What are the stakes for colonized bodies in an allegedly postcolonial world where institutions still use the term non-native to classify those who speak a “first language” other than English? In this autoethnographic performance, I connect critical cultural theories with embodied linguistic negotiations of identity as a “multilingual” person teaching students at a public university in a predominately White region called “New England” in the United States. By tracing my visceral encounters with the power relations between my five languages (English, Arabic, Tamil, Malayalam, and Hindi), I seek to decolonize ideologies that enforce a stable origin for language itineraries.
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