This appears as an afterword to a special issue of the print journal Modernism/modernity (Volume 32, Number 3, September 2025): The Language Challenge: Modernisms in Multilingual South Asia, gueste edited by Preetha Mani and Jennifer Dubrow In the work I’ve been doing over the past ten years, I have discussed the emergence of historically new examples of multilingual literature, culture, and entertainment and called for new ways of counting, organizing, and valuing languages inside and outside the university. I have sought to explain how, why, and when artworks began to use languages differently, where they have drawn on early twentieth-century modernist paradigms and where they have diverged. Along the way, I have highlighted two approaches to the history of modernism and language that have shaped our understanding of multilingualism as a concept and a philosophy.

In literary texts, speech is often taken for granted as simply dialogue delivered by characters. But this assumption belies what occurs in speech between people in everyday life — we interpret speech, we try to see what the speaker really means, beyond what they are saying in a strict sense. Michael Lucey’s intervention with What Proust Heard is to turn a closer eye (and ear) to speech in texts (“language-in-use,” as he calls it) in order to investigate not only what particular speakers might...

In the 1965 movie Incubus, a pre- Star Trek William Shatner, with characteristic avidity, plays the role of Marc, a wounded soldier who comes to the village of Nomen Tuum in search of curative water (fig. 1). While there, he is seduced by a beautiful young succubus, whose appointed task is to prevent Marc’s recuperation and instead deliver his soul to hell. What transpires is a bit too complicated, or silly, to merit recounting in detail, but suffice it to say, in Hollywood-speak, that the film is an arena where Twilight meets The Twilight Zone meets Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols. The director of Incubus, Leslie Stevens, creator of the recently cancelled Outer Limits television series, was seeking a way to make the low-budget black-and-white film distinctively eerie and to market it to the burgeoning art house cinema circuit. He settled on a clever strategy: Incubus’s dialogue would be in the constructed international auxiliary language, Esperanto. Asserting his newly found auteur status, Stevens would not allow the film to be dubbed into any single national language; it would thus always require subtitles. In this case, Esperanto was viewed not as a means of communicating across national borders and promoting universal brotherhood, but of preserving those boundaries, of maintaining an uncanny and succubus-like kernel of foreignness in language itself. [[{"fid":"1502","view_mode":"wysiwyg","fields":{"format":"wysiwyg"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"wysiwyg"}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-wysiwyg","data-delta":"1"}}]]Fig. 1. Incubus (1965), Esperanto scene.