No abstract

Despite a decade of diversity policy plans, a wave of student rallies has ignited debates across western European university campuses. We observe these debates from a situated call for anti-racism in Belgian higher education institutions, and critically reflect on the gap between diversity policy discourse and calls for anti-racism. The students’ initiatives make a plea for racial literacy in the curriculum, to foster a critical awareness on how racial hierarchies have been educated through curricula and institutional processes. Students rethink race as a matter to be (un)learned. This pedagogical question, on racial literacy in the curriculum, is a response to diversity policies often silent about race and institutionalised racisms. Students request a fundamental appeal of knowledgeability in relation to race; diversity policy mostly envisions working on (racial) representation, as doing anti-racist work. This article argues how racial literacy might offer productive ways to bridge the disparities between students’ calls for anti-racism and the institutional (depoliticised) vocabulary of diversity. We implement Stuart Hall’s critical race theory and Jacques Rancière’s subjectification as key concepts to study and theorise these calls for anti-racism as a racial literacy project. This project can be built around engagement as educational concept. We coin possibilities to deploy education as a forum of engagement and dialogue where global asymmetries such as race, gender and citizenship can be critically addressed.

This article explores the racial semiotics of the Dutch concept of the other-lingual ( de anderstalige). Multicultural discourse ostensibly encodes the otherness as merely linguistic; however, Flemish nationalist policy discourse deploys the other-lingual to discern autochthony from allochthony. Retracing the origins of this concept, we found that the concept did not originate in Dutch-speaking Europe, but we found earlier traces overseas in apartheid South Africa where the Afrikaans concept served the forced exclusion of coloured people. We conduct a semiotic analysis of the other-lingual to study how the concept racially encodes and decodes the Afrikaans language in South Africa and the Dutch language in Flanders. The dataset contains records in Dutch and Afrikaans, published in, or in regards to, the Netherlands, Suriname, Flanders (Belgium) and South Africa. Our semiotic analysis of the South African other-lingual engages with religious discourse published in 1950s South Africa. The semiotic analysis of Flemish other-lingual engages with its trajectory in Flemish Government Declarations from 1992 to 2022. The article concludes that the history of the other-lingual, revealing a racial identification between Flemings and Afrikaners, provides pivotal arguments for the contemporary understanding of race in the Dutch languages.

This theoretical article reflects on a recent development in adult literacy studies: transnational adoptees relearning their heritage languages. Literacy and adoption scholars have studied the replacement of the heritage language with a second language and reported it as a permanent loss. Returning to the country of origin, return adoptees challenge such notion by relearning the heritage language as part of their homecoming. We explore how this heritage language relearning could be seen as a renegotiation of the language hierarchies between the adoptive community and the community of origin of languages in the relationship between the adoptive region and the region of origin. Building on Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s “Enabling Violation” concept, we deploy a postcolonial perspective on understanding heritage language relearning in transnational adoptees. We discuss how language relearning can challenge and reproduce the asymmetrical relation between adoptees’ position in the Global North and their first families in the Global South. We argue that heritage language relearning can open the door for adoptees to engage with transnational literacy, carving out global learning trajectories and reconnecting their adoptive and first world. The last section of this article discusses adoption organisations’ dialectic response to this shift by partaking in the organisation of heritage language classes for adoptees. We argue that adult education centres and literacy educators can play a pivotal role in further institutionalising these heritage language classes for transnational adoptees.