As such, the panel will combine several strands of recent scholarship focusing on literary multilingualism (such as Brian Lennon’s In Babel’s Shadow and Rachael Gilmour’s Bad English) as well as address the overwhelming dominance of the English language in global literary production and critical reception alike, a state of affairs that led to Aamir Mufti’s appeal to Forget English! and Minae Mizumura’s lament about The Fall of Language in the Age of English.
Rather than focusing on a single linguistic contact zone, the panel adopts an explicitly comparative approach by juxtaposing presentations focusing on three different world areas (the Caribbean, Western Europe, and South Asia) and three different instances of linguistic hybridity (French/Antillean Creole, Spanglish/Portuñol/Judeo-Spanish, and English/Bambaiya).
In the panel’s first presentation, “On Pure Language, or Those Who Misspeke It: Reflections on an Experimental Translation of Gilbert Gratiant’s Fab’Compè Zicaque,” Tyler Grand Pre will use the example of an experimental Middle English translation of mid-20th-century Martinican poetry as an opportunity to employ a multilingual adaptation of Walter Benjamin’s concept of pure language in the context of translation. His project promises to challenge the monolingual paradigm in several ways: firstly, it produces a complex translation of what is simultaneously a Francophone discovery and a Creolophone rediscovery of Antillean Creole in written verse; secondly, it expands the possibilities of Modern English by using Creole’s more opaque pronominal relationships; and thirdly, it participates in a relexicalization of Afro-Caribbean and African-American folklore.
The labor of translation introduced by Grand Pre is developed in our second presentation, “The Linguistic Labor of Spanglish, Portuñol, and Judeo-Spanish Literature.” Remy Attig offers his concept of “linguistic labor” to analyze texts by authors who toward the end of the last century began engaging in a form of linguistic activism intended to repudiate previous characterizations of hybridized language varieties as little more than impure or uneducated Spanish. In this, Attig distinguishes between vibrant and growing body of literary work in interlingual registers of Spanglish and Portuñol on the one hand and the critically endangered variety of Judeo-Spanish, whose preservation he characterizes as “a linguistic form of palliative care.” (In devoting attention to both the vitality and mortality of hybrid languages, the presentation thus perfectly encapsulates the panel’s title.) “Linguistic labor,” Attig argues, must be recognized as a form of gendered work whose contribution to enhancing the prestige of hybrid languages tends to be overlooked in the context of literary capitalism.
The theme of language, power, and prestige will be further explored in our third presentation, “Rejection and Subversion in Mumbai’s Gully Rap,” in which Akshara Dafre analyzes the multilingual language used in contemporary Indian hip-hop. Combining the approaches of first-generation postcolonial writers like Achebe and Ngũgĩ with Braj Kachru’s theory of subversion of English, Dafre analyzes the lyrics of gully rap as a form that simultaneously rejects and enriches the English language. By addressing the form’s combination of English with the Mumbai street slang known as “Bambaiyya,” which includes not only Hindi but also several regional languages such as Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, the presentation problematizes our understanding of linguistic decolonization as well of what constitutes a postcolonial text.
By combining presentations exploring Antillean, Iberian, and Subcontinental linguistic faultlines, this panel will offer a multifaceted challenge to the monolingual paradigm and allow for both a celebration of the joys as well as an acknowledgment of the sorrows contained in those faultlines. Thanks to a conscious decision to eschew a fourth paper and limit the panel to standard-length presentations, there will be ample time to explore their manifold interconnections during a stimulating discussing period.