ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the materiality of translingual migrants’ writing, which is a bridge to the archive-as-process. The archives are often stored in territories of the core rather than the periphery, but their accessibility has been limited in the past for geopolitical reasons. Processual archives and the semi-peripheral context can give an introduction to translingualism and philological issues. “The Golden Age” of philology in the nineteenth century has passed and will probably never come back. The new philology can encompass the study of translingualism in two ways. First, together with historical linguistics, it highlights multilingualism as a linguistic norm and standard, which is a good starting point for the discussion on translingualism, as well as for comparative literature generally. Second, archival research on the real history of philology as an academic discipline and a political practice of nationalization goes beyond the false self-image of the discipline toward a new philology and comparative literature.