Making Waves: Anarcha-Feminist Encounters with Multilingualism in Hawaiʻi
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2020
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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The Hawaiian Islands bestow on us fresh conversations about multilingualism, shaped by Indigenous pursuits of sovereignty amidst a multiethnic settler society. Galvanized by encounters with multilingual abundance and Indigenous future-making, this dissertation recenters applied linguistics along dialogic lines to advance the case for a Public Applied Linguistics (PAL). How to connect with public audiences should be of vital interest to applied linguists. The discipline’s commitment to offer solutions for real-world problems flows alongside growing concerns about its track record for tangible societal change that enables multilingual lives to flourish. Reckoning with these paralytics, this dissertation coalesces with anarcha-feminism’s radical relationality and autoethnography’s unearthing power of storytelling to analyze, reflect on, and foment grassroots action, grounded in the author’s five-year involvement with language advocacy and activism in Hawaiʻi. Three sites of public engagement are analyzed that generated transformative action in support of multilingualism: 1) mobilization for legislative testimony; 2) digital storytelling, an activist walking tour, and guerrilla signage in a language teacher preparation course; and 3) Indigenous language planning in 19th and early 20th century Hawaiʻi which balanced Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) rhetorical sovereignty with the needs of a nascent multilingual island society. The dissertation suggests a) for action to become transformative individually and collectively, it must be paired with memory work – here feminist, activist, and Indigenous; b) in order to theorize and ethicize language activism, applied linguists need to participate in direct action from contentious locations within a more-than-human world; and c) autoethnography’s capacity for decolonial border-thinking and reflexive action offers applied linguists a conduit for interrogating multilingualism’s own territorial agendas from where travel towards Indigenous multilingual futures becomes possible. By tracing the author’s gradual reorientation away from the state as epicenter of language policy action to grassroots organizing and Indigenous knowledge systems, this dissertation moves multilingual relationships beyond issues of representation and identity politics towards differential yet complementary accountabilities that Kānaka ʻŌiwi and settlers hold vis-à-vis the Islands, the Indigenous language ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, and each others’ genealogies. If enacted with a care-full eye towards the situated ethics of multilingual encounters, PAL may inspire hope and grassroots relational action in Indigenous-settler contexts.
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Education, Bilingual, Sociolinguistics
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