Articles

Mining Multilingualism's Materiality: 'Re-representing' Linguistic Diversity in Presidential Biography

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Abstract

This paper engages in a “geo-semiotic” (Scollon and Scollon 2003) analysis of David Maraniss’s 2012 presidential biography, Barack Obama: The Story, and offers an alternative view to how the materiality of global multilingualism is utilized for enhanced literary effect in the hypercompetitive arena of 21st-century Presidential biographical writing. Utilizing an interdisciplinary paradigm of analysis (Block, Gray and Holborow 2012), the paper offers a detailed microlinguistic account of the visual and semiotic strategies employed by a Pulitzer-winning author, which appropriate multilingualism in a bid to peripherize both its use and its users. Through an astute use of polyglot etymologizing, translation, transliteration, and multilingual appropriation, Maraniss’s thematized multilingualism evinces a markettheoretic of asymmetrical linguistic valuation (Park and Wee 2012). Maraniss’s careful visual and verbal mapping of the linguistic journey of an American President seeking the unmarkedness of monolingualism over the markedness of multilingualism demonstrates how appropriations of multilingualism in material products, such as bestsellers, can be deployed to render multilingualism ‘immaterial.’

Keywords: Geolinguistics, language ideology, code-switching, multilingualism, biography

How to Cite:

Pandey, A., (2014) “Mining Multilingualism's Materiality: 'Re-representing' Linguistic Diversity in Presidential Biography”, Critical Multilingualism Studies 2(1), 38-73.