The relation of english to other language-oriented departments, though dense with complexity, is rarely talked about in the open. One explanation for the lack of discussion may be the difficulty of framing a relation that is moving in two directions at once: while over the last generation or so English and the so-called foreign languages have come to resemble each other in substance, they have grown apart in material resources and institutional prestige. Many departments of English are more or less thriving, while departments of other languages and literatures in the same places are depleted and struggling. And yet, in the view of many of the people who determine our condition—administrators, legislators, and students—we are largely all of a piece; my problems will soon be yours, yours will be mine, and scholars and teachers of literature will find that they have far more joining than dividing them. To revive one of the rubrics of our New York University conference, we literary scholars are much better at collating the many ways we are different than identifying and leveraging the ways we are the same. How much does our declining influence in academy and society owe to an incapacity to come together and announce our identity when it matters? I take the position that we now have an ethical obligation to do what inclination and training have so badly prepared us for: to measure our sameness and difference on one scale and talk about what we can do together. How can people in English departments address this condition? What might those in other literature departments do? Having spent a career moving between these settings, I offer some reflections.

The changing demographics of higher education are bringing the teaching of English and the teaching of foreign languages closer together. For an increasing number of students, English is a foreign, a second, an international, or a global language, not the language of a unitary mother tongue and culture. Increasingly, students of French, German, or Spanish are learning a foreign language on the background of experiences of migrations, displacements, and expatriations but also on the background of multilingual and multicultural experiences. The typical language learner is, for example, a Nigerian with a Canadian passport learning German at the University of Texas, or a Czech citizen with a knowledge of English, German, and French enrolled in a Japanese class at the University of California, Berkeley. The common denominator among language learners is their interest in language in all its manifestations: literary and nonliterary, academic and nonacademic, as a mode of thought, as a mode of action, and as a symbol of identity. At UC Berkeley, the current success of courses with titles like Language, Mind, and Society; Language in Discourse; Language and Power; and Language and Identity—as they are offered by English programs, foreign language programs, linguistics departments, or schools of education—is a sign of a renewed interest in the way language expresses, creates, and manipulates “alien wisdoms” through discourse.

One of my favorite sayings——SITUated on the tenuous interface between humor and seriousness—is “Money isn't everything, but it's way ahead of whatever is in second place,” which is cynical and materialistic but impossible to completely reject. In our profession, one could plug in the word Spanish and derive the same results. At colleges and universities across the country, enrollments in Spanish language courses are growing out of proportion, while programs in other languages often struggle to attract students; some small language offerings have in fact become endangered species, and comparisons to the laws of natural selection permeate the discourse. To the many acronyms that pepper the jargon of our profession has been added LOTS—that is, languages other than Spanish—a disclaimer used whenever language programs and language enrollments are being discussed. This acronym is troubling, since it categorically removes Spanish from the discussion of language programs as being too big to handle or—even more sinister—as somehow constituting an obstacle to the teaching and appreciation of the remaining languages, that is, of the LOTS. Even more troubling are the constant references to the “Spanish problem,” heard among university administrators and language program directors, and the downright offensive comparisons between Spanish enrollments and gorillas of varying dimensions and body weight, depending on who is offering the simile. Why should one facet of the disciplines we hold most dear become a problem akin to a threatening beast escaped from the menagerie? I am aware of no global demonization of other trends found in the humanities (sarcastic and often politically incorrect backroom comments notwithstanding); we had no structuralist, deconstruction, feminist, Marxist, or postmodern problem, and the current attractiveness of such areas as applied linguistics, gender studies, and cultural studies is not seen as problematic except by a small group of professors whose own courses are perceived as losing enrollment to these upstart newcomer fields. Across universities no one speaks of the math problem, the science problem, the physical education problem, or even the English problem, despite the fact that all students are required to take courses in these areas and that staffing and resource issues often cause the shoe to pinch in many places simultaneously. To face these issues squarely, we need to examine facts and fantasies, pride and prejudice, public virtues and private vices, and reject the fratricidal vivisection of our profession in favor of a stance that is both ethically defensible and logistically realistic.

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

As a member of the mla executive Council, I participated in the discussions that led to this conference and felt moved by my colleagues and their sense of urgency, particularly as expressed by Rosemarie Scullion and Sylvia Molloy. At the time of our council meetings, however, I was thinking mostly about staffing issues and the various reports and resolutions related to the use of graduate student and non-tenure-stream labor—some of them useful, some of them not very useful at all. And there I felt a real sense of urgency—and I remember thinking that there might be a way these issues converged.

Forty years ago, when my department was established as one of the first departments of the new San Diego campus of the University of California (UCSD), its founders had a free hand to construct a new model for literary study by recasting the institutional infrastructure that traditionally divided the field by language or language group. The initial vision, as summarized in the introduction to an early graduate program review, was relatively abstract:

One of my favorite anthropological anecdotes is one Renato Rosaldo tells from his fieldwork among the Ilongots in the highland Philippines in the late 1960s. He was interviewing a very elderly woman about kinship and marriage and raised the topic of adultery. Did it ever happen, he wondered, that a married person became the lover of someone other than his or her spouse? The woman, uneasy and embarrassed, acknowledged that she did recall a few occasions when this had happened among the Ilongots:

There are approximately six billion people living in the world today, of whom roughly one billion are well off (living at or near Western standards) while three billion live on less than two dollars a day; two billion are in between, though even the most fortunate among them are at least fifty percent below the standards of the top one billion (Summers). The trend, unfortunately, is toward more wealth at the top, more poverty at the bottom, and the population is growing fastest where needs are greatest (estimates for population growth by 2050 range from about eight to nearly twelve billion). The United Nations Population Fund report from which these facts are taken furthermore points out that the

One does not have to be a prophet to predict large global crises—military, political, migratory, environmental, health-related, concerning international law, and so forth—that will affect if not us, then surely our students' generation.