Southern thinking and intermingling cosmologies, epistemologies and ontologies of decoloniality run through deep canyons carved through millennia. Sociolinguists nurtured within the northern academy must side-step hubris lest they fall through the abyss that lies between northern and southern ways of being, and the southern canyons of relevance they desire.
Decolonial and southern thinking as the provenance of people and civilizations that have withstood repeated invasion and epistemic, ontological and cosmological violence, is something that may not be possible to acquire from without. Six years ago, southern perspectives of multilingualisms were offered as a challenge to northern appropriation of discourses of multilingualism and southern epistemologies at AILA 2014 in Brisbane. The challenge was to open a space and ethos for dialogue in which what is known and unknown and how to be and to become differently can be explored. The challenge, swiftly taken up, was followed in quests for relevance. These turned towards recasting post-colonial discourses of critical linguistics within ‘new-to-the-northern-academy’ theoretical frames in search of southern-ness and decoloniality. Southern thinking and intermingling cosmologies, epistemologies and ontologies of decoloniality run along deep canyons carved through millennia. In different ways, several scholars, including Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) and Santos (2012, 2018), scrutinise the points of intersection between north and south which at times offer opportunities to reach or aspire to ‘mestizo consciousness’ (Kusch, 1970) or to generate ‘new knowledge’ (Connell, 2019). At other times, they recognise an abyss or its mirage that lies between northern and southern thinking (e.g. Macías, 2005; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012). Hastily assembled montages that invisibilise and pirate southern thinking appear as shadows of coloniality in a post-truth world. They take us no closer to understanding or learning how to be or to become southern or how to overcome our coloniality. Instead we descend not into the canyon but into the gaping mouth of hubris and irrelevance. If the architecture of the northern academy serves to contain intellectual mobility or to send enthusiasts into the abyss, is it possible to find the edges of southern canyons where we learn to forget and then to hear and see otherwise?
