Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz (review)

Yasemin Yildiz’s Beyond the Mother Tongue offers a usefully provocative take on a growing “movement” in language studies away from a monolingual framework for conceptualizing language, language relations, and language users and toward conceptions of multilingualism that do not simply offer pluralized versions of monolingualism—sets of discrete languages and their users. While the book focuses primarily on canonical and “minority” writers associated with the literary/aesthetic realm—Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu—and more particularly with engagements with “German,” Yildiz’s analyses move fluidly to encompass a far broader range of language practices, and will be of interest to readers (like myself) relatively unfamiliar with the specific texts Yildiz discusses. This is both necessary and appropriate given her argument that monolingualism is not simply a statement about the limited linguistic repertoire of populations but, rather, a “key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as of imagined collectives such as cultures and nations” (2).

While firmly at odds with the tenets of the ideology of monolingualism (helpfully described in her opening chapter), Yildiz also resists the temptation to merely celebrate a plurality of languages. Instead, she insists that we understand contemporary language practices and politics, at least in the West, as a response to an overriding monolingual framework, that is, as postmonolingual rather than evidence of a “plurilingual” ethos or the multilingual practices and beliefs obtaining elsewhere and/or in other eras. Yildiz’s historicizing of contemporary forms of multilingualism demonstrates these to be “refracted through the monolingual paradigm” (3–4), hence we need to read such instances and efforts at multilingualism against the backdrop of that paradigm, to “work through” rather than attempt to merely sidestep notions of the “mother tongue,” for example, in order to move beyond such concepts (13–14).

Yildiz’s location of monolingual and postmonolingual writing in ongoing tension, and her careful elucidation of the language environment, politics, and practices out of which specific writings have emerged, enable her to help us see resistance to monolingualism even in writing that would appear on its surface to be simply monolingual, and, as well, to demonstrate that writings which appear to be highly multilingual may in fact evince monolingualist conceptions. So, for example, in light of Paul Celan’s multilingual practice, and his location outside the language he claimed as his own, his endorsement of German as his mother tongue can be understood to resist the monolingualism he preached insofar as he was not the authorized speaker of that language (18). Conversely, the conceptual artwork Wordsearch, while displaying an enormous variety of languages and scripts marking it as in one sense “multilingual,” fits within a monolingual framework by identifying the contributing individuals in terms of one language only.

Following her opening chapter introducing the history and significance of monolingualism as a cultural paradigm, subsequent chapters examine and evaluate the strategies by which specific writers have broken with monolingualist tenets. Chapter 1 examines Kafka’s wrestling with both German—the language he spoke and wrote—and Yiddish, a language he encountered in Yiddish theater particularly and wrote about in ways that changed his relationship with German. Chapter 2 considers the “internal multilingualism” of Adorno’s use of “foreign”-derived words in his otherwise “German” writings, especially in the context of Adorno’s writings on “Words from Abroad” (1959), his considerations of Fremdwörter as “the Jews of language,” and the early twentieth-century movement against use of such words by language purists. Adorno, Yildiz argues, puts “native” and “foreign” words into dialectical interplay to engage in what she terms a “critically postmonolingual form.”

Chapters 3–5 are each devoted to three contemporary writers and the alternative strategies they take for breaking with monolingualism within the context of increased global migrations and communications: Yoko Tawada, Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu (respectively...