Decoloniality, Spanish and Latin American studies in Australian universities: ¿es un mundo ch’ixi posible?

ABSTRACT

Course descriptions from Spanish and Latin American studies departments in Australian universities operate as both curriculum documents and promotional materials. As a result, these departments face difficulties in promoting the ideals of social justice and equity often associated with language education. This paper analyses these course descriptions for examples of themes that visibilise other ways of knowing/doing/being from a decolonial perspective in response to the neoliberal ethic inherent to the genre. Using a critical discourse analytic approach from a Latin American perspective, this paper analyses several key themes of decoloniality present in the course descriptions including historical acceptance, language diversity, and gender and sexuality. These themes offer examples of how Spanish and Latin American studies departments in Australia are disrupting dominant ethics, ontologies and epistemologies within institutional constraints to work towards un mundo ch’ixi: a world of contentious but complementary opposites.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• colonization
• education
• Global South
• South America
• oceania
• culture

Acknowledgment

This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Notes

1. The term world languages has been used throughout this paper to refer to what have also been termed foreign languages, languages other than English (LOTE), or second languages. World languages is more commonly used in the United States and is not unproblematic itself. For some, it may evoke Anglo-centric connotation as does world music. The Australian National Curriculum uses the term languages, but this may cause confusion whereas foreign languages, languages other than English (LOTE), or second languages have negative connotations that associate languages such as Spanish as outside the community and alien to Australia while also ignoring the plurilingualism of speakers. Although world languages is not a perfect choice as it may evoke Westernised sentiments as does world music, at the very least it recognises the spatial and cultural diversity of languages. Where possible, the term languaging is used instead.

2. The Real Academia Española (RAE) is an organisation based in Spain tasked with maintaining, safeguarding and preserving the Spanish language. Their motto is ‘to cleanse, fix and enhance’. The organisation produces dictionaries that cover vocabulary, grammar and spelling.

3. AbyaYala is the Indigenous name in Kuna language for Latin America suggested by Aymara leader Taki Mamani in the 1980s meaning ‘land in its full maturity’. (Vergara 2018)

4. Un mundo ch’ixi translates as a ch’ixi world from the Aymara language from AbyaYala.

5. Karan Barad uses the term intra-action ‘in contrast to the usual “interaction”, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intraaction recognizes that district agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intraaction’. (Barad 2007, 33)

6. It should be noted that the term languaging has been previously developed by Humberto R. Maturana, Franscico J. Varela and later Walter Mignolo. Maturana and Varela’s notion of language is based on the idea that ‘Everything said is said by an observer’ (Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 8.). This implies that the communicative process moves beyond the simplistic sender-receiver model of communication to one which includes ‘recursive and mutual interpretations’ (Cuffari, Di Paolo, and De Jaegher 2015, 1109)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle H. Heinrichs

Danielle H. Heinrichs is a PhD Candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include decoloniality, discourse studies, Spanish and Latin American studies and heritage languages. As part of her doctoral studies, Danielle examines the intersection of languaging, decoloniality and social media in Spanish as a world language education. She is trained in Spanish and Latin American studies and German and has experience lecturing and teaching communication, sociology and Indigenous studies.