Navigation guide (English)

En ligne : https://plurivers.net/revue-plurivers-1/navigation-guide.html

While each of the contributions that follow can be read in any order and stand-alone, we invite you to take a moment to read this page in order to orient yourself in this pluriverse.

In the spirit of pluriversality, this journal comprises a variety of contributions in a range of languages. It is literally plurilingual, with contributions in French, English, Spanish, and Creole (and hopefully more languages to come in future issues). Due, however, to the global hegemony of English, French and Spanish, this means that these Latin-based languages–Latin being the basis of hegemonic globalisation, as well as the classification/taxonomy and commercial­isation of biological matter–will tend to overrule others unless radical editorial decisions are taken to avoid this. The balance of languages will change from issue to issue, and we hope in future iterations to increase the number of pages in less globally dominant tongues. But this also leads to an editorial conundrum that we will continue to tackle: how on the one hand to ensure wide readership and accessibility while at the same time decentring linguistic expression (i.e., decolonising language), and with this epistemologies (what Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o famously spoke about in his 1986 book, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, and many others have also taken up from all corners of the pluriverse)? With the plurilinguistic nature of our journal, we wanted also to share one of the most common experiences of life on Earth, that of living, breathing, writing (as Édouard Glissant famously noted), eating, moving, and loving surrounded by a plural­ity of languages. We felt that hiding this plurality in a monolinguistic journal would not be genuine in our attempt to partake in the many worlds that may compose a common world.

One way in which we have attempted to deal with this is by provid­­ing translations of all of the contributions on the journal’s accomp­anying website: www.plurivers.online. This provision of translations is particularly important for the editorial introductions, which we have written in French due to the necessity to widen the debate on “decolonial ecologies” in the many French-speaking worlds, but which we wish to be engaged with by readers operating in other languages for them to appreciate the journal’s framing more broadly, along with the special focus of each issue.