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In Translingual Imagination, Steven Kellman cites the popular monolingual myth that "there seems to be something not only painful but unnatural, almost matricidal, about an author who abandons Muttersprache" (3), only to list many authors who have succeeded and have renewed the languages to which they chose to contribute. Note the vocabulary of "pain," "abandonment," "unnaturalness," even monstrosity implied by the "matricide" of writing in another language. According to Yasemin Yildiz in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition, it is the persistence of such affectively charged vocabulary that undergirds the power of what she names the "monolingual paradigm": "a key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern social life, from the construction of individuals and their proper subjectivities to the formation of disciplines and institutions, as well as imagined collectives such as cultures and nations" (2). As a belief in the irreplaceable biological origin of a person's language, it was introduced alongside the nationalist foundations of modernity in the eighteenth century and made the "mother tongue" not a metaphor, but a fetish and a "condensed narrative" that sees "affect, gender and kinship, tied to a story of origin and identity" (12-13). In order to allow for a multilingual paradigm to re-emerge, alongside the possibility of affective relationships with other languages or a productive estrangement from them, Yildiz argues that we need to unsettle the "linguistic family romance" and deconstruct "the manufactured proximity between 'mother' and 'language'" (12). Translingual writers creating in more than one literary language have long been writing against the monolingual paradigm, showing the need for other metaphors to describe the connection between writers and their languages. Their putative matricidal attempts originated often in the need to evade the matrix of national cultures' oppressive monolingualism or gender norms. In a postcolonial context, this gave rise to the vocabulary of appropriation or abrogation (Ashcroft, 1989), cannibalism (Fernandez Retamar, 1971) or theft (Ramazani, 2001). John Skinner's The Stepmother Tongue: an Introduction to New Anglophone Fiction (1998) suggested "stepmother tongue" in an effort to find a term to classify Anglophone fiction composed in a language imposed by the unequal power structures of colonialism. The compulsory language of the colonizer, contrasted with the local 'mother tongue,' inhabits here the archetype of a stepmother. Critics have since turned to this somewhat playful metaphor to refer to writing in a non-native language in contexts other than postcolonial, which because of the increased mobility of people in the age of globalization has become also common in immigrant and diasporic literatures. Josip Novakovich employs "stepmother tongue" in his introduction to a collection of stories by non-native English speakers writing in the United States. "Writing the Stepmother Tongue" returned as an umbrella term for translingual creativity in the recent symposium on Translingual Writing organized by Kellman, Natasha Lvovich, and Ilan Stavans at Amherst University in October 2015. During the proceedings, translingual writers assembled in the opening panel of the symposium interrogated the governing metaphor as they proposed that the dynamics of language acquisition as often include lovers as ancestors. Ilan Stavans suggested that his wife was the giver and listener of the language: "many of us are married to non-our-first-language speakers" and "the true translators, the true transfer ticket holders are those partners." Sergio Weissman followed with a comment about the "intimate informant," and Gustavo Perez-Firmat admitted that the only two people he ever collaborated with and allowed to edit his work were his wife and a best friend. What these statements point to is that the second language chosen for translingual writing--especially outside the postcolonial context--allows for more voluntary affections: it is not so much a "stepmother's tongue" as a lover's tongue. …

The study of the literature of large metropolitan centers that are divided along linguistic, ethnic, and cultural fault lines by colonizations, redrawn borders, or waves of migration provides one alternative to the national model in the study of comparative literature. Often opposed to nationalism in all its guises, the literature of nodal cities is strongly aligned with the idealistic goals of cosmopolitanism and Goethean Weltliteratur in emphasizing the fluidity of borders in those spaces and the complexity of identities they engender. The Polish novelist Paweł Huelle's 2004 novel Castorp centers on one such nodal city, Danzig/Gdańsk, in order to respond to Thomas Mann's meditation on cosmopolitanism in The Magic Mountain. Castorp is also a postcolonial response to the canonical German text; it calls for rememorizing and reimagining the presence of German history in the Polish landscape. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, this article argues that the postcolonial perspective of Castorp offers not an accusation but a call for a cosmopolitan reconciliation and inclusiveness. Huelle does not provide a nationalist re-reading of the past, but a complex review of overlapping identities that cannot be reduced to a simplistic German-Polish dialectic. Rather than writing back in the sense of striking back, Huelle invites us to understand his city in a “deep time” — to use Wai Chi Dimock's phrase — that includes, rather than erases, its German past.

The inexorable prisons of color, race, and clan that Salman Rushdie evokes here, when peeled off in a hopeful reverie, leave the eponymous character of The Moor's Last Sigh as a free-floating physical body, comfortable in a world of apparent sameness. Realizing, however, that shedding the skin stands only at the very beginning of a long process of de-differentiation, Moor adds that his dream has its extension in another vision, this time one of becoming "simply an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world."2 Consequently, to ease his presence and mobility in the world, Moor wants to shake off first differences inherent to the body, and then the body itself. Although seemingly growing out of an idealism that strives for universal equality, the outlook endorsed by such a vision evokes the Enlightenment ideal of the disembodied mind as constitutive of a public sphere consisting of free, reasoning individuals.3 Additionally, because it seems impossible now to unwed the Enlightenment from the imperialist project that underpinned it, it becomes clear that the ideas that gave rise to universalism underlie also the notion of the cosmopolitan: the same "person"-generic and genderless citizen-is to be at home in the world.4 Such a universalist position has already been interrogated by many cultural critics, who revealed its specificity to a very limited group of men. Also Rushdie clearly realizes the limitations of this stance and has his character mourn that "in the waking world a man's not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be." Moor acknowledges that, beside his parents and his