Heterolanguage in Twenty-First-Century Cinema and Literature: Transnational Mediations

Abstract

“Heterolanguage in Twenty-First-Century Cinema and Literature: Transnational Mediations” analyses multilingual films and novels that prominently feature “heterolanguage,” or a language that is not easily accessible to part or all of a text’s target audience. As this dissertation demonstrates, heterolanguage offers a novel, non-binary way of apprehending language and linguistic alterity based on access (as opposed to prestige). By making heterolanguage the backbone of a new reading practice, this dissertation zooms in on the multilingual qualities and the non-translation stance that are prime features of the corpus herein constituted. By examining how the deployment of heterolanguage can subvert established linguistic power relations across a variety of geolinguistic contexts, this study fleshes out the eminently political potential of heterolanguage as a cultural device.

At the same time, this dissertation argues for the necessity to make the new reading practice proposed reflective of current transnational circulation trends. With the global intensification of cultural and economic flows, twenty-first-century cultural productions increasingly depend on processes of transnational mediation to travel beyond their context of inception. This study focuses on the impact of three such processes (i.e. translation, film trailers as a form of paratext, and the category of “global art cinema”) on key texts of Latin American cinema, Franco-Canadian literature written in Chiac, Sub-Saharan African cinema, and U.S. literature written in Spanglish.

By analysing the transformations endured by the selected texts as they circulate from one context to another, this dissertation reveals how transnational mediations decisively affect heterolanguage’s subversive potential. By grinding out the conceptual lens offered by heterolanguage, this dissertation also pushes the study of multilingual experiments into previously uncharted territory. Designed at the confluence of film and media studies, comparative literary studies, and translation studies, this dissertation proposes an innovative methodology that contributes to all three fields by shedding light on how, in the twenty-first century, the global system of circulation and its infrastructures crucially carry, shape, and re-shape the politics of heterolanguage.