Immigration and Exile Foreign-Language Press in the UK and in the US: Connected Histories of the 19th & 20th centuries

Résumé En

This volume reflects on the specificities of foreign-language periodicals published by immigrants and exiles in the US and in Britain in an era of mass mediatization (19th-21st centuries). Far from being a marginal phenomenon, foreign-language journalism represents thousands of titles and tackles central political, linguistic and literary issues which will be discussed in a collection of selected essays allowing a comparison between those two major English-speaking and historically-related countries. The book makes a case that this journalism is more varied and complex than is sometimes assumed andthat overall, too little attention has been borne to the language(s) in which it is produced. Joshua Fishman’s statement that ‘beloved language is not an abstraction’ (1999) reminds us that those publishing periodicals in Britain and the USA in a language other than English reflected debates and tensions over identities of ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson, 1991), but also shaped these. They thus constitute precious sources on ethnic communities – which the case studies on foreign-language press enterprises in the USA and Britain from the 19-21st centuries (in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Flemish, Polish, Greek, etc.) here fully bring home. Building up on the vast literature on the foreign-language press in the US and seeking to make up for the absence of a global study on the foreign-language press phenomenon in Britain, this volume offers a fresh perspective into this still marginalized phenomenon in media history by its "histoire croisée" approach.