Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race Series Editor Ernst van Alphen Editorial Team Murat Aydemir, Maaike Bleeker, Isabel Hoving, Yasco Horsman, Esther Peeren Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism Editors Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Colophon Original Design Mart. Warmerdam, Haarlem, The Netherlands www.warmerdamdesign.nl Design Inge Baeten Cover image Cover illustration: “Fork in the road”. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use the photograph reproduced on the cover of this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Printing The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation – Paper for documents – Requirements for permanence”. ISSN: 1570-7253 E-Book ISSN: 1879-5846 ISBN: 978-90-420-3856-1 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1098-0 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands Mission Statement Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race Intersecting is a series of edited volumes with a critical, interdisciplinary focus. Intersecting’s mission is to rigorously bring into encounter the crucial insights of black and ethnic studies, gender studies, and queer studies, and facilitate dialogue and confrontations between them. Intersecting shares this focus with Thamyris, the socially committed international journal that was established by Jan Best en Nanny de Vries, in 1994, out of which Intersecting has evolved. The sharpness and urgency of these issues is our point of departure, and our title reflects our decision to work on the cutting edge. We envision these confrontations and dialogues through three recurring cate- gories: place, sex, and race. To us they are three of the most decisive categories that order society, locate power, and inflict pain and/or pleasure. Gender and class will necessarily figure prominently in our engagement with the above. Race, for we will keep analyzing this ugly, much-debated concept, instead of turning to more civil con- cepts (ethnicity, culture) that do not address the full disgrace of racism. Sex, for sex- uality has to be addressed as an always-active social strategy of locating, controlling, and mobilizing people, and as an all-important, not necessarily obvious, cultural practice. And place, for we agree with other cultural analysts that this is a most productive framework for the analysis of situated identities and acts that allow us to move beyond narrow identitarian theories. The title of the book series points at what we, its editors, want to do: think together. Our series will not satisfy itself with merely demonstrating the complexity of our times, or with analyzing the shaping factors of that complexity. We know how to theorize the intertwining of, for example, sexuality and race, but pushing these inter- sections one step further is what we aim for: How can this complexity be under- stood in practice? That is, in concrete forms of political agency, and the efforts of self-reflexive, contextualized interpretation. How can different socially and theoreti- cally relevant issues be thought together? And: how can scholars (of different back- grounds) and activists think together, and realize productive alliances in a radical, transnational community? We invite proposals for edited volumes that take the issues that Intersecting addresses seriously. These contributions should combine an activist-oriented per- spective with intellectual rigor and theoretical insights, interdisciplinary and transna- tional perspectives. The editors seek cultural criticism that is daring, invigorating and self-reflexive; that shares our commitment to thinking together. Contact us at [email protected]. Contents 9 Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck 15 Getting up onto Monolingualism: Barthes, Kafka, Myth David Gramling 39 A Case of ‘Fake Monolingualism’: Morocco, Fouad Laroui Diglossia and the Writer 47 Moroccan Literature: A Monster Yet To Be Born? Madeleine Kasten A Response to Fouad Laroui 53 Philology’s Jargon: How Can We Write Post-Monolingually? Till Dembeck and Georg Mein 71 Monolingualism, Heterolingualism, and Poetic Innovation: Esther Kilchmann On Contemporary German Literature, with a Side Glance to the Seventeenth Century 87 mi have een droom (with an Introduction by Liesbeth Minnaard) Ramsey Nasr 91 About Being Representative: Ramsey Nasr’s Poetic Liesbeth Minnaard Performances as Antwerp City Poet and Dutch Poet Laureate 109 Eèchtenteèchtig (with an Introduction by Elisabeth Bekers) Chika Unigwe 117 “Bearing Gifts of Words”: Multilingualism in the Fiction of Elisabeth Bekers Flemish-Nigerian Writer Chika Unigwe 133 Brussels is Europe: Koen Peeters’ Grote Europese Thomas Ernst Roman as Multilingual Literature 149 The Barbarism(s) of Multilingualism: Outweirding the Maria Boletsi Mainstream in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Performance Literature 171 The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation Yoko Tawada 181 The Bones of Translation: Yoko Tawada’s Translational Poetics Bettina Brandt 195 The Contributors 199 Index Thamyris/Intersecting No. 28 (2014) 9–14 Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck Moving beyond the myth of monolingualism, the actual aim of this volume, seemed too bold a statement to allow for a central title position. Living, as we do, in a world and age in which the restrictions set by monolingualism in many ways determine our daily existence, made the more moderate claim of challenging the myth of monolin- gualism seem more appropriate: as a first and highly important step on the road to ‘beyond.’ Surely,the heightened discursivity of terms such as ‘globalisation,’ ‘internationalisation,’ or ‘world society’ seems to suggest that multilingualism—rather than monolingualism— is nothing less than the sign of our present time. Closely connected to the last decades’ unprecedented increase in world-wide mobility—of persons, goods, infor- mation and ideas—and global interactions, the co-existence and intermingling of a broad variety of (western and non-western) languages now characterizes West- European societies more than ever. Simultaneously, competence in a whole range of languages as well as proficiency in intercultural communication appear as the keys to success, officially promoted by EU policies. Nevertheless, discussions about related topics such as migration, multicultural- ism and integration continue to revolve around the claim that flawless fluency in the ‘national tongue(s)’ is a fundamental requirement for a full-fledged membership to national communities. Simultaneously, this flawless fluency, that not only pertains to grammar, style and pronunciation, but also includes a whole range of hard-to-define, ‘unique’ qualities and affective dimensions of the language concerned, seems strictly reserved for native speakers. The native speaker features as the embodiment of the ‘mother tongue,’ and one might go so far as to claim that in its most radical Introduction: How to Challenge the Myth of Monolingualism? | 9 consequences, speaking about the ‘mother tongue’ is just another oblique way of speaking about race. But even if one does not want to go that far: contemporary dis- course on migrants and other newcomers leaves little doubt that the ‘true’ members of the national community are those who speak the national language as their mother tongue. This conflation of national language and mother tongue, two highly controversial constructs, has far-reaching results when it comes to the in- and exclusion of new- comers into the national communities of most West-European countries. Whereas the pursuit of economic interests often results in an everyday practice of multilingual pragmatism, on an ideological level monolingualism, the priority of the—preferably native—national language, still appears as the indisputable norm; the norm that guarantees national belonging and unconditional loyalty to whatever is defined as ‘the national.’ In her monograph Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition Yasemin Yildiz identifies the contradiction between multilingual realities and the seemingly unwavering persistence of the monolingual paradigm as the “key structur- ing principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life” (2). This contra- diction, she argues, results in a state of tension that manifests itself in a broad range of situations and phenomena on various levels of society. The present volume, pro- grammatically titled Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, sets out to probe this tension as well as the ways in which it leaves its multi-faceted imprints in the field of culture. By focusing on manifestations of and reflections on this tension in literature, performance art, translation and scholarly work, it aims to investigate the various ways in which prejudices on multilingualism on the one hand, and practices of multi- lingualism on the other, respectively corroborate and challenge the myth that claims and privileges one exclusive language of national belonging. Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism contains a rich variety of scholarly contri- butions that discuss multiple negotiations of and challenges to the myth of monolin- gualism in various cultural contexts. Topics range from the ethics of mono- and multilingualism, the persistent ideology of nativity and the native speaker, the trials and tribulations of translating multilingual