The quite contemporary epistemological postures that are critical of the dominance of Euro-modernist knowledge traditions are sometimes guilty of inadvertently perpetuating the very same hegemonies they seek to unsettle. For this reason, the intervention by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is timely and relevant. In re-assessing the “common sense” assumptions that belie the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Flores and Rosa remind us of the need to pitch our conversations with boldness, conceptual clarity, and conviction to avoid essentialisms that tend to hide and reveal—in equal measure—the co-naturalization of language and race and the concomitant discourses they invoke. This short commentary engages their reflections.

More than two decades ago, Latin American decolonial theorist, philosopher, and semiotician Walter D. Mignolo (2002) published an article on “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” In the article, Mignolo introduced several concepts that are foundational to the arguments that Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa advance. Included among the concepts introduced by Mignolo is “colonial difference,” “repetition without difference,” “the double bind,” “border thinking,” “relocation of thinking,” “critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge,” “Eurocentrism from the left,” and “Eurocentric critique of modernity,” among others. Together, and individually, these concepts point to the conundrum that contemporary social science and allied scholarly communities face in trying to transcend meta-narratives of Euro-modernist coloniality—in ways that do not reproduce the same. When Mignolo introduced these concepts, he was drawing attention to the fact that while the postmodern criticism of Euro-modernity is important and necessary, it is not enough. His call was for the development of alternative grammars and vocabularies that are fit for purpose—ones that would enable us to side step the language of colonial dichotomies and fallacies of superiority, linearity, completeness, and universal relevance.

In re-engaging and troubling the concept of “raciolinguistics,” Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa follow the path of reflexive praxis charted by Walter Mignolo and other decolonial theorists. They are inviting us to enter dialogic conversation on the imperative to think otherwise, to think anew, those rarely challenged “commonsense” assumptions that underpin the work we do in sociolinguistics and allied fields of study. It is an invitation to change not only the conversation but also the contents of our conversations. Flores and Rosa urge us to embark on delinking—a project that confronts the dangers of global coloniality and hierarchies of humanity, race, languages, and knowledges. They are inviting us to undertake a broader global review of our practices to ascertain how we got to be where we are as well as the steps we might take to pick ourselves up and continue walking. Or, as postcolonial literary critic, Chinua Achebe, might have suggested in Things Fall Apart: this is about finding out where the rain began to beat us and how we can build a sturdier and roomier shelter (Achebe, 1959). This is because the methodologies and theories developed to serve the ends of colonization and the exercising of imperial power “are no longer fit for the job because they are both historically and conceptually out of date” (Chabal, 2012, p. viii). We need to think from a non-Euro-modernist and decolonial standpoint to enable us to question several assumptions that we normally take for granted.

Flores and Rosa raise numerable critical points. I will engage and elaborate on three that stand out for me. The first is about providing conceptual clarity and setting the record straight on the distinction between “raciolinguistics” and a “raciolinguistic perspective.” On this point, they consider the unhelpfulness of the nominalization of “raciolinguistics” insofar as it reproduces problematic essentializations in analyses of intersections between race and language. The preference for presenting the argument in terms of a “raciolinguistic perspective” is important because this conveys an action logic that emphasizes the ongoing rootedness, possibilities of existing otherwise, and thinking and acting with/across territories that should frame our struggle for new futures. For this reason, I find Flores and Rosa's reflection persuasive because “a raciolinguistic perspective” suggests a conceptual framing that “captures the kind of posture, attitude, and action we need in pushing forward the agenda of resistance, refusal, resurgence, and a re-existence otherwise” (Ndhlovu, 2022, p. 3). Unlike the nominal term “raciolinguistics,” which betrays the Euro-modernist colonial obsession with naming things, peoples, ideas and so on, for purposes of classifying, hierarchizing, and controlling, “a raciolinguistic perspective” speaks to the ongoing creation of ways of thinking, ways of knowing, ways of sensing, being, and living now and into the future (Ndhlovu, 2022; The New Polis, 2022). Flores and Rosa make it abundantly clear that due to its rootedness in an ongoing living reality of struggle, “a raciolinguistic perspective” holds the promise for new and alternative pathways.

This leads me to the second point, which is about troubling the tendency to institutionalize our practice. The late Nobel Prize Laureate and anti-racism scholar, Toni Morrison (2019), once asked in relation to African American Studies: What is the true purpose of the discourse? In their article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa are, in a sense, restating Toni Morrison's question. They suggest that when a discourse or an idea becomes commonplace, it runs the risk of losing its salience as it turns into a slogan (Ndhlovu, 2022). When introducing the concept of sloganization in the context of language education research, David Gramling (2018) advised that slogans benefit from enjoying extraordinary space and visibility through suppressing and subsuming counterevidence in given discursive terrains. An unintended consequence is the promotion of a partial and distorted epistemology that is historically and culturally blind. In reflecting on the study of race and language, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa are following hard on the heels of this previous body of work that calls attention to the pitfalls of discourses that have been canonized to the extent of losing their salience. Flores and Rosa's article initiates a conversation on how we might redeem the study of language and race from the sloganization implicated in the uncritical uptake of the concept of “raciolinguistics.”

The argument is that analyses of race and language lose their liberatory power when they are appropriated in services of equilibrium (status quo), what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012, p. 1) have characterized as “metaphorization of decolonization [that] makes possible a set of evasions, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” The consequence is the dilution of the hard and unsettling work of decolonization. Tuck and Yang discuss several things that are unsettling about such appropriation, one being the superficial adoption of the language of decolonization in a manner that supplants prior ways of talking about social justice, and other social scientific approaches that seek to disrupt colonial legacies. A key imperative here is the importance of “a heightened reflexivity amongst those of us who are advocates of decolonisation in much the same way that we expect other scholars to become more introspective about their intellectual outputs” (Moosavi (2020, p. 333). This is the call that Flores and Rosa are answering in their reflections.

The third critical point that Flores and Rosa raise is one about challenging the colonial discourse of universalism. On this point, they are pushing back against “global networks and hierarchies of knowledge production [and] critically reflecting on and resisting the universalization of US racial logics” (Flores & Rosa, this issue). This proposition echoes lines of argument advanced by other scholars particularly those speaking from Indigenous and Southern perspectives (e.g., Connell, 2007; Makoni, 2012; Ndhlovu & Makalela, 2021; Ndhlovu, 2021; Ndhlovu & Kelly, 2020; Nabudere, 2011; Ramadan, 2011; Yunkaporta, 2019). Like Flores and Rosa, these Southern and Indigenous scholars trouble the fallacies of universal relevance, grand narratives, grand erasures and reading from the center that characterize the mainstream Western/Euro-modernist scientific enterprise.

The concerns that Flores and Rosa raise around the discourse of universalism implicate the concept of “coloniality of universalism”, a term I introduce here to describe how Euro-modernist imperial forces colonized the idea of the “universal” and used it to conquer the knowledges, cultures, and languages of everyone else around the world. Through colonialism, the very essence of what it means to be human and to know was reduced to a parochial construct of Euro-modernity. It is this colonized idea of universalism, which frames the concept of “raciolinguistics” that Flores and Rosa are challenging. They suggest that when faced with the racialization that is endemic in language and language education, our responses must assume a planetary posture. A redeemed universalism must be the rallying point from which diverse networks of local academic and nonacademic communities fighting for social, educational, and cognitive justice converge to exchange ideas, experiences, and strategies for charting common global futures.

To conclude, the reflection by Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa is significant in that their critique of discourses and praxes that have inadvertently produced essentialisms are not unique or limited to the field of sociolinguistics. Rather, the arguments they posit speak directly to what is happening in the academy in general because nearly all our disciplines constitute the intellectual apparatus that sustains the ongoing project of global coloniality. This invitation to engage in critical reflection on our disciplines and our practices is, therefore, a welcome addition to the burgeoning voices calling for the same, especially those speaking from Southern, Indigenous, and decolonial perspectives. To advance this commendable agenda, we must adopt a methodological posture that brings together diverse cultures and traditions of knowing to mediate pathways for producing interconnected forms of knowledge. The goal must be that of transcending the limits of mono-epistemes that have institutionalized some of our work on language and race.

Open access publishing facilitated by University of New England, as part of the Wiley - University of New England agreement via the Council of Australian University Librarians.

相当当代的认识论立场对欧洲现代主义知识传统的主导地位提出批评，有时却无意中使他们试图扰乱的霸权永久化。因此，纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯和乔纳森·罗莎的介入是及时且有意义的。在重新评估掩盖“种族语言学”概念的“常识”假设时，弗洛雷斯和罗莎提醒我们需要大胆、概念清晰和坚定地开展对话，以避免倾向于隐藏和揭示的本质主义。平等措施——语言和种族的共自然化以及它们所引发的伴随话语。这篇简短的评论引起了他们的思考。

二十多年前，拉丁美洲非殖民理论家、哲学家和符号学家沃尔特·D·米尼奥洛（Walter D. Mignolo，2002）发表了一篇题为《知识的地缘政治学和殖民差异》的文章。在文章中，米尼奥洛介绍了几个概念，这些概念是纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯和乔纳森·罗莎提出的论点的基础。米尼奥洛提出的概念包括“殖民差异”、“无差异的重复”、“双重束缚”、“边界思维”、“思维迁移”、“知识地缘政治的批判意识”、“来自欧洲的欧洲中心主义”。左派”和“以欧洲为中心的现代性批判”等。这些概念一起或单独指出了当代社会科学和相关学术团体在试图超越欧洲现代主义殖民性的元叙事时所面临的难题——以不重现同样的方式。当米尼奥洛介绍这些概念时，他提请人们注意这样一个事实：尽管对欧洲现代性的后现代性批判是重要且必要的，但这还不够。他呼吁开发适合目的的替代语法和词汇，使我们能够避开殖民二分法的语言以及优越性、线性性、完整性和普遍相关性的谬误。

在重新探讨和困扰“种族语言学”的概念时，纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯和乔纳森·罗莎遵循了沃尔特·米尼奥洛和其他非殖民理论家所描绘的反射实践之路。他们邀请我们进行对话，探讨必须换位思考、重新思考的必要性，这些很少受到挑战的“常识”假设支撑着我们在社会语言学和相关研究领域所做的工作。它不仅邀请我们改变对话，还邀请我们改变对话的内容。弗洛雷斯和罗莎敦促我们开始脱钩——这个项目面临全球殖民主义以及人类、种族、语言和知识的等级制度的危险。他们邀请我们对我们的做法进行更广泛的全球审查​​，以确定我们如何走到现在的位置，以及我们可以采取哪些步骤来振作起来并继续前进。或者，正如后殖民文学评论家奇努阿·阿切贝（Chinua Achebe）在《分崩离析》中所暗示的那样：这是为了找出雨水开始袭击我们的地方以及我们如何建造一个更坚固、更宽敞的庇护所（阿切贝，1959）。这是因为为殖民和行使帝国权力服务的方法论和理论“不再适合这项工作，因为它们在历史上和概念上都已经过时”（Chabal，2012，p.viii ）。我们需要从非欧洲现代主义和非殖民主义的角度进行思考，以使我们能够质疑我们通常认为理所当然的几个假设。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎提出了许多批评观点。我将讨论并详细阐述对我来说最突出的三个。第一个是提供概念清晰度并澄清“种族语言学”和“种族语言学观点”之间的区别。在这一点上，他们认为“种族语言学”的名词化毫无帮助，因为它在种族和语言交叉点的分析中再现了有问题的本质化。以“种族语言学视角”来呈现论点的偏好很重要，因为这传达了一种行动逻辑，强调持续的根源性、其他存在的可能性，以及在领域内/跨领域的思考和行动，这些领域应该框架我们为新的未来而奋斗。出于这个原因，我发现弗洛雷斯和罗莎的反思很有说服力，因为“种族语言学视角”提出了一个概念框架，“捕捉到了我们在推动抵抗、拒绝、复兴和重新定义议程时所需的姿态、态度和行动”。 -否则存在”（Ndhlovu，2022，第 3 页）。名义上的术语“种族语言学”背叛了欧洲现代主义殖民者对命名事物、民族、思想等的痴迷，其目的是分类、等级化和控制，而“种族语言学视角”则不同，它指的是不断创造的方式现在和未来的思维、认知方式、感知方式、存在和生活（Ndhlovu，2022；新城邦，2022）。弗洛雷斯和罗莎非常清楚地表明，由于其植根于持续存在的斗争现实，“种族语言学视角”有望开辟新的替代途径。

这引出了我的第二点，即对我们实践制度化趋势的困扰。已故诺贝尔奖获得者、反种族主义学者托妮·莫里森（Toni Morrison，2019）曾就非裔美国人研究提出这样的问题：话语的真正目的是什么？从某种意义上说，纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯和乔纳森·罗莎在他们的文章中重申了托尼·莫里森的问题。他们认为，当一种话语或一种想法变得司空见惯时，它就会面临失去显着性的风险，因为它变成了口号（Ndhlovu，2022）。在语言教育研究背景下引入口号化的概念时，David Gramling（2018）建议口号受益于通过抑制和包容给定话语领域的反证据来享受非凡的空间和可见性。一个意想不到的后果是促进了一种在历史和文化上是盲目的片面和扭曲的认识论。在反思种族和语言研究时，纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯（Nelson Flores）和乔纳森·罗莎（Jonathan Rosa）紧随其前的工作，呼吁人们关注那些已被经典化而失去显着性的话语的陷阱。弗洛雷斯和罗莎的文章引发了一场对话，讨论我们如何将语言和种族研究从不加批判地接受“种族语言学”概念所涉及的口号中拯救出来。

论点是，当对种族和语言的分析被用于平衡（现状）时，它们就失去了解放的力量，伊芙·塔克和 K.韦恩·杨（2012，第 1 页）将其描述为“非殖民化的隐喻[即] 使得一系列逃避成为可能，这种逃避是有问题的，试图调和定居者的罪行和同谋，并拯救定居者的未来。” 其结果是削弱了非殖民化的艰巨而令人不安的工作。塔克和杨讨论了关于这种挪用的一些令人不安的事情，其中​​之一是表面上采用非殖民化语言，其方式取代了以前谈论社会正义的方式，以及其他试图破坏殖民遗产的社会科学方法。这里的一个关键当务之急是“我们这些非殖民化倡导者必须提高反思性，就像我们期望其他学者对自己的智力成果更加内省一样”（Moosavi（2020，第333页）。这是弗洛雷斯和罗莎在反思中回应的号召。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎提出的第三个关键点是挑战普遍主义的殖民话语。在这一点上，他们正在反对“知识生产的全球网络和等级制度，[并]批判性地反思和抵制美国种族逻辑的普遍化”（弗洛雷斯和罗莎，本期）。这一主张呼应了其他学者提出的论点，特别是那些从土著和南方观点出发的学者（例如，Connell，2007 年；Makoni，2012 年；Ndhlovu 和 Makalela，2021 年；Ndhlovu，2021 年；Ndhlovu 和 Kelly，2020 年；Nabudere，2011 年；Ramadan） ，2011；Yunkaporta，2019）。与弗洛雷斯和罗莎一样，这些南方和土著学者对普遍相关性、宏大叙事、宏大抹除和从中心解读等西方/欧洲现代主义主流科学事业的特征的谬误提出了质疑。

弗洛雷斯和罗莎对普遍主义话语提出的担忧暗示了“普遍主义的殖民性”的概念，我在这里引入这个术语来描述欧洲现代主义帝国势力如何殖民“普遍”观念并用它来征服知识世界各地其他人的文化和语言。通过殖民主义，人类和知识的本质被简化为欧洲现代性的狭隘建构。正是这种殖民化的普遍主义观念，构成了弗洛雷斯和罗莎所挑战的“种族语言学”概念。他们认为，当面对语言和语言教育中普遍存在的种族化问题时，我们的应对措施必须采取全球性的姿态。一种被救赎的普世主义必须成为一个集结点，使当地学术和非学术界的不同网络为社会、教育和认知正义而奋斗，汇聚在一起，交流思想、经验和战略，以规划共同的全球未来。

总而言之，纳尔逊·弗洛雷斯和乔纳森·罗莎的反思意义重大，因为他们对无意中产生本质主义的话语和实践的批评并非独特或仅限于社会语言学领域。相反，他们提出的论点直接反映了整个学术界正在发生的事情，因为几乎我们所有的学科都构成了维持正在进行的全球殖民计划的知识机构。因此，邀请我们对我们的学科和实践进行批判性反思，是对不断涌现的呼吁的声音的欢迎，特别是那些从南方、土著和非殖民角度发言的声音。为了推进这一值得赞扬的议程，我们必须采取一种方法论立场，将不同的文化和知识传统汇集在一起​​，以调解产生相互关联的知识形式的途径。我们的目标必须是超越单一认识论的限制，这些限制使我们在语言和种族方面的一些工作制度化了。

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