Introduction: Migration and Multilingualism

I. THE THEATRES OF MIGRATION AND COSMOPOLITANISM

In his 2006 book, Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre, Marvin Carlson defines language as a product of the sociocultural and temporal context in which it originates and to which it refers. By analogy, he recognizes an inseparable bond between the theatre artist and the audience, intensified by theatre's close relationship with spoken language, which makes "matters of locality and specificity clearly more central than they are in a more abstract art like dance" (3). With the increased mobility of the world's population as well as rapid developments in media and digital technologies, multilingualism and its translingual practices have become a common if not expected form of personal expression and interpersonal communication. Today's theatre presents an analogue to these practices: it "speaks with many different voices" and employs heteroglossia as a leading device and state of being (Carlson 19).

Jacques Derrida, speaking of the interdependence between subjectivity and language, defines language as a system of cognitive mechanisms, references, and ethical codifications based on the recognition of the self as other (113–17). Language operates within systems of distancing and teaches us to recognize this distance, working as an instrument of representation, as a tool for experience, and as experience itself. The Other, in this context, appears as a metaphysical construct rooted in language (117), an entity separate from the self and yet an integral part of it. Derrida's philosophy of language helps us better to understand how multilingualism works and how a multilingual theatre can focus our attention on the workings of the self, thereby reinforcing our sense of the present moment and activating (self-)reflexive modes of reception. Multilingual theatre situates the divided self between experience and repetition, demonstrates the process of repetition as causing distortions and leaving traces, and depicts the trace as a "kind of proto-linguisticality" or "arche-writing" (Lawlor). To articulate oneself in several languages, or to listen to others switch and mix codes, creates an environment of possibility and chance that forces multilingual speakers to be at once alert to the complexity of language and distant from it. Such moments of self-reflection and self-estrangement contribute to what Christopher Balme identifies as "a polyethnic state," wherein "theatre attains a kind of laboratory function in the Brechtian sense of being an 'experimentelle Vorschau-Bühne' for a better society" (115).

For the monolingual subject, an encounter with a new language is never easy, for it often creates "[t]he sensation of having your world turned upside down or inverted" (Marlatt 222). And in moments of border-crossing, such an encounter can produce, in Daphne Marlatt's words,

a sense of the relativity of both language and reality, as much as it leads to a curiosity about other people's realities […]. It leads to an interest in and curiosity about language, a sense of how language shapes the reality you live in, an understanding of how language is both idiosyncratic (private) and shared (public), and the essential duplicity of language, its capacity to mean several things at once, its figurative or transformational powers.

(222)

Work by migrant artists frequently builds on such experiences, for it often recognizes language's "essential duplicity." The medium of theatre allows these artists to "construct in writing a world where [they] do belong" (222), whereas the tension between one's mother tongue and (in)ability to properly express oneself in a second language constitutes one of the major mythopoetic tropes of migration (Cox 10).

Migration and Multilingualism is a project that began in May 2016, born of a fellowship awarded to Yana Meerzon, Katharina Pewny, and Gunther Martens by the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at Ghent University. It consists of two related endeavours: first, our collaboration with Alex Ferrone on this special issue of Modern Drama, which focuses on multilingual dramaturgies of migration in European theatre; and, second, an edited collection of scholarly articles, dialogues, and creative statements about global theatre practices and migration, to be published by Routledge in 2020. This two-tier project aims to provoke...