ABSTRACT
This chapter works from the coordinates of contemporary Glasgow–specifically, Scottish-Asian writer Suhayl Saadi's Glasgow-set debut novel, Psychoraag (2004)–in order to think about how literature can register the language diversity which is at the same time an everyday fact of contemporary global modernity, and a challenge to conventions of literary language and form. Multilingualism, like any other language practice, is never immune from regressive politics of class, race, or gender; it may be exoticized, commodified, or institutionalized. In addition, the novel performs a more pyrotechnic multilingualism, incorporating not only Urdu lexis, but also fragments of multiple other languages, different font sizes and styles, fragments of Arabic script, capitalization, upside-down text, right-left reversal of English words, as well as images and fragments of maps. Psychoraag's Glasgow is, and has always been, a multilingual city, where the contemporary sounds of Glaswegian Scots, English, Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Swahili, and Pashto (60) are continuous with the ghostly polyphonic voices of the city's past.
