This proposed special session on Naoki Sakai and his unique approach to multilingualism and translation is intended to rhyme with the MLA convention theme in 2022: “Multilingual USA.” Sakai has published many books and articles in as many languages over the last 35 years, all of them challenging fundamental assumptions about the nature and identity of “language” and the still-common assumption, in the USA and elsewhere, that single languages are or should be coextensive with individual nation-states. Sakai’s work rejects all representations of languages as distinct, bounded entities (what linguists call langues), arguing instead that they are constitutively multiple and exceed their supposed identities. Languages are not things to be counted, he stresses; neither apples nor oranges but both and more besides, they are other than themselves from the start. Reading Sakai thus may call to mind Barbara Johnson’s notion of “difference within” and her deconstructive sense of multiplicity already at the origin. Sakai extends this insight in novel ways. That languages are inherently heterogeneous implies, for him, that translation is not a neutral exchange between pre-existing idioms that share an outer border and nothing else. Instead, translation is a historical and political practice whose purpose is to make the foreign different, and the different foreign – a practice, in short, that has become indispensable to modern nationalisms. “Not Counting Languages” offers support for the multilingualism of the USA, as of every nation.

Sakai can be better understood as a critic of translation studies, as commonly practiced, than as a contributor to the field. Interested less in semantic equivalence than in power imbalance, he has pursued with verve his argument about the priority of the multilingual in publications that span area studies, the history of colonialism in the East and the West, modern political theory and philosophy, anthropology, and three centuries of Japanese history and literature. His CV is enormous, and although his work is becoming better known outside his teaching fields (Douglas Robinson’s Critical Translation Studies [Routledge 2018] is largely an analysis of Sakai’s thought), it’s probable that many members of the MLA, especially those not in Asian Studies, are unfamiliar with it still.

This panel, we hope, will help to change that. The three main speakers engage with Sakai’s work as an invaluable resource in their own analyses of multilingual writing. Shuang Shen (Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, Penn State) explores “a multilingual and multi-media repertoire of texts and performances that revolves around Hong Kong’s Chinese Language Movement in the early 1970s.” Performative and political, these works, for Shen, “destabilize the borders of English and Chinese, official language and vernacular language, orality and writing, the language of law and that of sociality.” The second speaker, Penny Pui Chee Yeung (Comparative Literature, Rutgers), reads Yoko Tawada’s 2011 Memoirs of a Polar Bear as a novel that exists in the spaces between and within its languages and scripts. Yeung suggests that, with this novel’s sustained “heterolingual address,” the task of the translator has never been harder. Finally, Jennifer Scappettone (English and Creative Writing, Chicago) examines the extraordinary translingual and multi-authorial poetics of Sawako Nakayasu, whose Mouth: Eats Color project not only deconstructs the priority of original to translation but, in so doing, “eats national languages and their presuppositions for breakfast, impelling the reader to piece together a quavering continuum of apprehension, destined never to arrive at total comprehension.” In conclusion, Naoki Sakai will briefly respond to the papers before we invite comments and questions from the audience.

This will be, in format, a typical MLA panel with a 5-minute introduction, three 12-15 minute papers, a 10-minute response, and 15 minutes of concluding discussion. I imagine an audience of 20-30 drawn from scholars working in translation studies, literary theory, comparative literature, and East Asian studies.