(In)visibility of Romanian Writers in English as a Second Language

The list of successful exophonic writers is impressive: Vladimir Nabokov (native speaker of Russian), Elie Wiesel (native speaker of Romanian), Chinua Achebe (native speaker of Igbo), Xiaolu Guo (native speaker of Chinese), to mention only a few who have chosen to write in English. In many cases it is the turbulent history of their native countries (wars, authoritarian political regimes, ethnic and religious persecution) that led to the traumatic abandonment of the language in which they were born. While this is still a major cause of the language switch to English, there are other reasons for adopting English as the literary medium of fiction and poetry. We invite examinations of the relationship between language and identity, choice for English as the language of literary visibility, and refugee, expats, and immigrant authors’ works whose difficult topics regarding migration, dis/relocation, trauma, and alienation are better served by a non-native language. Exploring cases of writers whose heritage language is other than English (and especially those whose mother tongue is/was Romanian), we hope to start a conversation about how cultural memory and heritage inform and challenge the thematic content analysis, actor-network theory, cultural studies approaches, and deconstructive and postcolonial perspectives.

Do writers in English as a second language completely disappear behind their works’ language? To what extent their works mediate the world of continuous displacement of populations? More than ever, the rupture between inhabitants and their native land is painfully, as well as proudly, reflected in works written in English as a second language.

 Please send 250 word proposal to Ileana Marin marini@uw.edu