International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures

“This book will be celebrated by readers grateful for its erudition and for its fine close readings. Readers will also be moved by the profoundly democratic culture that International Perspectives on Multilingual Literatures acknowledges and thereby promotes. To collect this broad sampling of contemporary essays that may otherwise have been mistaken as marginal contributions to the conventional categories of ‘natural’ language traditions is to re-set the cultural compass. It is to recognize and to name literary arts as non-‘natural’ constructions that use available materials, such as languages, to make new things and to make things seem new. As migrations continue to complicate the colour and the sound of native lands, to ignore the strong current of multilingualism today amounts to a xenophobic purism whose political names are not pretty. Colonial and post-colonial conditions are culturally impure, as are the experiences of migration in search of opportunity or just safety. And the accumulation of native, imposed, and adopted cultures takes the sound and the shape of layered languages. Good readers can hear one underneath the other. Good writers layer their style with enough foreignness to keep the text from congealing into something flat and easily assimilated. Assimilation here, and in general, means monolingualism which amounts to the defeat of nuance.”