The Postlingual Turn

No one is born speaking or writing a language. We all begin as language learners, and in that sense, there are no native languages. There are only foreign languages. As language educators and as scholars of literatures produced by Black, migrant, indigenous, and multilingual artists, we know that even the universalism of “foreign languages” and “second languages”—which holds the Other at tongue’s length, so to speak—needs to be replaced by the universalism of “additional languages.” Every language is an additional language, not a primary, national, or natural language (Silva and Wang; Horner et al.). But if every language is an additional language relative to others that we use, or others that our neighbors use, it is also an additional language relative to itself. Languages are not additive or countable in ways that presume a static and durable separation among coherent wholes, one language and then another (Sakai). This is, first, a lingual axiom: we’re thinking here of the blended histories of Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, French, Latin, Spanish, and many other languages that have contributed to the syntax, diction, and spelling of the words we are producing on this page right here. It is, second, an axiom about the technologies of religion, media, communication, performance, translation, and circulation that distribute and also shape the meaning of our words right now.

The postlingual turn we discern in literary studies forks between the right here and right now of the tongue, understood as both a physical-spatial object (the buccal cavity, the language-producing anatomical apparatus, their prosthetic intermedial supplements) and a temporal dimension (produced by the technologies of lingual transmission and reception). We privilege “lingual” over “linguistic” to distinguish the postlingual turn from adjacent terminological usages in linguistics, for “lingual” resonates with literary perspectives on language that encompass forms of alingualism (Gramling 9; elhariry 149) as well as what Michael Allan calls waswasa, or forms of whispering at the intersection of sacred and secular knowledge. “Lingual” even offers a hidden benefit. It provides English-language criticism with a term that inches closer to the always-split meaning of langue in French as both “tongue” and “language.” Indeed, “lingual” means “of or relating to the tongue”; it designates anatomical features such as the “lingual nerve,” the “sensory branch of the mandibular nerve that supplies the mucous membrane of the anterior part of the tongue and the floor of the mouth”; and it gives rise to a number of other compound nouns such as “lingual bone,” the horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck (OED).

The postlingual in this view is concerned with anatomical, physical, and spatial permutations, but it also specifically isolates language phenomena that occur after the adult development and supposed mastery of additional languages. The verbal arts and all literature are postlingual in this regard. Actually, postlingualism has been with us for a while, residing just on the other side of the disciplinary, political, methodological, and translational trappings of extensively debated critical paradigms such as translingualism, multilingualism, plurilingualism, and bilingualism. We can hear the desire for postlingualism in a comment by Professeur Lacombe, Francois Truffaut’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a world-weary sorbonnard-normalien cum alien music language specialist decked out in proto-80s, round, half-tint sunglasses. In an acme of translational-lingual frustration, he blurts, “Ce bilinguisme m’ennuie !” The line remains untranslated (“Bilingualism bores me!”) in the subtitles for the presumably unknowledgeable viewer, which must mean that translation and bilingualism were boring and frustrating well before the 1970s. Indeed, modern literary history brims with an excess of postlingual expression. Translation and bilingualism have been giving way to postlingualism at least since 1855, the year when Aḥamd Fāris al-Shidyāq published his landmark Arabic novel al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq (Leg Over Leg). Al-Shidyāq oversaw the publication of the book in Paris from beginning to end. Sensu stricto, then, this is a French book written in Arabic. Or it’s an English book (composed while Al-Shidyāq was in England) written in Arabic. Or it’s Arabic written...