Decolonising the language of citizenship

This article investigates how language becomes a contested site for decolonising the study of citizenship. In particular, I look at the linguistic conditions where the English language is used as a means of writing about citizenship and ask: how do we, as authors, decolonise scholarship if the very means to do so requires the language of the colonisers to begin with? Drawing on writers including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Rey Chow, Jacques Derrida, and Gloria Anzaldúa, this article problematises ‘colonial’ expectations embedded in the practice of writing, such as an expectation to write like a native speaker, and to produce a coherent understanding of the text. I argue that these writers’ approaches to language show various ways in which writing becomes integral to de/coloniality. Building on their works, I further suggest different tactics of writing we can adopt to decolonise citizenship studies. They include: using minoritised languages for writing; provincialising English-speaking scholarship; developing a writing style unique to the author; and disappropriating the text.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

Exploring the links between language, everyday citizenship, and community

The so-called migration and refugee ‘crisis’ has seen a wide-spread phenomenon across the world where people come together to build relationships to enact their visions of community, regardless of different ways in which they are included in or excluded from the citizenship regime. This special issue contributes to the studies of these political struggles to explore how such encounters of people are facilitated, negotiated, and contested, from the angle of language. In particular, we use the everyday as a lens to explore how spaces for agency are mobilised and practices of community-making take place. Drawing on a range of geographical locations as well as disciplinary backgrounds, the contributions look at multiple sites of seemingly uneventful and mundane social interactions. The authors collectively demonstrate the critical role language plays in these various everyday interactions, through which the boundaries of community, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, are contested, reproduced, and negotiated.Peer reviewe

Resistance beyond sovereign politics:Petty sovereigns’ disappearance into the world of fiction in post-Fukushima Japan

What happens to sovereign power when petty sovereigns refuse to exploit discretionary power to suspend the rule of law, the very power that is delegated to them and makes them who they are? How might such a refusal contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between resistance and sovereign power? This article revisits Judith Butler’s notion of petty sovereigns to explore the possibility that petty sovereigns establish a distinctive relationship with law. This article draws on a case involving one nameless petty sovereign and his published writings. He writes novels to expose how law is used by some officials to realize a particular policy goal with regards to nuclear energy. His novels blur the line between fiction and non-fiction: it contains classified information only available to bureaucrats, discusses actual energy policies and related laws, and introduces fictional characters who resemble non-fictional characters. I argue that this example suggests that petty sovereigns are not necessarily tied to the node between governmentality and sovereignty. Shifting between the worlds of fiction and non-fiction, petty sovereigns slip away from sovereign power, which controls the subject-making process, and quietly resist sovereign politics through the contingency of subjectivity. </jats:p

Translators as mediators of citizenship : rethinking community in relational translation

Translation is often assumed to be successful if it builds understanding beyond linguistic barriers. In contrast, failed translation signals miscommunication. The article challenges this assumption to explore the potentials of failed communication for the idea of community: how we might come together to build relationships when we fail to understand each other. The article is based on the case of multilingual migrant activism, where participants of activism rely on translators because they do not share the same language for communication. I will demonstrate that, deliberately or accidentally, voice and silence are misunderstood through the figure of the translator, and how unintelligibility comes to shape interactions. Drawing on the works of contemporary political thinkers including Jean-Luc Nancy, Iris Young, and Slavoj Žižek, I will argue that such communication failure allows us to realise community in the sharing of our own limitations of being, beyond the binary between ‘us’/‘host’ and ‘them’/‘guest’.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

BEYOND WORK: MIGRANTS’ MULTIPLE RELATIONSHIPS WITH FINNISH LANGUAGE

Learning Finnish is often emphasised as essential for migrants to find employment in Finland. But what role does learning Finnish have for individuals, for whom Finnish language is not necessary in their work