Women from circumstances of displacement and precarity are often considered from perspectives of postcolonial subalternity and suffering. Their linguistic versatility is understood as emerging from conditions of hopelessness, poverty and vulnerability. In this chapter, the authors bring vignettes of conversations with southern multilingual women living now in Australia, who at different stages of their lives and despite circumstances of precarity, exhibit ingenuity in survival through dextrous translingual and transknowledging practices. More than this, they demonstrate how their multilinguality is integral to their potential to thrive in hope. In the three small stories offered in this chapter diverse women of Australia – Anangu women from remote central Australia, young displaced women of extraordinary resilience, and women who escaped violent conflict in East Africa – reveal their strategies of self-efficacy in conversations of complicity and trust, and in processes of telling and retelling with the researchers. Mindful of ‘decolonising methodologies’, ‘southern epistemologies’ and ‘epistemic reflexivity’ , the authors recognise their limitations and privileges as researchers in the south, hopeful that in stepping lightly towards spaces that are at times private and at others, public, they can turn the lens towards playful and purposeful southern multilingualisms.

This chapter explores Hughes’s investments in and invocation of foreign language teaching. It reads his 1925 Crisis poem, “To a Negro Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret,” as a spectacularly unsuccessful foreign language lesson that rejoices in the failure of language countability and acquisition. By casting doubt on the viability of language mastery, the poem opens a space for nonnormative, emergent, and playful communication that responds to and cultivates environments that defy neat national and linguistic arrangements. In so doing, it anticipates a model of language instruction that present-day theorists of English Composition have termed a translingual approach, a social justice model that privileges the language habits and contexts of people who have typically been ignored, if not denigrated, in composition classrooms. This chapter uses this model to think through how “Negro Jazz Band” defunds projects of elitist, multilingual proficiency and replaces them with emancipatory, translingual play.

The ‘extended Caribbean’ provides a trans-American framework for linking José Martí and José Rizal at the Atlantic and Pacific ends, geographic and temporal, of the Spanish Empire, marking one possible moment of Caribbean literature in transition. This essay focuses on how each of these artist-activists uses translation of Spanish and English, as two of the colonial languages of the Atlantic and Pacific empires, in order to reveal the parallels between the two figures and their respective nationalist struggles during the 1890s. Put another way, the essay explores how far we can stretch the ‘Caribbean’ to account for the trans-global anticolonial imagination in the disappearing Spanish Empire of this time.

This chapter outlines the evolution of Englishes outside of the British Isles, with particular attention to exploitation colonies. It looks at contact between the English-speaking and indigenous language communities during Britain’s trade and colonization ventures from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries but also highlights circumstances predating British colonization often overlooked in the field, comprising a larger group of players, in a chain of contact, such as that among various Asian communities, and with the Portuguese. Features such as tone, particles, and mixed codes are discussed; although traditionally regarded as the outcome of imperfect learning, such restructuring illustrates how, with diverse ecologies and typologies, there are no constraints on the typology of the emergent World Englishes (WEs) varieties. Also underscored is the fact that the dynamics and outcomes of contact in WEs are not distinct from those observed in scenarios in which creole languages evolve. The chapter concludes by evaluating the current and future evolution of English from contemporary contact ecologies, including computer-mediated communication, the language teaching industry, and trade.