English has long emerged as the lingua franca of globalization but
has been somehow estranged in the hands or mouths of aliens, from
Joseph Conrad to Chang-rae Lee. Haltingly, their alien characters
come to speak in the Anglo-American tongue, yet what emerges is
skewed by accents, syntax, body language, and nonstandard
contextual references-an uncanny, off-kilter language best
described as Alienglish.Either an alien's English that estranges or
an alienating English because it sounds so natural, it issues forth
from an involuntarily forked tongue and split psyche, operating on
two registers, one clear and comprehensible, the other occluded and
unfamiliar. Alienglish hence diagnoses the literal split in
language or the alien's English; it further suggests the
metaphorical splits either of aliens in an English-speaking world
or of the English language dubbing and animating an alien world.
While such alien performances are largely ventriloquized by native
writers in the name of aliens, most blatant of which are Western
Orientalism and ethnic self-Orientalism, there were and still are
exceptional nonnative writers in Anglo-American tongues, as a
direct consequence of Eastern diasporas to the nineteenth-century
British Empire and then to the twentieth-century U.S. Empire. These
writers include Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Jerzy Kosinski,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, and Ha Jin,
who all seem to share a predicament: the strange English tongue
they belabor to host in an effort to feel at home in the
Anglo-American host culture as well as in their own bodies deemed
foreign bodies. Wherever one hails from, an alien with a tongue
graft is doomed to be either a tragic outcast or a pathetic clown,
caught between two irreconcilable languages and cultures, searching
for an identity in English yet haunted by a phantom tongue pain.
The book's methodology fuses the scholarly with the poetic, a
montage that springs from the very nature of diaspora, which is as
much about rational decisions of relocation as, put simply,
feelings. The heart of diaspora, breaking like a cracked voice, is
resealed by the head, making both stronger-until another thin line
opens up. Only through this double helix of head and heart,
thinking and feeling, can one hope to map the DNA of diaspora. Such
an unorthodox melange balances the tongue as a cultural expression
from the body and the tongue as a visceral reaction of the body.
Any potential crack amid the superstructure of global English and
its underside of alien tongues promises discovery of a new world,
which has always been there. Alienglish hence arrays itself on a
spectrum from the English's Alien to the Alien's English, from
white representations of the Other to aliens' self-representations.
The usual Orientalist suspects of Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and
Gilbert and Sullivan swell to capture affectless aliens from
sci-fi, Stieg Larsson, and Lian Hearn. The book then turns to
images of Shanghai and Macau, Asian Canadian Joy Kogawa and Evelyn
Lau, and the Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho. It concludes with
an examination of the new China hands (Ha Jin, et al.) and the
global media's search for the sublime. The title of this book
Alienglish appropriately conveys the uniqueness of this book, which
will be a useful contribution to Asian and Asian American studies,
comparative literature, diaspora studies, film studies, popular
culture, and world literature.
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