Karlié Rodríguez will begin by looking at Raquel Salas Rivera’s while they sleep: under the bed is another country (2019), published shortly after Hurricane María ravaged Puerto Rico. Karlié will explore the use of English, Spanish, and Spanglish, arguing that the multilingualism in the text functions as a literary device, a mirror distortion. English stands in as the language of reason and logic, signaling a particular audience, i.e., Americans, and Spanish as the language of feeling and affect, the words being more obviously directed at a Puerto Rican audience. There is a tertiary register present in the text as well: the dialectic of the Self (colonizer-colonized), which is represented by Puerto Rican Spanglish. Theoretically, this paper complicates Lacanian psychoanalytic thought by arguing that, for the colonized subject, the mirror stage never ends, even after life itself has ended. The mirroring in the text comes in the form of linguistic play as disidentification, disaster as an obstacle to identity formation and/or continuity, and (unstable) translation as formative of the colonized I function.

Müge Gedik will then explore how a multilingual approach is crucial to understanding the reflection of the global climate crisis in contemporary literature beyond Anglophone contexts. Oya Baydar’s Köpekli Çocuklar Gecesi (The Night of Children and Dogs 2019) and Erick J. Mota’s Habana Underguater (Havana Underwater 2010) deal with the social, historical, and cultural implications of the climate crisis in Turkey and Cuba. Both novels are set in dystopic futures in urban environments. They offer intertwinements of climate change, war zones, refuge crises, and transformations of mythic narratives. The novels facilitate a critical inquiry into the contemporary understandings of nationality, identity, and territory for a new ordering of the world and literary relations beyond “the colonial difference.” While their similarities reflect the question of “the human” within anxieties of climate change and contemporary politics, their divergences offer a complex understanding of Turkish and Cuban ecocritical literary histories through climate fiction across cultural and political connections beyond linguistic and geographical boundaries.

Finally, Surojit Kayal will argue that multilingualism is both a site and an approach to understand the global complexity of climate change. Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide (2013), translated by Ken Liu (2019), dramatizes the political economy of the global flow of electronic waste from the West to Silicon Isle, the fictional equivalent of Guiyu, the capital of e-waste processing in Guangdong, China. This paper focuses on the multilingual moments within this global climate infrastructure through the two major protagonists of the novel: Kaizong, a Chinese American student and interpreter and Mimi, a migrant Chinese waste worker. Kaizong and Mimi oscillate between English, Mandarin, and local Chinese dialects. Surojit investigates translation in the novel: the novel itself as a translated work, the multilingual worlds within the novel, and the material translation of values across modes of production at different sites of a global infrastructure (Tsing). Surojit argues that climate change is at once infrastructural and multilingual, and attending to its local intensities is necessary to understand its global spread and significance.

In closing, this panel speaks to the urgency of multilingualism in addressing the slow violence of the climate crisis. Writer-activists, using multilingual modes of writing, make this violence visible in ways that monolingual, anglophone texts cannot always accomplish.