Unmooring Literary Multilingualism Studies

Abstract

This article asks what it would mean for literary multilingualism studies to start by challenging dominant paradigms that govern conceptions of what “multilingualism” means, along lines suggested in applied linguistics in moves towards language practices of the Global South. It takes a cue from Alison Phipps’s call to decolonize multilingualism: turning away from fluency in “too many colonial languages” and towards more contingent ways of being in language, typified by the linguistic “unmooring” experienced by those who become refugees. It finds its model in the poetry of Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, born in Baddawi camp in Lebanon, as a means to reflect on multilingualism beginning from the space of the camp.