstacles as it attempts to make curricular, research,
and pedagogical reform.
With these caveats in mind, however, Ill end by emphasizing that valuable goals
and emerging lines of scholarship and research arise from translingual approaches

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to research and teaching. These, I think, have the potential to change the systemic
inequalities and imperialism of composition studies, because translingualism is both
paradigmatic and pragmatic, working as it does at the twin sites of knowledge and
meaning making in composition classrooms.
I see potential for translingual approaches to teaching, learning, and knowledge
making to begin activating the splendors of human imagination and creativity
(Mignolo 498). Because it can work at the paradigmatic level, a translanguaging approach can help scholars and students engage in explicitly demystifying the various
approaches to language difference (Guerra 232) by encouraging metalinguistic
and meta-rhetorical dexterity. Translingualism could also help the process of decolonizing thought and everyday languaging practices in composition scholarship
and classrooms by helping scholars, teachers, and students dwell in the borders of
colonial difference by using multiple scripts, media, languages, and English(es) as
routine and integral parts of the teaching, learning, and knowledge making activities of universities. If, as Bawarshi says, [T]ranslingualism is a fact of all language
use (245), scholars, students, and teachers still need to create the mutlidirectional
rhetorical contexts, situations, and purposes that offer possibilities for perseverance
of languages and knowledges across community, institutional, classroom, and professional contexts (Trimbur). Language and sign system hierarchies always index the
social hierarchies implicit in, indeed necessary for, imperialism. By creating pluriversal
contexts, values, and purposes for meaning makingthose disposition[s] and practice
[s] (Shipka) necessary for seeing difference as the norm of language usescholars,
teachers, and students can begin working together to dwell in the borders created
by the imperial difference.
Note
1. Ann Feldman offers a particularly insightful critique of literacy narratives and reflection. Taking up what Anis Bawarshi calls the genre function (Bawarshi 2003), Feldman argues that we need
to examine the ways that genre provides a lens for the resources of culture and context (Feldman 112).

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