Introduction

What joins all languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death.

—James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010)

In this special issue of American Quarterly, we focus on the politics of language, translation, and multilingualism broadly understood within the shifting field of American studies. Our overarching questions are, What difference has linguistic difference made in shaping American history and experience, and how does language define what counts as "American" in American studies? By linguistic difference we mean both the distinction between different languages inhabiting shared spaces and the differentiations that emerge within individual languages as they become vehicles of social difference and geographic distance. Translation, in other words, is called for both between and within languages. We ask how language ideologies and language policies have shaped the American language-scape, and how real-life linguistic and translation practices escape or contradict such normative forces. We observe points where language usage and translation practices impinge on and implode received notions of "Americanness," expanding or contracting them, putting into question dominant assumptions about the latter's cultural coherence. And, of course, linguistic difference and translation are key dimensions of the "Americanness" that spreads beyond the US's geographic borders, bringing the cadences of hip-hop, for example, into every language on earth. American studies, we believe, stands to benefit greatly from incorporating language, linguistic difference, translation, and multilingualism as basic parameters of analysis across its interdisciplinary terrain. Grasping the United States as a dynamic linguistic force field whose energies extend beyond its boundaries is essential to the project of American studies. In this introduction, we trace some of the broad contours of our subject, before introducing the essays that make up this special issue.

The Politics of Monolingualism

Fireworks around language flare up unpredictably all the time in US public life. The heat is often uncalled for. In the early 2000s, one of us attended a conference on bilingualism at Harvard University, organized by Doris Sommer, well-known author of several innovative books on the social value and aesthetic powers of bilingualism.¹ Harvard's then president, Larry Summers, we learned, was to attend the opening to welcome the one hundred or so attendees. At least here, we thought, our subject is being taken seriously. And so it was. Instead of the usual ninety-second ritual nod, President Summers surprised us with an impassioned monologue calling into question what we were doing. "I am sure you all mean well," he told us but (paraphrasing) the subject we would be discussing at the gathering was of no intellectual interest, and moreover, was a threat to society. Promoting the use of languages other than English in our institutions and on our streets undermined social cohesion. The prevalence of Spanish was an obvious danger: "If you people have your way," he said, "twenty years from now, instead of one Harvard there will be two, one speaking English and the other Spanish. And that will be the end of the university."² Our conference kickoff became a baño de agua fría, a reminder of the kind of gratuitous aggression that the idea of multilingualism, and the fact of Spanish, can trigger in the American psyche. President Summers seems to have been channeling his Harvard colleague, the political scientist and ideologue Samuel Huntington, whose polemical book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2005) had just appeared.³ Huntington's focus was the threat posed to US society and culture by Latino ("Hispanic") immigration, which, Huntington famously claimed, was going to divide the United States into "two peoples, two cultures, and two languages."⁴

Between 1984 and 2000, immigration made the United States more linguistically diverse than ever before. During the same period, twenty-one states passed laws or constitutional amendments making English their official language. Those two developments are related, of course, but not in a sane way. Newt Gingrich's famed "Contract with America" (1994) called bilingualism "a menace to American civilization."⁵

Summers, Huntington, Gingrich, and the English-only legislations that periodically sweep the country...