Editor's Note

Although in my editorial role I typically do not interject my personal background, I will make an exception here to note that being a nonnative speaker of English and living in two languages (Japanese and English) is a major part of my scholarly and personal identity. Even years after I started teaching in American academe and had English-language publications under my belt, I have often felt insecure about my English, worried that my inadvertent misuse of articles, confusion of words, misplacement of accents, or almost-but-not-quite-right colloquialisms would betray my status as a non-native English speaker. I have feared that such mishaps would discredit my status as a scholar of American studies more seriously than any failings of my research or analysis. Even to this day I sometimes worry that some may question my role as the editor of the flagship journal of American studies on the basis of my language abilities. This language-based anxiety added to the imposter syndrome—common among those who feel Othered by American academe—I already suffered from. When reading Philip Roth's The Human Stain, I identified with the character of Delphine Roux, not for her political or intellectual orientation but for her anxiety over "fluency" in its multiple valences.

All this is to say that my own relationship to language has shaped my thinking about America, and that I had long felt that American studies as a field has not addressed the issue of language as fully as it could. Language—and more specifically, the dominance of English—not only is a critical axis of power, especially in relation to colonialism, immigration, and nationalism, but also is a central yet often taken-for-granted and thus invisible element of knowledge production with very real implications and consequences. Since the Hawai'ibased team took on the editorship of American Quarterly, we have consciously tried to go beyond the US national frame in our editorial practice, not only by having multiple members of the editorial board based outside the US but also by trying to review more books written in languages other than English. For various practical reasons having to do with the political economy of academic knowledge production, circulation, and consumption, the latter has proved to be more challenging than we initially anticipated. This is only one instance of how, even in our deliberate effort to transnationalize our scholarly frame of mind, the Anglocentrism that dominates the field often delimits its contours.

In light of these concerns, I encouraged two of the foremost scholars whose work on the issues of language and translation have made important interventions to American studies among other related fields—Mary Louise Pratt and Vicente L. Rafael—to propose and guest edit this special issue. I, along with the Board of Managing Editors, was extremely excited to work with them throughout the review and editorial process and to witness the range of emerging scholarship that looks at the workings of language—often violent but also ingenious and transgressive—and its intersections with settler colonialism and Indigeneity, race and empire, migration and diaspora. It has been particularly exciting to see the many nuanced ways in which scholars examine the complex practices of translation. We are delighted to see the historical, geographic, and cultural as well as linguistic span the special issue covers, and we hope that it will launch a new phase of research and dialogue that treats language as one of the critical axes of analysis in understanding America in its many permutations. I am grateful to the tireless labor of the guest editors in compiling this pathbreaking collection and to the authors for their brilliant contributions.