Delinking to Learn From Youth Expressive Practitioners of the Everyday: A Commentary on “Undoing Competence: Coloniality, Homogeneity, and the Overrepresentation of Whiteness in Applied Linguistics”

Abstract

Aligned with the epistemic disobedience of Sylvia Wynter (2003), Flores and Rosa's compelling essay extends beyond protesting the racist histories behind conceptualizations of competence and instead has urged a larger delinking (Mignolo, 2007) from dominant knowledge systems that elevate white Western rationality. Through a rigorous excavation of the colonial roots of competence, Flores and Rosa have rethought colonial worldviews and unraveled the persistent coloniality that are accepted as commonplace across academic disciplines studying language. In their efforts to undo competence (e.g., linguistic competence and communicative competence), the authors have practiced intellectual disobedience (Wynter, 2003) as they "denaturalize narratives at the core of universalizing linguistic theories by identifying their specific locus of enunciation rooted in European colonial logics that have reified normative white linguistic perspectives, perceptions, and positionalities."First conceptualized by Quijano (1992), coloniality describes the hidden processes of erasure, disposability, and devaluing of certain human beings, including their ways of thinking, living, speaking, and contributing to the world.