This paper illuminates the construction of new social and linguistic orders in multilingual primary schools in Cape Town. It suggests that these emerging ideologies of postracial solidarity can be seen as examples of Fanon’s (1968) postcolonial cosmopolitanism ‘from below’, one that creates new terms for recognisability and ethical engagement.
This paper mobilizes the potential of linguistic ethnography to uncover largely invisibilised processes of cultural and educational production in highly diverse but marginalized school sites in Cape Town, South Africa. It aims in this way to contribute to Santos’ (2014, 154) sociology of absences and emergences by illuminating ‘absent knowledges and absent or silenced agents’ in mainstream social sciences and simultaneously identifying emergent knowledges and practices in order to identify possibilities for change. In southern contexts, complex histories of engagement across difference lie behind each interactional moment: each moment carries the potential to either shift or reproduce racialized indexicalities and thereby either transform or reinforce the local social order. The paper draws on observations, interviews, and recorded peer interactions to illuminate encounters across difference among multilingual ten-to-twelve-year-olds in two primary schools on the periphery of Cape Town. Findings show how youngsters construct new raciolinguistic orders, reworking historical divisions through resignifying racial, ethnic, and national categories and subverting the racialised indexicalities operating in the local social field, albeit not always unproblematically. The paper shows the potential of more heteroglossic and less stratified sites to enrich the sociological imagination: it suggests that these emerging ideologies of postracial solidarity can be seen as examples of Fanon’s ([1961] 1968) postcolonial cosmopolitanism ‘from below’, one that creates new terms for recognisability and ethical engagement. Here, as elsewhere, those outside the eurocentred core seem to bear the responsibility for rehumanising humanity (Césaire 2001; Fanon 1961/1968; Mbembe 2017) and forging new realities. References Césaire, A. 2001. Discourse on Colonialism. Transl. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. Fanon, F. [1961] 1968. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Mbembe, A. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Santos, B. de S. 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
