Transnational Narratives in Englishes of Exile by Catalina Florina Florescu and Sheng-Mei Ma (review)

In her chapter qua postscriptum, Catalina Florina Florescu uses the term "heteroglossia" to summarize immigration experience, but this term represents the collection in more senses than its major topic. Throughout the collection, we hear heavily accented personae telling their immigration stories with "hybrid languages"; we hear the fluent yet culturally encrypted English circulating among the young Chinese international students in the United States; we also hear silence—the voice of the utterly deprived—recounting the experience of female immigrants. All these "voices" constitute the "Englishes" indicated in the book title. The collection also "speaks" to its readers, however, through a variety of artistic forms, including the practice of the Nepantleras (visionary cultural workers), video installation, photography, cardboard statue, and so on. Indeed, how can a collection dedicated to immigration experience not speak in a "heteroglossic" manner, if immigrants themselves do?

In the past decade, there has been rich scholarship exploring and legitimizing the "Englishes of exile," involving scholars on trans-Pacific studies such as Richard Jean So, Yun-Te Huang, and Sheng-Mei Ma (one of the contributors of the collection), as well as their colleagues in trans-Atlantic studies such as Tariq Modood and Jopi Nyman. Compared with the existing scholarship, the collection's "heteroglossic" features—its wide-ranging coverage of geographical space, languages, and materials—can be overwhelming at first sight. Nevertheless, the editors' careful selection of articles suggests various methods for the reader to grasp this complicated subject. To begin with, although the volume hails the era of Englishes, it is not a blind celebration of globalization that has generated this unique linguistic phenomenon. Tim Gauthier, for example, directs his critical attention to the current mode of globalization, where migrants are accepted or refused on the basis of their "desirability." As a result, while those whose inherent diversities "do not threaten the homogeneity" of their host countries are welcomed (11), the exiled majority are stigmatized as murderers, rapists, thieves, and terrorists. Focusing on the same topic of transnational mobility, Hsin-Ju Kuo questions the validity of comparing immigrants to rerooted plants and the expectation of their immediate prospering in "unaccustomed earth." Behind this horticultural metaphor, argues Kuo, is the neoliberal rhetoric that places the burden of cultural assimilation and identity (re)construction solely on migrants, and in the meanwhile turns a (color-)blind eye to the reality where "race continue[s] to play a fundamental role in structuring and representing the social world" (180). Both Gauthier and Kuo conduct in-depth criticism of the current discourse of globalization, and both appeal for counter-narratives that will lead to "a better world" (Gauthier 16). Nevertheless, it is in envisioning this "better world" that both become abstract and even vague. This, however, tells less about their analytical skill than the actual difficulties in challenging the current mode of globalization.

The multilayered structure of immigrant identity is another theme covered by many authors of the collection. As Kuo warns us of the danger of over-simplifying immigration as "transplantation," Christene D'Anca approaches the same topic from a linguistic perspective, questioning the "translatability" of immigration experience. D'Anca notices that Andrei Codrescu, rather than eliminating his Romanian accent and "translating" his Romanian past for his American readers, "pushes his thoughts forward until the midpoint […] in order for the other side to take over and drag the translation onto foreign shores" (90). D'Anca's analyses of Codrescu's manipulation of his languages (and, accordingly, his immigrant identity) break the long-held "domestication/foreignization" dichotomy. In its stead, she proposes a third model that involves cooperation between the immigrant writer/translator and his native readers, paralleling the process of mutual acceptance in the (re)construction of immigrant identity.

Language is, nevertheless, a double-edged sword in the exploration and (re)construction of immigrant identities. Either by carefully weaving Persian words into English texts, as Sanaz Fotouhi observes in the works of diasporic Iranian writers...