Parallax at georgetown3/31/2023 ![]() ![]() This special issue wants to push these ideas further, exploring how the conditions and context of group and community formation change as the world becomes increasingly multilingual. One attempt has been made by Rebecca Walkowitz, in her book Born Translated, where she engages Anderson’s ideas from the perspective of translation, arguing that it ‘puts pressure on the conceptual boundaries between one community and another’ (2015: 29). Theorists so far have been slow to connect this drive towards (societal) multilingualism with the study of communities and the arrangement of the social in the ‘era of globalization’, to borrow Spivak’s (2012) term. As Yasemin Yildiz (2012) has argued with regard to Europe, however, the continent’s presumed monolingualism is slowly giving way to a postmonolingual paradigm, in which language variety and multilingualism are recognised and valued. As many linguistic anthropologists have argued, the nation-state as a political ideal is the product and reproduction of a ‘standard language’ ideology (Woolard and Schiefelin, 1994 see also Gal, 2006). The upsurge of digital media and an increasingly interconnected world prompt us to ask whether these factors do not in fact enable a wholly new idea of simultaneity once again.Ĭontemporary globalization problematizes another tenet of the traditional understanding of imagined communities, namely its (implicit) monolingual nature. In the face of unfolding globalization, today the claim that the printing press gave rise to ‘wholly new ideas of simultaneity’ has gained particular resonance. Anderson’s argument that the development of European print capitalism from the late medieval period to the modern era played a paramount role in language standardization and the creation of a national consciousness has been influential throughout the humanities and social sciences. The study of this phenomenon has heavily drawn on Benedict Anderson’s (1983) seminal concept of ‘imagined communities’. Special issue title: Imagining Communities, MultilinguallyĮdited by Jesse van Amelsvoort (University of Groningen/Campus Fryslân, NL)Īnd Nicoletta Pireddu (Georgetown University, USA)Īll around the world, modernity has been characterised by a drive towards ever more nation-states. ![]()
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