Postmemory and multilingual identities in English language teaching: a duoethnography

ABSTRACT

Postmemory, the narrativised intergenerational transfer of often traumatic experiences, is a crucial component of multilingual identity negotiation. In this article, we focus specifically on the curricular interactions and personal and collective aspirations of multilingual students who use English for academic purposes. We situate our discussions in the literature on critical pedagogy, affect/emotion theory, and memory studies. We utilise duoethnography as a methodology for our dialogic inquiry. A duoethnographic approach enables us to be both self-reflexive and socially transformative through our explorations of lived experiences of language loss and gain and of our historical becoming of professional language educators. We highlight how multilingual identities are constructed, challenged, and reconstructed not only by social practices of sign-use, but also by intergenerational spatial mobility and the distributed nature of postmemory. Finally, we provide pedagogical implications for language education that seek to foster critical affective literacies. Turning to affect and emotion is important to move the discussion of multilingual identities beyond physical signifiers of social differentiation (i.e. race, gender, ethnicity, and class). Pedagogical attention to memory, affect and identity may offer us a more nuanced understanding of teachers’ and students’ agency and investment in multilingual semiotic practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• memory
• postmemory
• affect
• emotion
• duoethnography
• multilingualism

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is not always possible to make a distinction between memory and postmemory. We use postmemory as a single word to denote Hirsch’s conceptualisation that the origin of some of our memories precedes our birth. When we put the prefix ‘post’ in parenthesis, our intention is to highlight the complex interrelationship between memory and postmemory.

2 For example, the Hebrew letter ש, for initial /ʃ / in shin or /s/ in sin, substitutes for the ‘W’ in World; the Hebrew ם /mem/ stylistically approximates or suggests the ‘D’. Beyond denotation, the digraphia and indexicality of the restaurant sign might indicate an experiential ‘authenticity’ (i.e. ‘real’ Jewish bagels!), and for those who know or who have studied Hebrew, the sign affordances potentially invoke feelings and postmemories of belonging to a diasporic community (i.e. a Jewish Canadian identity) and the dynamic performance of its collective identity.

3 A critical affective literacies approach to pedagogy consists of four principles: (1) examining why we feel what we feel, (2) striving to enter a relation of affective equivalence, (3) interrogating the production and circulation of objects of emotion in everyday politics, and (4) focusing on the performativity of emotions to achieve social justice.