On Reelecting Monolingualism

Taking examples from contemporary Europe and the United States, this lecture will evaluate four propositions: that monolingualism is a political structure on the rise, for reasons that outstrip mere nationalist and nativist animus; that monolingualism as a powerful political structure maintains an increasingly tentative reference to speakers’ actual speech practices, deriving additional power from that tentativity; that monolingualism and multilingualism are not opposing, but rather interlocking discourses; and that monolingualism has acquired a newly productive potency in transnational economic rationales which, in turn, manage the supply-side dissemination of cultural production.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of German, Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society