Common though it may be in most of the United States today, monolingualism is an aberration in most of the world. In western Europe, for example, primary schools teach foreign languages to young children; in urban areas of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, switching between local, vernacular languages and national tongues is a common daily occurrence among all citizens, even those who may not be literate in the traditional Western sense. In a speech for the formal inauguration of the University of California, Irvine's new International Center for Writing and Translation on 5 April 2002, the 1986 Nigerian Nobel Prize laureate for literature, Wole Soyinka, asserted that the United States is “one of the most insular, mono-linguistic communities [he has] ever encountered in [his] life.” Along with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of The Monolingualism of the Other, and Bei Ling, a dissident Chinese poet, translator, and editor, Soyinka is on the executive board of Irvine's new center, an initiative funded by a large endowment from Glenn Schaeffer, a successful Las Vegas casino executive (Johnson E1, E3).

Robert burns, an astute student of human nature, wryly observes in his poem “To a Louse”: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gi'e us / To see oursels as others see us.” What we may learn is not always palatable. It is no secret that, in the eyes of many of our colleagues in disciplines outside language and literature, English too often appears as a bewilderingly undisciplined discipline—irresistibly drawn to the latest fashionable theory, riven by tiresome factionalism, and shamelessly encroaching on the disciplinary territory of others. The view from within is not always rosy either, on the evidence of satirists such as David Lodge in Small World and Frederick Crews in Postmodern Pooh. In our own eyes, of course, we are stable, responsible, hard-working, and absolutely central to the humanities. It is our colleagues in foreign language departments, we sometimes insist, who are the fractious and feckless ones, and who give the humanities a bad name. But these, our closest colleagues, see us—institutionally, if not individually—as arrogant and imperialistic, and ill content to tend our own gardens, as Voltaire urged. The heart of the matter is that we deem ourselves qualified to teach and to write about works of literature in translation, sometimes without adequate knowledge of the language, culture, or relevant literary tradition. Moreover, in many institutions, world literature is the exclusive—and zealously guarded—province of the English department. How can we reconcile this disciplinary imperialism, not to mention our suspicions about the effectiveness of often balkanized foreign language departments, with the fact that for more than thirty years the most influential theorists have been French, German, and Russian (Auerbach, Bakhtin, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Iser, Jakobson, Kristeva, et al.) and that, for the most part, we read them in translation too? Occasionally, of course, English faculty members have been the translators.

Just before coming to the conference on the Relation between English and Foreign Languages in the Academy, I saw an exhibit at the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe titled Who Stole the Teepee? Combining historic with contemporary objects, the exhibit probed not only the theft of tradition announced in its title but the possibility that “we” (Native Americans) or “our ancestors” had been more than willing to sell it. Such speculative reflection resonates with the way in which we who study East Asia have dealt with our relatively stable isolation: while complaining of language and literature colleagues' indifference, if not contempt, toward our endeavors, we have also prided ourselves on the difficulty of our languages and the ancientness of our civilizations, the source of an arcane body of knowledge requisite for even basic literacy. If all foreign language and literature scholars feel subordinate to the empire of English, East Asianists are not only beyond the pale but are often proud of it. Underlying this orientation is an important historical feature: even allowing for the mixed case of China, this region was not colonized by Great Britain. This has meant that it lacks a bourgeoisie that grew up speaking English. I shall return to colonial history below.

I want to begin with some anecdotal facts:

Item: a first-year seminar on multiethnicity in New York is taught at Barnard College only by the English faculty.

Item: a senior seminar on epic and romance in the Middle Ages, announced in the fall 2002 offerings of the University of Michigan's English department, will include works by Chrétien de Troyes and Marie de France, but the only texts to be read in the original language are in Middle English.

Item: a comparative literature course on modernism, magical realism, and postmodernism at the University of Michigan for fall 2002 will read texts by Proust, Kafka, Mann, Borges, García Márquez, Tekin, Calvino, and Pamuk in English only