Fears of a One-World Language

Abstract

José Martí railed against the “provincialism” of national borders imposed on the Western hemisphere in “Our America” in 1891. And yet, only within the last thirty years—facing the deterritorialization and unprecedented migration of people, the flow of capital, and the movement of goods and ideas throughout the world—has U.S. literary studies adopted what might be called a “transnational” perspective. Some contemporary transnational methods of literary studies such as Wai Chee Dimock’s situate official state histories within the broader temporality of “deep time” while relativizing nationalism as a modern reaction against early colonial encounters with the (non-European) other. From this perspective, true comparatism traces networks of people, languages and ideas as they transcend national borders and nationalist discourses. As the 2001 edition of PMLA indicates, transnational methods of study (also known as “Global Studies”) trace the sources of creative expression within the world’s dominant languages to sources lying within the world’s at risk languages.

But what if there are worlds in the one world, each ticking to its own contradictory and contesting clock and pulsation? Why…can ethnicity not secede from the epistemic regime of transnationalism and seek its own salvation in History, or perhaps history? What if ethnicity calls into question the regime of capitalized concepts and categories?

—R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnic Studies in the Age of Transnationalism”