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Gazing at language crossing in the global north but doing crossing in the global south

Rampton (1995) uses the term ‘language crossing’, or its less well-known variants ‘code crossing’ and ‘code alternation’, to refer to language use by people who are neither accepted nor recognized as legitimate members of the group associated with the use of that language as a first language. The use of language in this manner has been referred to as ‘bricolage’ and involves the speaker’s using linguistic resources to project certain personas and identities that have been behind the influential theoretical work of ‘styling’. Rampton’s early theoretical work depended heavily on the study of multi-ethnic people from working class backgrounds in urban settings. He noted that, in some cases, their use of language appeared to be mediated by popular culture and instigated by migration and globalization. The contexts in which he conducted his research were largely heteroglossic, and Rampton (2003) extensively analyzed his interactional data by drawing upon the Bakhtinian notion of ‘voice’ (multivocality) to enhance the analytical valence of his work. More recently, Rampton, Charalambous, and Charalambous (2018) have called for an extension of the analytical utilization of the concept of ‘language crossing’ beyond its ‘local’ friendship networks, ‘convivial expressions’, and ‘artful performance’ to more conflict-ridden contexts in which language in education policies may play a key role. The research by Chariatte (2018) in which she analyzes how gangs in Greater Cape Town cross into the language varieties of their victims when narrating their encounters with the victims is exemplary of a research strand which fits into ‘the crossing of a kind’ which Rampton, Charalambous, and Charalambous (2018) are recently calling for. Rampton et al. took pains to insist that, although this work is poststructuralistic and ascribes to the fluidity of language, it is not part of the ‘trans-superdiversity-metrolingualism movement’. For Rampton et al., ‘crossing’ is not shorthand for ‘trans/super/metrolingualism’. The main objective of this introduction and special issue is to gaze at ‘language crossing’ from the Global North but to do ‘language crossing’ in the Global South with the objective of investigating what happens to epistemologies and ontologies that originate in the Global North when they are used in the Global South to confront concerns about ‘how to address, mitigate, and possibly reverse the social inequality, discrimination, economic, political oppression, and heteropatriachy encountered by peoples of the South’ (Pennycook and Makoni 2019). The Global South is a problematic political concept, but