Beyond the Mother Tongue: Bilingualism as Cultural Capital in Migrant Literature

Abstract

Several recent works in language, migration and postcolonial literature emphasize hybridity, fluidity, and mobility in migrant language practices. In the introduction to Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language, Suresh Canagarajah advocates for a “hybrid” and “mobile” perspective on language and migration: “Scholars are considering languages unbound—that is, they are endeavoring to understand the flows across time and space of semiotic resources, unfettered from an imposed structure”. [1]The ‘hybrid’ or ‘mobile’ turn has challenged the ideologies of native languages, monolingual national identity and linguistic assimilations. Literary criticism has shown how world literature undermines monolingual paradigms and calls for new, transnational reading practices.[2] Among others, Rebecca Walkowitz’s ground-breaking study Born Translated addresses translation not primarily as a craft that grants access to other literatures but as a vital component of twenty-first- century world literature, understood not as a canon of excellence but as a complex and ever-changing system of circulation and reception. While finding merit in the dynamic notion of migrant multilingualism and linguistic practices, the paper intends to resist the temptation to unconditionally celebrate hybridity, fluidity, and multilingualism in the context of literature of migration. Drawing on recent criticism,[3] the paper will ask why, and how bilingualism came to have the cultural, symbolic, and, crucially, economic value that it does under neoliberalism. As Pascale Casanova states: “A language is dominant if (and only if) it is a second language used by bilinguals or polyglots around the world. It is not the number of speakers that determines whether it is dominant or not (otherwise, Mandarin would be the dominant language). The criterion is, rather, the number of plurilingual speakers who “choose” it”. The paper aims at investigating the shift of paradigm from a monolingual to a ‘hybrid’ model by analysing bilingual and multilingual strategies in migrant literature in English. It shall delve on contemporary novels (e.g. Exit, West by Mohsin Hamid and Crossing by Pajtim Statovci) that thematise, enact, or anticipate migration as part of a collective creative process illustrating how bilingual writers challenge myths of monolingual or national languages and display multilingual subjectivities. Yet, it will aim to show that bilingualism’s cultural/social status is complex and investigate the way in which bilingual authors often display a “cosmopolitan” literary and linguistic style that embraces cultural difference insofar as they do not challenge a neoliberal order. In a broader perspective, it will thus wish to call for the need of researching multilingual experiences in migrant literature that are excluded from the discourse of language hybridity and from the cultural capital of successful, bilingual authors.

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