Theaters of Multilingualism

Even as the awareness of literary multilingualism within Anglophone scholarly circles is on the rise, discussions of how such a paradigm interacts with the study of drama and theatre are still few and far between. One way to think about this situation might be to revisit the status of drama in comparison to that of the novel, which seems to have emerged as the genre of choice for referencing multilingual maneuvers. That route would take us at least back to Mikhail Bakhtin, the early-twentieth-century Russian theorist and prominent scholar of the novel. After all, as a few scholars have already noted, it was Bakhtin who, on his way towards formulating some of the most interesting and widely influential methods of studying prose fiction, had famously relegated drama (along with epic and poetry) as a deficient literary genre. Drama, he had somewhat curiously argued, was not a true dialogic form and was thus incapable of embodying either polyphony or heteroglossia. Bakhtin was understandably critical of the dominance of an authoritative and hence monologic voice in art as much as in society. His unfavorable diagnosis of drama on those grounds, however, does not seem to account for the literary form’s potential realization as performance, which only makes it less rather than more subservient to authorial intention. But, the early unflattering characterization of drama possibly set the critical tone for much of the commentary that followed, which might also explain its relative absence from the otherwise ground-breaking recent scholarship on a re-emergent multilingualism in literary studies. Three broad developments characterize these contemporary approaches: for almost every case of multilingualism, there seems to be a need to invoke translation, either as a supplement or in some contexts as a deterrent to the concomitant being of multiple languages; the uneasy dynamics, in varying degrees, of “Global English” in conditioning contemporary readers’ responses to multilingual literature as well as acting as a place holder for future “Global monolingualisms”; and finally, a shared awareness of the profoundly ambiguous nature of the term multilingualism, a sense of simultaneous excess and imprecision invoked in its usage to designate certain linguistic and literary phenomena including often equivalent terms like “translingual,” “postmonolingual,” and “plurilingual,” adding to the already existing list of “heterolingual,” “polyglot,” “metrolingual,” and, of course, the more prevalent “bilingual.” In the interest of brevity, in the rest of this article, I attempt to sketch some preliminary ways in which multilingualism figures in contemporary dramatic and performative texts in relation to only the first two of the three points discussed above—translation and Global English.

The politics of translation as well as that of “Global English” have been most prominently staged in theatres of postcolonialism where the presence of two or more languages has not only enabled a robust multilingualism but also marked the Europhone cultural production from those regions in complicated yet interesting ways. The dramatic works of two prominent English-language Nobel laureates, Nigerian, Wole Soyinka and, St. Lucian, Derek Walcott from the 1960s onward, for instance, have regularly engaged with the poetics and politics of inheriting multiple languages of aesthetic expression. During the same period Samuel Beckett, who was born Irish, had started writing in French and translating it back into his “first language,” English, thereby engaging in another variation of bilingualism in his theatrical practice. Brian Friel’s postcolonial classic Translations (1980) is written entirely in English but employs a brilliant theatrical conceit that stages the shifts between speakers of English and Irish-Gaelic for the audience. And then, there is new research on longer and, in some form, continuous histories of multilingual oral and written cultures like those prevalent in Southern Asia that would seem to dislodge European colonialism from its position as a privileged marker of language politics. In fact, one of the advantages of focusing on drama (or poetry) as opposed to the novel in a discussion of multilingualism is the realization that the use of multiple languages within a single literary or performative text is far from an exception and anything but recent. Scholars working outside the contexts of postcolonialism have also recently highlighted older traditions of multilingualism in non-Anglophone...