How do we encounter others who are not like us, who are different from us? When reflecting on this question, applied linguists have traditionally worked within an empiricist, human-centred framework, and focused on human interaction. Recent contributions by new materialist and posthumanist scholars have encouraged linguists to broaden the scope of their work and to consider not only encounters between humans, but also encounters between humans and the rest of the world (e.g. Pennycook 2017). In this paper I build on what I have called 'a sociolinguistics of the spectre' (Deumert forthcoming), and reflect on a small set of interviews (conducted in 2018/2019 in South Africa) where speakers discuss how they engage with those who are not physically visible to them but who are nevertheless present in their lives (spiritual beings, ancestors, etc.). I will explore these interviews by focusing on how speakers enact 'encounters with the other' in contexts where the other does not share our bodily presence, yet is central to the ways in which we construct, and enact, a relational ethics vis à vis the world that surrounds us, including its presences as well as its absent-presences (Derrida 1993). Thus, following Leonie Cornips' (2019) call for an 'inclusive sociolinguistics', I seek to broaden our work beyond the human-centredness of modernity/coloniality. The talk addresses the following two elements of the symposium theme: (i) 'to include a fuller range of lived, embodied and interactional enactments of ethical encounters with the Other', and (ii) to foreground the listening subject in these encounters, making visible complex ontological commitments and ethics.
References
Cornips, L., 2019. The final frontier: Non-human animals on the linguistic research agenda. Linguistics in the Netherlands36: 13-19.
Derrida, J. 1993. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London/New York: Routledge.
Deumert, A. Forthcoming. The Sound of Absent-Presence? Formulating a Sociolinguistics of the Spectre. Special Issue, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, ed. by S. Sultana and D. Izadi.
Pennycook, A. 2017. Posthumanist Applied Linguistics. London/New York: Routledge.
