Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (review)

Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. Edited by Werner Sollors. New York: New York University Press, 1998. x + 409 pp. $25.00.

"In the past 20 years, scholars have come to pay much attention to race, gender, and ethnicity," Werner Sollors wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education (October 30, 1998), "yet they have tended to ignore language as a defining part of American culture." The essays collected in Multilingual America aim to change that pattern. Extending and concretizing multicultural scholarship on American literature, these essays address not only the themes of cultural identity and difference but also the linguistic fusions, substitutions, fractions, and contradictions by means of which these themes appear. The underlying syllogism of the collection, therefore, goes something like this: If language defines culture, and America is multi-cultural, then multilingualism is the ground level of American culture. Furthermore, if America is multilingual, and language is a crucial key to national identity, then American multilingualism may indicate an emerging transnational form of American democracy. At least, most authors in this collection propose that cultural universalism is giving way to a politics of difference, language rights, and ethnic particularism. For the authors and editor of Multilingual America, this is a good thing.

Multilingual America, in other words, requires reimagining relations between American cultural and political identities. In a context in which influential political scientists such as Samuel Huntington have been arguing that post-Cold War geopolitics will be characterized by clashes among the world's seven major civilizations, and thus that Anglo-Europeans need to consolidate their traditional cultural identity in order to fend off attacks on a homogeneous Euro-universalism, Sollors' collection offers multilingualism as a method for changing the way people affiliate themselves with group identities. In the introduction to Multilingual America Sollors writes, "language provides a model for an understanding of culture that need not be based on race, and language acquisition may be one way of making voluntary affiliations, widening the circle of the 'we,' and at least in part 'becoming what one is not'" (4). As a utopian project, then, this collection of essays challenges its readers to investigate the history of American culture critically and to sever political identity on the national scale from Huntington's presumed cultural or civilizational centralism. "Multilingualism" here is understood as conferring positive benefits for international and intercultural communication on a global scale.

Once this framing argument about the blind spots of multiculturalists and traditionalists with respect to linguistic diversity has been presented, we can more clearly see how the original scholarship presented in Multilingual America draws in important ways from four trends in the humanities: the emphasis on the preservation of minor languages among sociolinguists, the preference for generic individuation associated with ethnopoetics, the historical specificity applied to questions of value defended by proponents of cultural studies, and the theories of hybridity or transculturalism actively promoted particularly in Latino and postcolonial studies. These four tendencies merge in Multilingual America to produce an approach to American literature that is both narrower than reigning models of ethical criticism and broader than the textual scholarship devoted to canonical authors. Like the Longfellow Institute at Harvard (directed by Sollors and Marc Shell, a contributor to this volume), then, Multilingual America takes as its ambitious and fruitful task the direction of scholarly attention to the "multitudes of culturally fascinating, historically important, or aesthetically interesting texts that were written in languages other than English" (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lowinus/).

Given scope of this project, it is not surprising that the essays Sollors has collected do not employ a single strategy. Rather, they are presented in seven parts devoted to different aspects of the problem of working on the many languages used for literary purposes in the United States. Part I addresses questions of literary history, paying particular attention to the ways that the inclusion of non-English texts alters...