AAUSC Issues in Language

Program Direction 2010

Critical and Intercultural

Theory and Language Pedagogy

Glenn S. Levine
Alison Phipps
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Chapter 10
Postcolonial Complexities in Foreign Language
Education and the Humanities

Robert W. Train, Sonoma State University

Abstract
This chapter develops a critical perspective on foreign language education by drawing on
postcolonial theory and research in order to better conceptualize and address the complex-
ity of language education in terms of ecologies of interconnected spaces of policy, curricu-
lum, and classroom practice. Starting from the basic classroom issue of linguistic diversity
and variability, this chapter offers a critical approach to language in education that strives to
“situate language study in cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames within
the context of humanistic learning” (Modern Language Association [MLA], 2007, p. 4).
This chapter advocates a critical, transcultural, and translinguistic humanism grounded
in decolonial practices of foreign language education that are theoretically informed,
educationally relevant, socially engaged, and ethically accountable. The chapter
also attempts to bring increased historical and critical depth to how foreign language
educators understand and perform the teaching of language in ways that connect to
transdisciplinary research concerns in the humanities and beyond.

Postcolonial Complexities in Foreign Language

Education and the Humanities
In this twenty-first century, it is difficult to imagine a foreign language department
or program in which the study and theory of literature and culture does not include
well-established courses offering students and faculty the space for explicit study,
reflection, and debate surrounding multiple and complex postcolonial practices
of language. In the case of French and Spanish, the two most commonly taught
world languages at universities in the United States and also commonly taught
in Europe, these courses are often conceptualized around convenient categories
of francophone or Latin American studies. The same can be said of linguistics
courses within those same departments and programs. The traditional “History
of the Language” courses and the more recent sociolinguistically oriented classes
on the linguistic diversity and variation of French or Spanish in the world must
engage with the postcolonial and imperial contours of language in global contexts.
And yet, can we language educators say that the critical vantage points afforded
by explicit attention to postcolonial theories and practices figure prominently in
the so-termed language courses and programs in those same departments where
the object and subject of pedagogic knowledge known as “Spanish” or “French”
can still seem disturbingly reductive with respect to the postcolonial complexities
of language, culture, and identity?
141
142 ROBERT W. TRAIN

Searching for a Postcolonial Space

in Lower-Division Language
In foreign language education, increased attention has been given to some of the
surface phenomena of the postcolonial. For example, the canonical student rep-
resentatives Jean-Jacques and Marie-France are now routinely accompanied by
Ali and Fatou in first-year French textbooks. The cultural achievements and his-
tory of French communities of North America have become staple readings from
the early settlements of the Acadians to the celebrity of the sports figure Tony
Parker. Students are sometimes invited to sample the worldwide lexical diversity
of French where the supposedly same referent can be named differently in Paris,
Dakar, and Montreal. In Spanish class, Christopher Columbus unfailingly comes
to America. In textbooks designed for lower-division Spanish courses (e.g., Spaine
Long, Carreira, Madrigal Velasco, & Swanson, 2005), it is common to find chap-
ters and cultural units that each feature their own nation beyond Spain. Learn-
ers of Spanish in universities—whether in foreign, native, or heritage language
courses—are increasingly supplied with demographic information on Hispanics
in the United States, often with considerable census data related to the various
Spanish-speaking communities associated with immigration from Latin America.
And the students are told that the supposed same things again can have different
names in Havana, Madrid, and Mexico City.
The opening of foreign language education, however tentative, to the diversity
and variability of language marks a significant change. In the traditional, overtly
Eurocentric language curriculum and instruction, there was Paris or Madrid,
beyond which everywhere and everyone else seemed like a day excursion into the
quaintly local or a mortal combat with the barbarian Other. The expanded canon
of Spanish and French as world languages opens new spaces for possible postcolo-
nial understandings of language, culture, and speakership. These possibilities are
all the more tantalizing for those learners who are also speakers of English, the
most problematically and hegemonically global and, some would say, imperial of
all world languages (see, e.g., Phillipson, 1992).
The worldliness of language and languages also begs for expanded and critical
ways of reconceptualizing what we call “language” and “languages,” along
with the constellation of concepts surrounding language use and speakership
(e.g., “competence” and “nonnative”). What is the place or multiple sites of
language(s) within and beyond university foreign language programs? How can
we address the recent calls for curricular reform to “situate language study in
cultural, historical, geographic, and cross-cultural frames within the context of
humanistic learning” (MLA, 2007, p. 4)? Questions arise about “the standard con-
figuration of university foreign language curricula, in which a two- or three-year
language sequence feeds into a set of core courses primarily focused on canonical
literature” (p. 2). How can we begin or continue to break down this narrow and
reductive “two-tiered model”? Moving toward a “constitutive” account of language
as “a complex multifunctional phenomenon” will require foreign language educa-
tion to focus on the translingual and transcultural (p. 2). Toward this end, how can
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 143

we challenge the reductive and instrumentalist account of language and language

use as “a skill to use for communicating thought and information” (p. 2)?
In keeping with the transcultural and translinguistic project, I suggest
that an explicitly critical and postcolonial—even decolonial and decolonizing—
perspective provides a necessary entry point into more constitutive—even
reconstitutive—accounts of language and language education in the humanities
and beyond. As part of this perspective, I assert the foundational coloniality of
language in education that has shaped what we do as foreign language educators.
This move requires several accounts and recognitions to better conceptualize and
address the complexity of foreign language education in terms of ecologies of
interconnected spaces of policy, curriculum, and classroom practice. Drawing on
interdisciplinary theory and research, I offer a brief, historically situated account
of the ideological invention and reduction of language in and through pedagogy in
imperial and colonial contexts. This account leads to the recognition of tensions
surrounding the inclusion–exclusion attached to speakership and competence in
the (re)production of inequalities in global and local contexts.
This perspective is not intended as a definitive statement or a manifesto but
rather as a turn in an ongoing dialogue between language program directors,
instructors, and researchers (not in fact mutually exclusive categories) who bring
with us diverse fields of study, discussion, and debate that are critical to language,
learning, and education.

Notes on Theory and Terminology: Imperialism,

Colonialism, and Coloniality
One of the problems with bringing the postcolonial into foreign language
education is the number of complex and contested concepts. Individual scholars
have aligned their particular postcolonial approaches with or distinguished
them from other scholars and approaches as a result of the ongoing practices
and debates that may be discipline-specific but also cut across disciplinary
boundaries. By way of example and for the benefit of the foreign language
educator who may wish to further pursue postcolonial studies, I include a
brief (but by no means exhaustive) list of some of the disciplinary diversity and
interdisciplinary connectedness within the humanities that can be found among
postcolonial approaches by historians (e.g., Prakash, 1995), literary schol-
ars (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2007; Said, 1978; Young, 2001), philosophers
(Spivak, 1999), applied linguists (Pennycook, 1998), educators (Willinsky, 1998),
and anthropologists (Asad, 1991; Errington, 2007). As these scholars exemplify,
a postcolonial perspective also requires a willingness to venture beyond one’s
primary academic discipline. For foreign language educators, understanding the
postcolonial dimensions of what we do challenges us to go outside ourselves,
beyond the borders constructed by or assigned to the teaching/learning of foreign
languages in the university. However, the passage across and between boundaries
to a broader view of foreign language education is fraught with transactions and
144 ROBERT W. TRAIN

negotiations involving the host of unruly debates, concepts, and terms that we
encounter. Undoubtedly, this messiness is part of the complexity of theory in
general and particularly the highly charged and contested areas such as postcolo-
nial critique. Toward this end, I attempt to give a brief perspective on how some
of these key terms and concepts (e.g., imperialism, colonialism, and coloniality)
affect language pedagogy in practice. The ultimate goal is to work toward incor-
porating some of the large body of postcolonial inquiry into our own critiques,
understandings, and practices of foreign language education.

Imperial(ism) and Colonial(ism)

Imperialism has been glossed as “the practice, theory, and the attitudes of a domi-
nating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory” while colonialism, which is
“almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on
a distant territory” (Said, 1993, p. 8, quoted in Ashcroft et al., 2007, pp. 40, 111).
In spatial and causal terms, imperialism or neoimperialism has been described as
“the phenomenon that originates in the metropolis, the process which leads to
domination and control,” while its “result, or what happens in the colonies as a
consequence of imperial domination, is colonialism or neo-colonialism” (Loomba,
2005, p. 12). Without going into the terminological nuances and debates, the
imperialism–colonialism dynamic helps us to understand foreign language edu-
cation as situated within complex global and local relations of interwoven prac-
tices, policies, and ideologies involving, among other factors, distance, historicity,
power, and control, as well as inequalities generated by hierarchical ordering and
classification. In the case of French and Spanish imperialism and colonialism, a
complex web of historically enacted ideologies, policies, and practices emanated
from the metropolitan centers of power in the European capitals of empire in
Paris and Madrid with the express design to rule over, for example, colonies in
Quebec and Mexico. The metropole-centered imperialism(s) surrounding the
French and Spanish languages supported the process of colonizing “their” distant
territories in the Americas and across the globe (Ball, 1997; Mar-Molinero, 2000;
Train, 2009b).

Coloniality
Increasingly, postcolonial strands of research have attempted to complexify the
center-periphery/metropole-colony asymmetry and to look beyond imperialism
and colonialism in narrow historical, economic, and territorial perspective. Most
prominently, the term coloniality has emerged to engage the global dimensions
of colonialism and imperialism as historically situated but dynamic world systems
of relations, flows, ideologies, territorialities, and inequalities that have involved
both domination and resistance as well as hegemony and agency. The notion of
coloniality attempts to avoid any mechanistic view of imperialism–colonialism
relationships by accounting for not only the control exerted by imperial power in
colonial situations but also the agency, or the “socioculturally mediated capacity
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 145

to act” (Ahearn, 2001, p. 112) by individuals and groups, among the colonizers
and the colonized. The world languages of European imperial origin, like Spanish
and French, have come to our classrooms as socioculturally mediated practices
of language, culture, and identity that are charged with ongoing imperial and
colonial histories. On the one hand, these practices constrain what we can do with
language and who we can be as speakers according to a metropolitan model of
native standard speaker. On the other hand, these world language practices also
give rise to the often contested creation of new practices in the diverse local and
global contexts beyond the distantly situated normative center in, for example, the
idealized educated native speaker in Paris or Madrid.
This line of thinking offers us the insight that relations of coloniality are
unequal but nevertheless mutually constitutive between the metropole/center and
the colony/periphery. For example, the concept of coloniality has been linked to that
of “Americanity” (Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992). The “geosocial construct” of the
Americas that emerged beginning in the sixteenth century was “the constitutive
act of the modern world-system” such that there could not have been a capital-
ist world-economy without the Americas (Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992, p. 549).
Philosopher Enrique Dussel (1995) locates the “birthdate of modernity” in 1492,
when Columbus arrived in the New World, thus highlighting the mutually con-
stitutive role of the colonial/imperial project in shaping the societies, economies,
cultures, discourses, and knowledge of Europe and the Americas.
From this perspective, the modern languages we teach and learn are some-
what disingenuously named after their supposed metropolitan centers of origin
(e.g., Spanish, French, and English). In fact, the modernity of these languages
is largely due to the complex linguistic, cultural, and material exchanges and
appropriations generated through colonial/imperial encounters and exploitations.
Would modern French still be modern French without, to cite a most ordinary
example, banane—originally the Portuguese rendering of a Guinean word that
today is used by French speakers to express a range of meanings beyond the primary
tropical fruit referent to include, for instance, clothing apparel (un sac banane,
fanny pack; porter en banane, wear around the waist; un pull jaune banane,
a bright yellow sweater) and friendly insults (espèce de banane!)?
While recognizing that Europe would not have been modern without its colo-
nies, postcolonial perspectives also point to the role that colonial and imperial
enterprises have had in universalizing Eurocentric knowledge, perception, and
classification in situations of local and global inequality. Coloniality can be seen as
the creation of a set of states linked together within an interstate system in hierar-
chical layers, with the formal colonies at the very bottom. But far from disappear-
ing with the end of formal colonial status, coloniality “continues in the form of a
socio-cultural hierarchy of European and non-European” (Quijano & Wallerstein,
1992, p. 550). Pratt (2008) also notes the continuing coloniality in what she calls
the “neocolony” of the Americas, particularly Latin America:
The normative cultural referent is that of the metropole, which
establishes the minor status of the local. This relation is sustained by
the cultural and educational practices of the Creole elite, whom the
metropole supplies with higher education for their young. Among
146 ROBERT W. TRAIN

that elite, the neocolony tends to produce split subjectivities:

one’s lived reality lacks significance; the “real” real is elsewhere,
and it owns you much more than you own it. The neocolony is
seen as the receiving end of a diffusion of polished knowledge and
processed goods. (p. 465)
In North America, “real Spanish” has been ideologically constructed and recon-
structed in historical and current contexts both inside and outside the classroom
as elsewhere in the United States despite the undeniable presence of generations of
Spanish speakers within our national borders (Train, 2007b). Similarly, French lan-
guage textbooks in the United States have typically assumed that the default value
for unmarked “French” is France and the standard language associated with France
(Wieczorek, 1994). The ongoing coloniality surrounding French in North America
would seem to be present in the very limited presence of Canada in French teach-
ing materials used in universities in the northern United States despite the obvious
proximity to the continent’s largest French-speaking community (Chapelle, 2009).
The notion of coloniality affords foreign language educators perspective on
the spatial, temporal, sociocultural, educational, and political constructions of
distance, domination, and hierarchy associated with imperialism and colonial-
ism that have played out in a range of material, symbolic, affective, discursive,
pedagogic, and institutional dimensions involving the supposed nativeness and
foreignness of certain languages and their supposed speakers within an overarch-
ing common humanity. There is nothing simple about the language(s) that we
have learned and come to teach as “native” and “foreign” or “first” and “second,”
and we are part of the multiple histories and contexts in which our languages and
ourselves take shape.

The Critical Imperative of Post- and De-

Postcolonial theory involves critical analysis of the histories of colonialism and
imperialism and investigates their contemporary effects. Postcolonialism’s criti-
cal imperative of “making connections between that past and the politics of the
present” (Young, 2001, p. 6) is “both contestatory and committed towards political
ideals of a transnational social justice” (p. 58). The prefixes post- and de- articulate
the need to supersede and undo colonialism and imperialism but also the post-
colonial and decolonial stance that “signals an activist engagement with positive
political positions and new forms of political identity” (Young, 2001, p. 58).
Basic to various formulations of postcolonial and decolonial critique, coloniality
is at the heart of the transcultural, where the transformative practices—cultural,
linguistic, and otherwise—from outside the imperial centers of power “reflect back
on metropolitan discourses and such a perspective offers the possibility of disman-
tling previously maintained, hierarchized notions of centrality” (Thieme, 1996, p. 4).
The contestation of centrality—geographical and metaphorical—is now increasingly
difficult to dismiss as linguistically, culturally, and educationally irrelevant.
Ongoing debates surrounding world Englishes and English as a lingua franca
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 147

highlight the plurality and pluricentricity of world languages and the complexity
of speaker identities beyond native and nonnative (Jenkins, 2007; Shin & Kubota,
2008). These postcolonial insights lead us to a fundamental conflict between the
increasing recognition of the plurality of voices within what are usually conceived
of as unitary language systems (such as “English,” “Spanish,” or “French”) and the
unfortunate fact that education in general—and language education in particular—
deals very poorly with this plurality and diversity of language, culture, and speaker-
ship within and between human beings.
Coloniality affords us the insight that the imperial and colonial past is still
present. Coloniality, then, implies historicity, a critical historical awareness that
each supposed national history and the language attached to it are, in fact, inex-
tricably intertwined with long-standing and shifting colonial and imperial webs
of relation and power. For example, the (post)coloniality of Latinos in the United
States has been delinked from the formal decolonization of Latin American nations
because many people living in both once-colonized and once-colonizing countries
are still subject to the oppressions put into place by colonialism (Klor de Alva, 1995;
Loomba, 2005). Poststructuralist approaches recognize a “multiplicity of histories”
in which the lives of oppressed peoples can be uncovered rather than a silencing
single national history (Klor de Alva, 1995). In this sense, immigrant, minority,
and heritage languages and learners are very much part of the voices that national
histories on both sides of the Atlantic have largely silenced. Questioning whether
we live in a postcolonial era, Pratt (2008) has offered a nuanced view:
The post prefix is used here to call forth not a subject paralyzed
between nostalgia and cynicism in a Fukiyaman “end of history,” but
a subject newly capacitated to read the present in light of a broad-
ened more discerning reading of the past. This subject is oriented
not toward a future frozen in a post-progress eternity but toward
a renewed anti-imperial, decolonizing practice. The decolonization
of knowledge is, I believe, one of the most important intellectual
challenges of our time. (p. 460)

Taking up this challenge in explicitly critical terms, it is clear that decolo-

niality involves epistemological and ontological work to produce what Mignolo
(2007) has called a “decolonial shift.” This decolonization of knowledge and being
“marks the Eurocentered limits of critical theory as we know it today,” and “when
critical theory becomes de-colonial critique it has of necessity to be critical border
thinking” (p. 485).
From this perspective, crucial questions for foreign language educators
emerge. How do we better understand the colonial/imperial complexities that
are part and parcel of the languages we teach? From there, how do we use that
understanding to move toward a decolonial shift by de-(Euro)centering tradi-
tional notions of what language and language learning are as well as their place in
education? Working from constituted borders of knowledge, curriculum, and
instruction, how can we critically reconfigure foreign language education in more
inclusive ways?
148 ROBERT W. TRAIN

Critically Rethinking the Borders in Foreign

Language Education and the Humanities
In rethinking the foundational and ongoing coloniality of language in education,
it is necessary to recall that the accounts of language and humanistic learning
evoked in the MLA Report are situated with respect to long and complex histories
surrounding the applied study of language. In the European tradition, those who
wrote about and systematically reflected on language, its uses, and its users were
typically doing so in the context of language teaching or more broadly in the con-
text of language/culture-centered education. This tradition coalesced around the
classical notion of the Greek paideia or the later Roman and European Renais-
sance humanitas built around a curriculum of studia humanitatis and artes liber-
ales, from which we get our modern notions of the humanities and the liberal arts
(Train, 2009b). Today, it is still in the liberal arts–based humanities that language
and languages occupy a central curricular place in education.
From a postcolonial perspective, the contours of language education have
been historically constructed in terms of shifting projects of humanistic learning
(e.g., humanism, enlightenment, and modernity) grounded in reductive ideolo-
gies, policies, and practices. Traditionally, these projects of humanistic learning
have relied on powerful, even hegemonic discourses of education, culture, and
literacy based on standardizing ideologies of unity and purity of language that fuse
with notions of speakership grounded in the dynamics of (not) belonging, inclu-
sion, and exclusion. These discourses have a common goal of circumscribing the
boundaries of languages, as well as the borders between their supposed speakers
and learners.
The educational and cultural project of classical studia humanitatis, as
Heidegger (1977) noted, has always been grounded in an opposition between
the normative category of the civilized, humanized human (Homo humanus)
characterized by humanitas, and its other, the Homo barbarus. Heidegger
traced this opposition to what he called “the first humanism” of the republi-
can Romans, which defined humanitas in terms of ideals of virtue embodied in
the Greek notion of culture and education, paideia, acquired through scholar-
ship and training in the valued skills or “arts” of good conduct (p. 200), which
included correct linguistic comportment. This humanity acquired through
education corresponded to the cultural and territorial category of Romanness
(romanitas). Humanitas was both a justification and an explanation for the
supposedly merit-based but transparently class-oriented inequalities between
humans (Veyne, 1993). As a precursor to notions of meritocracy and distinction
(Bourdieu, 1979) that have shaped modern education, desirable “humanity” was
defined largely by educated language and its users in opposition to the “common
people” and from “uneducated members of the propertied class who, by their
lack of instruction, brought no honor to their class” (Veyne, 1993, p. 342). On
another level, humanitas intersected with long-standing notions about the
civilizing and humanizing mission of education within the larger political
context of imperial conquest.
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 149

If the Romans produced the first humanism, they did so largely by

constructing Latin, the first world language. As in the case of future world
standard languages like Spanish, French, and English, the codification of lan-
guageness was part of a larger entextualization of ideologies and practices
surrounding global hegemony and inequality. In terms of the humanities and
liberal arts, languages in education were reduced to codified “arts” that were
both texts, as in an ars grammatica, and a body of cultural-pedagogic knowledge
and competence as one of the liberal arts, the first two being grammar and
rhetoric, that were developed by the Romans and further institutionalized in
medieval Europe. The goal and consequence of codifying Latin in grammars
(artes) was to reduce and regulate speech by means of grammatical categories
and also to separate, distinguish, and classify educated speakers from the
unschooled masses. In a move that laid the foundation for standardizing
linguistic and pedagogic practices up to our day, the language that the Latin
grammarian taught was invented as simultaneously and paradoxically artificial
and natural or, in other words, “a product of human skill that claimed objective
validity and permanence” (Kaster, 1988, p. 19).
In ecological webs of practices, intertextualities, and ideologies, language in
school and society was invented and reinvented for centuries in innumerable local
contexts around these “arts” (artes), codified accounts of what educated speakers
of world languages should be and how they should act. The artes concept was con-
nected to the act of describing and governing language within regulated borders
of use and speakership according to complex notions of nativeness and foreign-
ness attached to supposed the unity and purity of language and identity. Language
professionals constructed the “vices and virtues” of language with their lush tax-
onomies of error, which almost always included the “intolerable vices” of barba-
rism and solecism.
Describing syntactic error, the term solecism derives from the Greek
concept of speaking incorrectly, as stated by ancient writers to refer to the
supposed “corruption” of the Attic dialect among the Athenian colonists at
Sóloi in Asia Minor. This traditional category of error was framed in terms of
substandard or corrupted speech. In postcolonial terms, the supposed depar-
ture from linguistic and moral integrity evokes a context in which those who
would claim Athens as the center of imperial power were able to marginalize
the problematically native—that is, a colonial but not necessarily foreign—
“other on the periphery.” In conjunction with solecism, barbarism points
to another modality of colonial and imperial marginalization, the “other
as nonnative.” “Barbarism” came to be used to describe word-level or mor-
phological deviation or variation from a standard form used in either writ-
ing or speaking. Etymologically, it came into the European metadiscourse
about language from the Greek term designating a “foreign mode of speech,”
derived from the verb “to behave or speak like a foreigner” (Barbarism, n.d.).
However, as Calvet (1999) remarks, the notion of barbarism translated Greek
linguistic racism into Western language ideologies. The original Greek word for
“foreigners” (bárbaros) stems from a derisively onomatopoetic representation of
150 ROBERT W. TRAIN

someone who cannot speak coherently—as in the Latin word for “stammering,”
balbus (also Spanish balbucear and French balbutier)—or who only produces
noises that could not be considered human, or at best deficiently so, from the
standpoint of the Greeks (Calvet, 1999). The ideological, educational, and
linguistic nexus of successive imperial regimes and European ethnocentrism
involved complex reductions to binary relationships between the “civilized”
center/metropole and the “barbarian other” on the supposed margins of empire
or society. The grammarians, rhetoricians, schoolmasters, and other language
professionals constructed these categories of error and identity in contrast to
the standardizing categories of order, unity, and purity attached to the supposed
Latinity (latinitas) or Greekness (hellenismos) on which the very notion of “the”
language was seen to rest (see Versteegh, 1987).
Modern education grounded in imperial world languages (e.g., Spanish,
French, and English) would appropriate the classical categories of language, error,
and speakership to stake out the boundaries of language, identity, and empire
between the natives and nonnatives, between “ourselves” and others (see Train,
2009a, 2009b; Willinsky, 1998). Alongside the classification of languages and speak-
ers as native and nonnative, modern education reworked classical humanitas into
a fundamental cosmopolitanism, recently characterized as “the Enlightenment’s
hope of the world citizen whose commitments transcended provincial and local
concerns with ideal values about humanity” (Popkewitz, 2008, p. 1).
The current world languages of today’s classrooms were invented according
to this European model of language that has ideologically reduced the complex-
ity and diversity constituted by variable language practices to a “language form”
that can be named, represented, codified, policed, and studied as “the/a” lan-
guage, whether native or nonnative, first or second language. Despite the long-
standing assumption of “linguistic naturalism” (see critique in Joseph, 2000)
that underpins modern linguistics and language education, languages are not
“natural objects,” but rather, as Makoni and Pennycook (2007) argue, they were,
“in the most literal sense, invented, particularly as part of the Christian/colonial
and nationalistic projects in different parts of the globe” (p. 1). In direct relation
with the invention of languages through social, cultural, and political move-
ments, a metadiscursive regime emerged based on “an ideology of languages as
separate and enumerable categories” (p. 2). In postcolonial and poststructural
terms, the enumerability of languages can be understood as part of a broader
project of governmentality associated with a Eurocentric culture that relent-
lessly observed, classified, and codified all aspects about the non-European
culture and language (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007). Critical anthropological per-
spectives have recently highlighted the “linguistic in the colonial” as local lan-
guages in imperial/colonial contexts of power and meaning have been reduced
to writing according to the Eurocentric model of language (Errington, 2007).
The very notion of bilingualism—the use of two languages—has been invented
and reinvented by competing institutions, groups, and individuals as a social
construct around contested colonial and postcolonial frames of citizenship,
language, and the state in local contexts (Stroud, 2007).
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 151

Engagement with Decolonial Practice in Foreign

Language Education: Toward a Critical Transcultural
and Translinguistic Humanism
At the heart of the humanities and foreign language education in the United States
is, to quote Said (1989), “the deep, the profoundly perturbed and perturbing ques-
tion of our relationship to others—other cultures, other states, other histories,
other experiences, traditions, peoples, and destinies” (p. 216). As the MLA Report
implies, this relationship to others is also grounded in awareness of our own posi-
tions with respect to language, culture, identity, education, and so forth. Hence,
the report offers the central theme of the transcultural, where “language is under-
stood as an essential element of a human being’s thought processes, perceptions,
and self-expressions; and as such it is considered to be at the core of transling-
ual and transcultural competence” (MLA, 2007, p. 2). However, there is also the
inconvenient fact that the humanities and language education have been histori-
cally and ideologically grounded in a deeply contradictory and troubling invention
of the human and humanity in ongoing ecologies of coloniality. Among the many
aspects of coloniality, this chapter has touched on the complex reduction of the
diverse and variable human language-culture practices to a conveniently coherent
whole (“a language”) that is seen to constitute legitimate or appropriate humanity.
This reduction–invention of humans and our language(s) has been linked to the
marginalization of those variable practices and speakers associated with them that
are deemed to fall outside the discursively policed boundaries of the supposed lin-
guistic, cultural, and pedagogic unity surrounding language and education. In
short, the hope for participation in language and education has been extended to
all human beings, yet language and education have also been constructed in ways
that position some humans outside full participation.
For foreign language education, one can posit a double coloniality and a double
decolonial challenge. On the one hand, learners in foreign language programs
in the United States—arguably the current imperial hyperpower (Chua, 2007)—
occupy a complex and asymmetrical position as speakers of English (whether
native or nonnative) in regard to other peoples, languages, and cultures of the
world. On the other hand, foreign language learners and educators participate in
linguistic utopias of maximally homogeneous objects of study (Pratt, 1987). The
learning and teaching of “French” or “Spanish” has traditionally privileged the
notion of a minimally variable and maximally homogeneous (i.e., standard) lan-
guage. This utopian, even delusional, stance toward linguistic homogeneity and
variability comes attached to imagined communities of target language speakers,
whose ideal colonial/imperial representation of monolingual, native speakership,
and competence are distantly situated beyond the grasp of all but a few if any
nonnatives as well as many native speakers of colonial and immigrant heritage
languages, to use Fishman’s (2001) terms. For example, the varied but often
unsatisfactory experiences with schooling that many native or heritage language
learners of Spanish encounter in the United States highlight the urgent need to
152 ROBERT W. TRAIN

rethink how we can do language education in more decolonial ways. The language
diversity embodied in immigrant and minority speakers is at the center of the
seemingly endless “crisis,” the constant “state of emergency” (Agamben, 2005)
surrounding language in ideologically monolingual nations. The devaluing of
immigrant languages often involves a larger context of hostility toward languages
other than English, notably Spanish (Valdés, Fishman, Chávez, & Pérez, 2006).
This situation is especially acute in the Southwest, where the postcolonial and
neoimperial histories of Spain, Mexico, and the United States have intersected in
complex ways. The institutional neglect of Spanish language education and the
focus on valuing practices of Spanish outside North America contribute to the
positioning of many bilingual Spanish speakers in the United States as somehow
“deficient” in their own language (Ortega, 1999; Train, 2007b; Valdés, González,
López García, & Márquez, 2003).
To avoid any misunderstanding, the intent of this chapter is not to argue
against the MLA Report, the humanities, and the importance of language(s) in
a humanistic education. Quite the opposite: I am advocating, as Said (2004) and
others have, a post-911 humanism that is connected or reconnected to critical
practice as a foundational component of education, a humanism that informs what
one does as a “scholar-teacher of the humanities in today’s turbulent world” (p. 2).
Taking into account the concerns of those engaged in education, a new transcul-
tural humanism of the sort suggested in the MLA Report would strategically chart
a course between a complete rupture with and a conventional entrenchment in
traditional practices of language in education. Foreign language educators might
consider that
it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism
and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism
and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that
was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that
absorbed the great lessons of the past . . . and still remain attuned
to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them
exiled, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American.
(Said, 2004, pp. 10–11)
In keeping with the historical perspective offered in this chapter, critical tran-
scultural humanism is solidly grounded in a sense of historicity, or, in Said’s (2004)
terms, “human beings in history,” where the “core of humanism” is “historical
knowledge based on the human being’s capacity to make knowledge, as opposed
to absorbing it passively, reactively, and dully” (p. 11). This belief in human agency
grounded in historical consciousness and purposeful activity is consistent with
major sociocultural currents of research in language learning (see Lantolf &
Thorne, 2006) as well as with more explicitly critical approaches aimed at trans-
forming existing social relations in the interests of greater equity in schools and
society (see Norton & Toohey, 2004).
In this concluding section, I offer some points of reflection and discussion
for foreign language educators (i.e., program coordinators, instructors, profes-
sors, and teaching assistants) to consider regarding what a critical decolonial
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 153

foreign language teaching and learning practice might look like within a frame
of a transcultural humanities. I organize these points around four broad goals
for rethinking and reshaping foreign language education in decolonial ways in
terms of fostering approaches to the teaching and learning of language that are
(1) theoretically informed, (2) educationally relevant, (3) socially engaged, and
(4) ethically accountable.

Theoretically Informed Practice

In keeping with the overarching theme of this volume, I will reiterate the impor-
tance of framing language teaching and learning in terms of integrating theory
into practice and practice into theory. Theory, then, must avoid, where possible,
reducing the complexity of language(s), teaching, learning, theory, and practice
to conveniently compartmentalized categories that can mask the interrelations
between them within larger ecologies. A critically humanistic interdisciplinarity
is basic to reconstituting language in education through poststructuralist,
postcolonial, and decolonizing accounts of language, culture, and identity
from a variety of broad fields in the humanities and social sciences, including
sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, education, literature, history, philosophy,
and anthropology. Without discounting the institutional requirements and
advantages attached to specialization within constituted academic disciplines,
language teaching and learning must cut across those boundaries by virtue of
being truly foundational in doing the academic work of any given discipline in
the humanities and social sciences. In this sense, a critical decolonial perspective
always seeks to transcend the boundaries that are imposed on and constructed
by foreign language education in a given historical moment and local context.
Applied linguistic research continues to provide considerable theoretical support
for expanded conceptions of teaching and learning of foreign language as socio-
cultural practice, historical practice, and social semiotic practice (see Kramsch,
2000). These perspectives open up possibilities for border-transgressive think-
ing capable of theorizing the displacement of traditional analytic and pedagogic
categories as well as conventional representations of language and speakership
beyond the limits of constituted boundaries. For example, as outlined in the pre-
ceding section, the conveniently reductive binaries of native/nonnative speaker,
first language/second language, and error/correctness have been constructed in
shifting colonial and imperial ecologies since the very earliest times of language
education. An interdisciplinary, retheorized, and transcultural foreign language
education would seek to go beyond the still-reigning binarism—the either/or
of bounded languages and identities—toward decolonial third spaces (Bhabha,
1994; Kramsch, 1993; Pérez, 1999).
To this effect, the MLA Report skillfully appropriates the basic humanity or,
rather, the fundamental necessity of communication between human beings as
an argument in favor of legitimizing foreign languages in education. The pillar
of this humanity-in-communication is translingual and transcultural compe-
tence, articulated in the report as a basic goal, outcome, and measure of foreign
language education. The translingual and transcultural model of competence
154 ROBERT W. TRAIN

offers a powerful rejection of the structuralist/Chomskyan postulate of the edu-

cated native speaker—assumed to be a monolingual-like human being—as the
locus of competence. The translingual and transcultural turn serves to reframe
who speaker-learners are as potentially multilingual individuals in multicultural
settings and what speakers can do, as seen from a more complex sociocultural
and ecological view of language and competence (see van Lier, 2004). This line of
research is complemented by the important concept of “symbolic competence”
that brings together complexity theory and postmodern sociolinguistics to explore
how an ecological approach to language data can illuminate aspects of language
use in multilingual environments (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008).
With respect to the notion of competence, we should proceed strategically,
as in the MLA Report, but also cautiously given the long history of competence
that has reproduced privilege for narrow groups of speakers. Perhaps competence
might ultimately be a category too fraught to critically recover (Train, 2007a).
Are there limits to the theoretical reworking of the reductive categories that have
largely positioned nonnative, second-language, foreign language, heritage, and
bilingual speakers as “deficient communicators” (Belz, 2002)? Already the notion
of standard communication is emerging in global language teaching practices
based on institutionalizing some people’s preferred practices and competence
as the standard norm for “effective communication” that, in turn, defines large
numbers of other people as inadequate or substandard communicators (Cameron,
2002). National/colonial/imperial models of language and competence do not
adequately account for the complexity of what bilingual, multilingual heritage
language speakers do in performing multiple, complex identities (see Blackledge
et al., 2008). Given the colonial baggage surrounding notions of native speaker
competence, the question remains, how do we incorporate into foreign lan-
guage education a more performative view of language use that has been basic
to postmodern theorizing of discourse in recent years (see Butler, 1997)? The
key theoretical issue involves rethinking what speakers and learners actually do
with language in their lives inside and outside the classroom according to more
performatively oriented views informed by poststructural and decolonial critique.
Stressing the agency of speakers, the recent concept of symbolic competence sig-
nificantly brings performativity or “the capacity to perform and create alternative
realities” into focus (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 666). The relationship of per-
formance—that neglected twin of Chomskyan linguistics—and postmodern per-
formativity to competence remains an area that will merit further investigation.

Educationally Relevant Practice

A critical, transcultural humanism would recognize that the constitution of the
components of foreign language education as institutional, pedagogic, and aca-
demic entities is part of larger ecological webs. Foreign language education can-
not or should not be reduced to a set of discrete courses, programs, departments,
and debates disconnected from other areas of educational importance, including
language in education policy. Learning Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and
so forth is not separate from learning English or from science, history, and so on.
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 155

In terms of language teaching and learning in the university, we would do well to

heed the advice of postcolonial scholars who call for “the humanities in dialogue
with the social sciences”:
If the Kantian university was based on reason, the Humboldtian
university was based on culture and the neoliberal university on
excellence and expertise, a future [. . .] university shall be envi-
sioned in which the humanities will be rearticulated on a critique
of knowledge and cultural practices. (Mignolo, 2000, p. xii)
Language education should not be removed from the political questions of
what gets taught, when, and to whom. Why, for example, is English the only man-
datory subject taught to every student in California schools from kindergarten to
at least freshman year in college, while other languages are currently considered
a college prep or elective course that is not a requirement for high school gradu-
ation or in most cases for college graduation? In California—to use the example
of the state with by far the most Spanish speakers—Spanish is not a significant
part of most students’ formal education, even that of bilingual Spanish-speaking
students.

Socially Engaged Practice

In conjunction with the educational relevance of foreign language education, a
transcultural and translinguistic humanism would connect in complex ways what
goes on in the classroom to the lives of our students and ourselves outside the
classroom as social actors in local, national, and global ecologies. Transcending a
narrowly theoretical postcolonial frame in favor of what I have called decolonial
practice, one may look to a range of possibilities for “post-postcolonial” language
education that depends on “the demands, constraints and revolutionary pos-
sibilities of particular local material and cultural conditions” (Luke, 2005, xvii).
As foreign language educators, we have to ask, what are those conditions for the
languages and learners we teach, where we teach them? Rather than assume that
whatever constitutes foreign language education can be uniformly applied to all
local contexts, we must engage with the social contours of our different programs
and diverse students. How would transcultural and translinguistic competence
play out in some of the countless permutations in California, such as Spanish at
an undergraduate public regional university in rural northern California? How
would it play out in German at a large public research university in the greater
Los Angeles area, French at a community college in the suburban Central Valley,
and Chinese at a small private liberal arts in the urban Bay Area? In terms of
the “big ideas” in education, a socially engaged foreign language education would
recognize that “standards,” “accountability,” or pedagogical method all have very
complex and differential effects on different students—to the contrary of the pur-
ported equality attributed to large-scale educational reform (it’s good for every
one) and pedagogical method (it works for everyone). Rethinking foreign language
education can take a page from postcolonial literary scholar John Thieme (1996),
who wrote that one of the consequences of the popularity of “hybridization” theory
156 ROBERT W. TRAIN

has been “a tendency (at odds with the practice of a theorist such as Bhabha) to
dehistoricize and dislocate writing from the temporal, geographical and linguistic
factors which have produced it in favour of an abstract, globally conceived notion
of hybridity which obscures the specificities of particular cultural situations”
(p. 3). We foreign language educators might find ourselves someday saying the
same of transcultural competence if it becomes plugged into the existing reduc-
tive discourses of reform. Again, an ecological view offers to keep the big ideas
grounded in the local contexts of individual learner, classroom, program, institu-
tion, and setting in a complex and problematized relationship with larger stan-
dardizing and centralizing contexts.

Ethically Accountable Practice

In uttering the “A” word, accountability, I’m not arguing for a standards-based
alignment of practice with current reductionist notions of accountability. Instead,
a critical decolonizing perspective recognizes that the foundational coloniality
of language education has produced tensions in the lives of speakers whose ten-
sions live within us and beyond us. Any attempt to reconstruct education means
coping with “intractable American dilemmas” (Cuban & Shipps, 2000) as well as
“the pervasive tensions in postcolonial communities” (Canagarajah, 2005) that
exist worldwide. Rather than uncritically embracing the latest iteration of educa-
tional reform or accountability, we should ask the basic ethical questions of who is
included in our reinventions or reconstitutions of language. Who will be affected?
And how? As language educators, we can benefit from a poststructuralist view
along the lines of Judith Butler, who has pointed out the ethical dimensions of
subjectivity, that is, the performance of myself in terms of who I am at a given
moment. For Butler (2005), ethical reflection involves giving an account of myself
that must reflect the social conditions under which I emerge, which requires a
turn to social theory to understand these social conditions. Coming full circle,
back to theoretically informed practice, part of our work in the humanities as
foreign language educators and scholars is to interrogate the reductive simplicity
in which language—and particularly foreign language in education—is so often
portrayed. There is nothing simple about language, learning, and education, much
less the interdiscursive complexity of so much of our work in the humanities.
Our world as language educators has become all the more complicated as the
United States has taken on an unparalleled imperial role in the world, reflected
in the defense-related funding that has come to dominate public investment in
foreign language education. In this context, foreign language educators may well
appreciate the words of Loomba (2005), who ends her remarkable synthesis of
colonialism and postcolonialism on an ethical note:
If universities are to remain sites of dissent and free intellectual
inquiry, if scholarship is not to be at the service of American or any
other power, critiques of past and ongoing empires are going to be
more necessary than ever. (p. 228)
Much work remains to be done in the principled practice of decolonial, trans-
linguistic, and transcultural crossing and negotiating of the historically constituted
POSTCOLONIAL COMPLEXITIES IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND THE HUMANITIES 157

borders of language, culture, and speakership. Framed in these terms, our profes-
sional activity as foreign language educators in the humanities must also include
engagement in increasingly global discussions regarding history, political con-
sciousness, ethical intercultural being, and criticality in language education (see a
European perspective in Phipps & González, 2004). This ongoing work of education,
engagement, and research may prove to have what Said (1989) called the “instiga-
tory force” to be “of startling relevance to all the humanities and social sciences as
they continue to struggle with the formidable difficulties of empire” (p. 225).

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