Writing in the foreign as a self-translation practice in the new aesthetics of migration and cosmopolitanism: Jumphra Lahiri and Karima 2g as case-studies

In the last decades, a gradual reconsideration of concepts such as language, translation, belonging, mobility, contact, nation, identity and community has been evisioned due to the new and ongoing migration flows. From this general assumption, the linguistic reflections provided in this research will move towards the discussion of some representative case studies which can help us to conceive of English as a self-translation practice (from English into Italian, and vice versa), thereby enabling a new aesthetics of migration and cosmopolitanism by connecting Italy and the United States, Africa and the Mediterranean, metropolitan cities and peripheries, diasporic, migrant and postcolonial subjects, peoples who define their critical space through literature, music, and cinema. Specifically, we will explore Jhumpa Lahiri’s radical linguistic choice to abandon English in favor of Italian as documented in her literary work In altre parole, and Karima 2G’s use of Pidgin English in her artistic and narrative pathway with the attempt to deconstruct the myth of a standard language and of “proper” English, the rhetoric of naturalization, as well as to undermine the ethno-linguistic categories of the “mother tongue”, “nativeness” and the “native speaker”, since they are central to their autobiographical literary and artistic pathways. This is particularly easy to observe when taking into consideration the new aesthetics of migration and cosmopolitanism engendered by Lahiri and Karima 2G who resort to “writing in the foreign” as an unconventional form of self-translation that holds in its interstices the double threshold of a contagious and unexpected hospitality in a new language. In their literary and artistic works, an unprecedented vision of language and language contact is unfolded with different linguistic and cultural heritages, thus problematizing the traditional understanding of language as a social projection of territorial unity held together by shared behavioural norms, beliefs and values. Indeed, this old view of language originated at a time when society consisted of human populations confined within geographical boundaries and structured by local imaginings of their social identity.