Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

Edited by DIANE PECORARI City University of Hong Kong Posthumanist Applied Linguistics Alastair Pennycook.. Underpinning all such statements, Alastair Pennycook argues, are certain assum

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Edited by DIANE PECORARI

City University of Hong Kong

Posthumanist Applied Linguistics

Alastair Pennycook Abingdon England: Routledge, 2018 Pp x + 168

doi: 10.1002/tesq.567

Language separates humans from beasts Humans and objects are distinct The purpose of language is to communicate The goal of communication is to under-stand each other Underpinning all such statements, Alastair Pennycook argues, are certain assumptions about human exceptionality, knowabil-ity, universalknowabil-ity, and anthropocentricism: the tendency to locate humans at the centre of everything, if not slightly above it (human hubris) Building on and expanding his work in urban multilingualism, Pennycook’s Posthumanist Applied Linguistics scrutinises a number of persistent (but increasingly irrelevant) dichotomies, boundaries, and tautologies concerning how our bodies, brains, and languages relate Posthumanist Applied Linguistics rethinks and reconfigures this relation, embedding it back into the world of distributed, multisensorial, mate-rial, and inter-species entanglements

Chapter 1 sets the scene for his case Pennycook begins by interpel-lating his reader with a series of unsettling vignettes (environmental damage, abuse of animals, poverty, discrimination, climate change sceptics, the plight of refugees) These call into question humanist appeals to shared notions of humanity or common human experience

A posthuman perspective “questions human hubris, questions human minds as central to knowledge, ethics, action, and intention and ques-tions the distincques-tions between humans and other creatures and objects” (p 14) Chapter 2 extends the introduction by mapping out the historical, philosophical, and theoretical foundations on which a posthumanist applied linguistics will be set, and in doing so

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defamiliarises notions of the human subject A critical, spatial,

object-oriented, and relational ontology is articulated and ready to be

unpacked

Chapters 3 to 7 illustrate this proposal through a number of radical

steps In Chapter 3, Pennycook first reframes language and cognition

as both distributed across human bodies and other resources in

net-works or assemblages, which are emergent, dispersed, multimodal, and

interactive—and therefore of particular relevance to work on trajectories

and repertoires Chapter 4 reinstates touch, taste, and smell as senses

that are highly relevant to linguistic study Because semiotic

assem-blages are affective and multisensorial, “we need to engage with the

senses rather than reflect from our armchairs on how perceptions are

linguistically realised” (pp 65–66) Better ways to address people’s

lin-guistically embodied engagements multisensorially are required, such

as through urban ethnography

Chapter 5 establishes our relations to and co-presence with other

animals as central to human collaborative, cognitive, and linguistic

activity If “human life cannot be understood in isolation from other

animals” (p 73), why should animals be excluded a priori from our

theories of language? A posthumanist applied linguistics considers the

divide between human and nonhuman forms of communication not

as absolute but as one of degree Chapter 6 reverses the status quo of

communication from understanding to mutual misunderstanding “The

point is not so much that we never understand each other, but rather

that understanding is messy, incomplete, different, complicated and

never entirely shared” (p 107) Here, sanitised views of effective

lan-guage and communication give way to accounts of the precariousness

of interaction and apparent misunderstanding in situ Chapter 7

decentralises agency from human subjects to include the agency of

our environment, of its objects, and of the networks of relations

between them The starting point is a critique of representationalism,

surrogationalism, and correlationalism—the widely held but mistaken

ideas that “signs stand for things in the world, and reality is about a

relation between things in our head and things out there in the

world” (p 113)

Each of these radical steps has been “towards a post-humanist

applied linguistics commons”—the proposed way forward that closes

the book (Chapter 8) To understand language, and for our

under-standing of language to be relevant to wider concerns, we must

embrace the precariousness, entanglements, and materiality of

exis-tence Aspects of this plight are reassuringly under way in applied

lin-guistics: Vygotskian sociocultural theory, critical constructivist

sociolinguistics, linguistic landscape research, new literacy studies, and

nexus analysis The term posthumanism should therefore not be

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putting: “the notion itself is less important than the constellation of concepts it makes possible” (p 126)

Overall, Pennycook has made a compelling case to question, then broaden, the range of phenomena often taken for granted in linguis-tic, cognitive linguislinguis-tic, and applied linguistic research The level of argumentation precludes in-depth analysis of empirical data but makes the book an important exercise in “rethinking relations between humans, language, objects and space, and considering more care-fully what distributed agency, language and cognition may mean” (p 18) Central to studies of language has been the relation between lan-guages, bodies, minds, and worlds Pennycook’s book reminds us why this relation must continually be rethought

SIMON HARRISON

City University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

International Students’ Challenges, Strategies and Future Vision: A Socio-Dynamic Perspective

Anas Hajar Bristol England: Multilingual Matters, 2019 Pp xv + 237

doi: 10.1002/tesq.573

The current monograph contributes to a growing number of publica-tions on study abroad It reports on the lived experiences of eight Arab university students undertaking master’s degrees in the United Kingdom Using a longitudinal, qualitative approach, Hajar traces the participants back to their learning of English in their home countries

in chapters 4 and 5 and up to their experiences in the United King-dom during a pre-sessional course in chapter 6, their master’s courses

in chapter 7, and their dissertation writing in chapter 8 Through a socio-dynamic lens, Hajar explores the challenges the students faced, their strategies for coping with these challenges, and how the stu-dents’ future visions helped to motivate them throughout each leg of their journeys

In chapter 1, Hajar makes quick work of an introduction, which includes an autobiographical narrative of his own journey studying in Syria before embarking on his postgraduate studies in the United Kingdom This narrative is brief but important in that it situates Hajar’s rationale for the current study in his own experiences as a

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