Yasemin Yildiz's Beyond the Mother Tongue offers a usefully provocative take on a growing “movement” in language studies away from a monolingual framework for conceptualizing language, language relations, and language users and toward conceptions of multilingualism that do not simply offer pluralized versions of monolingualism—sets of discrete languages and their users. While the book focuses primarily on canonical and “minority” writers associated with the literary/aesthetic realm—Franz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Feridun Zaimoglu—and more particularly with engagements with “German,” Yildiz's analyses move fluidly to encompass a far broader range of language practices, and will be of interest to readers (like myself) relatively unfamiliar with the specific texts Yildiz discusses. This is both necessary and appropriate given her argument that monolingualism is not simply a statement about the limited linguistic repertoire of populations but, rather, a “key structuring principle that organizes the entire range of modern life, from...
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