Abstract

No one is born speaking or writing a language. We all begin as language learners, and in that sense, there are no native languages. There are only foreign languages. As language educators and as scholars of literatures produced by Black, migrant, indigenous, and multilingual artists, we know that even the universalism of “foreign languages” and “second languages”—which holds the Other at tongue’s length, so to speak—needs to be replaced by the universalism of “additional languages.” Every language is an additional language, not a primary, national, or natural language. But if every language is an additional language relative to others that we use, or others that our neighbors use, it...