From Southern Theory to Decolonizing Sociolinguistics

Rezensionen / Stimmen

This book is a bold and timely contribution to debates about the role of power, privilege and perspective in the creation of knowledge. Particularly impressive is how contributors weave moving and personal stories of their experiences as scholars together with their empirically rich and theoretically complex accounts of their scholarship. This volume is a generously provocative intervention that provides a compass for future journeys in the field. * Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK * Akin to a capoeirista who swerves and slides and swings in syncopated disobedience to colonial oppression, this book has ginga. Each chapter engages southern theory not in mere references here and there but as integral to a project of rethinking language, re-shaping unjust worlds, and reimagining futures beyond our troubled times. The authors powerfully show how to decolonize our minds and de-Westernize our eyes and ears towards a sociolinguistic praxis that moves, grooves, and nourishes us. * Rodrigo Borba, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil * In this critical and exciting collection, Deumert and Makoni introduce us, through the multiple voices and perspectives of authors from a variety of disciplinary and geographical positions, to different forms of disciplinary disobedience and epistemological delinking that provide a new foundation for the project of decolonizing sociolinguistics. A fascinating volume and a must read for those interested in the decolonial turn in the social sciences. * Anna De Fina, Georgetown University, USA * Each chapter offers deep engagement with the contributing authors' histories through narration of their personal experiences. Deumert and Makoni invite us to find our own paths through this text, to navigate a non-linear chronology of its contents, as each of its chapters stands alone as equally insightful, timely, and pertinent [...] This is a book that can not only be approached as multi-stop journey and a guided tour of critical debates from a multiplicity of perspectives, but also may be regarded as a leisure tour that invites sight-seeing and impromptu detours along the way. * Cerise Louisa Andrews, University of Warwick, UK, BAAL News, Issue 125, Spring 2025 * ...an extremely interesting volume that shows the relevance of Southern thinking today, not only in critically reading mainstream sociolinguistics but also in proposing new paths for sociolinguistic thinking. -- Juan Eduardo Bonnin, UNSAM - Universidad Nacional de San Martin, Argentina, Language in Society (2025), 1-4