Linguistic Citizenship Inside and Beyond the Coloniality of English

ABSTRACT

This article describes how Black students within educational settings are positioned in relation to English, while also foregrounding fleeting moments of liberation and transformation. We focus specifically on the role of English within the linguistic repertoires of Black students in the Technical and Vocational Education and Training sector in South Africa. Drawing theoretically on linguistic citizenship, we explore how students momentarily step out of inherited ethnolinguistic subjectivities through fugitive acts of voice and meaning‐making. These acts are rarely stable or sustained but offer important glimpses of the reconfiguration of language, race, and self. We argue that in this context, English functions not as a neutral medium of access, but as a terrain where vulnerability, refusal, and recognition collide. These glimmers of refashioned subjectivity reveal how students live, stretch, and resist the coloniality of language in ways that complicate simple binaries of oppression and freedom.