Rejecting abyssal thinking in the language and education of racialized bilinguals: A manifesto

ABSTRACT

Following Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the authors of this article reject the type of “abyssal thinking” that erases the existence of counter-hegemonic knowledges and lifeways, adopting instead the “from the inside out” perspective that is required for thinking constructively about the language and education of racialized bilinguals. On the basis of deep personal experience and extensive field-work research, we challenge prevailing assumptions about language, bilingualism, and education that are based on raciolinguistic ideologies with roots in colonialism. Adopting a translanguaging perspective that rejects rigid colonial boundaries of named languages, we argue that racialized bilingual learners, like all students, draw from linguistic-semiotic, cultural, and historical repertoires. The decolonial approach that guides our work reveals these students making a world by means of cultural and linguistic practices derived from their own knowledge systems. We propose that in order to attain justice and success, a decolonial education must center non-hegemonic modes of “otherwise thinking” by attending to racialized bilinguals’ knowledges and abilities that have always existed yet have continually been distorted and erased through abyssal thinking.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We focus in this paper on the historical processes of white European colonization and their continued effect on those who now live in the U.S. and the U.K. We recognize, of course, that the processes of colonization and dominance over others have not been solely carried out by white Europeans.

2. The decolonial theory and approaches that we take up in this article have been advanced by scholars such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano, whose work we cite here. They have also been developed by other Latin American scholars, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar, Ramón Grosfoguel, María Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others. In the Asian context, Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) has been advocating a similar approach that he calls ‘deimperialization’.

3. Four of the authors participated in this initiative, known by its acronym, CUNY-NYSIEB. Otheguy served as principal investigator, García as co-principal investigator, Flores as founding director, and Seltzer as the third director.