Today, the Cold War is theorized through the organizational structure of the nation state (political knowledge) and area studies (institutional knowledge). Yet, in this framework, the key role of language—in diplomacy, intelligence, interrogation, and more—is often underlooked. Indeed, the Cold War and the ongoing cold war of today as a cultural, diplomatic exchange relies fundamentally on translation. While language has been privileged within area studies, with its focus on literary translation (Okada 2002), the perforation of the concept of “language” itself as a tool and weapon during the Cold War deserves greater analysis (Martin-Nielsen 2010, Haddadian-Moghaddam & Scott-Smith 2020). In this issue, we invite papers that think about language as a constructed field, rather than mere tool, of Cold War organization.

This issue is therefore concerned with the structural triangulation that emerges between the Cold War, language, and area studies. Post-World War II in the US university, national literatures and languages became the site of postcolonial, anti/communist national construction. On the one hand, language acquisition served a practical need; delicate political negotiations stressed the importance of accurate interpretations. On the other, it essentialized these areas of the world as homogenous blocs, contributing to the formation of Othered nation-states—the so-called “Second” and “Third” Worlds. As Naoki Sakai notes in Translation and Subjectivity (1997), the process of translation itself presents languages as closed entities—and, by association, reifies differences between ethnicities/nations. Linguistic and geonational differentiation thus occurred in tandem with Cold War attempts at equivalency and exchange. This simultaneous process of separation and connection during the Cold War has had a profound impact on the twenty-first century version of bipolarity that has followed the Russian Federation’s invasions of Ukraine.

If linguistic translation is a tactic in wars both hot and cold, war also encourages a translational approach to local histories and conflicts that reproduces the lines of Cold War bipolarization (Chow 2025). However, the complicity between war and translation has not prevented multilingualism from being regularly portrayed as a mechanism for international justice and peace. This rhetoric of multilingual internationalism continues in the post-Cold War rhetoric of globalization (Kapur 1998). The instrumentalization of multilingualism not only functioned as a tool of international diplomacy but also as a means of cementing the monolingualisms of modern nation-states (Yildiz 2012). In this sense, multilingualism remains within a monolingualism in a kind of ongoing cold war.

This special issue of Polygraph explores the dual-faced, ambivalent, and often contradictory nature of multi-/monolingualism emerging from cold war paradigms. We invite papers that consider how languages work as a weapon in/against war, and how war works as a language of worlding in the Cold War and its present-day heirs. We welcome submissions for consideration in the format of scholarly articles (5000-9000 words), interviews or conversations (2500-3500 words), translations (5000-9000 words), and book reviews (800-1000 words).

Abstracts between 300 and 500 words are due by November 1, 2025 to polygraphduke@gmail.com; please send any inquiries to the same email. Upon acceptance, full papers are due May 2026. Please include your name, affiliation, and contact information in the abstract. We also welcome articles written in non-English languages, but please submit abstracts in English.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Monolingualism and the Rise of the Cold War Nation-State
  • “Mother Tongue,” “Native Speaker,” and the Cold War
  • Modernity, Postcoloniality, and National Languages
• Multilingualism, Area Studies, and the Cold War
• The Cold War Figure of the Translator or Interpreter
  • Technologies of Translation and Interpretation During the Cold War
• Cold War as Ongoing; Impacts on Literature, Language, and Worlding
  • Second World and Non-Aligned Literatures
  • Third World Literatures, Languages, and Solidarity
  • Indigenous Languages, Dialects, Accents, and the Cold War
• Visual and Multimedia Languages of Propaganda
• Temporality, Borders, and Language after 1945
• Languages Beyond the Anthropocene and Cold War