Linguistically World-Travelling’ and Speaking in a Bifid Tongue: Contributions of a Latina decolonial feminist reconceptualization of the self to rethink multilingualism in a decolonial vein

Abstract

This article draws a connection between Latina decolonial feminist reconceptualization of the relational and multiplicitous nature of the self, and the project and possibilities of rethinking the role of multilingualism in promoting epistemic justice and the reconstitution of the communal. In particular, the author dwells into Maria Lugones’s border dwelling ‘world-traveling’ modality (1987) of moving between mutually exclusive selves, and its linguistic possibilities to make room to multiple ontologies of speakers and languages, where the idea of language and speaker move in a process of complex communication. The goal is to extend this Latina decolonial feminist understanding of a new kind of self with an ambiguous, fluid identity, and who experiences a sense of constant in-betweenness that fosters unique modes of meaning-making which can offer a lens to interpret the possibilities for interrupting a modern/colonial ‘bifid tongue’ sense of multilingualism tied to a bordered conceptualization of languages, closed sets of meanings, and an isolated-autonomous self.