Introduction to Focus: Multilingualism Now and Then

The ebb and flow of multilingual experimentation in literature could be a litmus test for the openness of nations. When their economies boom and they loosen their immigration restrictions, their writers turn towards experimentation that invites other languages to coexist peacefully within one text, within one sentence. In contrast, economic hardship breeds xenophobia, even in our global age of permeable borders and freely floating capital and fear. Certainly, now is not the moment of openness. Suffice it to mention the xenophobic outcry that accompanied this year’s SuperBowl Coca-Cola commercial that featured the patriotic song “America the Beautiful” in a polyglot mix of seven languages besides English and Spanish: Keres, Pueblo, Tagalog, Hindi, Senegalese French, and Hebrew. New media—Facebook and Twitter—allowed this uproar to enter into the public discourse to levels previously unimaginable, proving once again the belief that the cohesion of a nation is dependent on monolingualism persists despite the sophistication of linguistic and sociological theories that consider multilingualism an unremarkable routine for the majority of the world’s population. Even if it is an outdated paradigm and an unachievable ideal, monolingualism continues to lead to the persecution of cultural and linguistic minorities, to restrictive language policies, and to a lack of support for foreign language learning in schools around the world. For if some nations subscribe to multicultural policies, no nationalism is open to the multilingualism such cultural variety implies. An immigrant speaking her own language provokes unease or even hostility. Babel—a symbol of disruptive chaos—haunts nations.

But even if literature has rarely dared to mirror this reality, languages have always met and mixed in transnational migrations or cross–border relations, international newsrooms and institutions, communities and conferences, telegraph codes, wartime pidgins, and graffiti of multicultural metropolises. Writers who transcribed these mixtures into polyglot literary experiments—and switched within one text among several languages or blended them into syncretic linguistic forms—tended to fall in between the cracks of national literary canons. Their multilingual texts inhabited the margins of literary traditions: unread and understudied, complex and perplexing like the realities they arise in and describe. The current effort to expand literary canons and reconsider their narrow categories has led to a renewed interest in literary experimentation that represents the complex mixtures of interconnectivity fostered by economic globalization.

Searching for origins and analogies, this recent meta-multilingualism points towards medieval macaronic poetry and the way European languages mixed in between the primacy of Latin and the multiplicity of separate national languages. The analogy of the standing of Latin as a lingua franca in the late Middle Ages in Europe to the status of English nowadays allows critics to assuage the alarm at the pending loss of the world’s linguistic diversity under the threat of global English, suggesting instead a proliferation of languages in response, just as Romance vernaculars multiplied in response to the language of Rome. The parallel also allows a comparison of exiled and postcolonial writers writing in multilingual vernaculars to Dante Alighieri. An early precursor of the study of multilingual poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concepts of dialogism and polyglossia also derive from his study of the late Middle Ages, argues for literary multilingualism as leading to the valuable processes of “interorientation” and “mutual clarification” of languages and dialects, an observation which remains an important influence on theorists who engage with multilingualism now.

To understand contemporary multilingualism in the context of the Middle Ages also makes visible the processes of codification of national languages that followed the age of exploration. Benedict Anderson’s reading of the rise of nationalism as a result of print capitalism suggests the natural fluidity of languages and the constructedness of monolingualism, which as a paradigm spread around the world with colonization and print. Colonization put languages in contact on an unprecedented scale, through increased commerce, forced migrations of people, and the creation of nations where many linguistic communities used to live without the unifying umbrella of a state. And, it is the frequency of anti-colonial struggles and the intensity of anti-colonial thought in the twentieth century that put issues of language at the center of...