“Crammed With Tongues”: Cosmopolitan Creole in Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution

Abstract: Critical studies on contemporary multilingual poetry have examined the use of nonstandard English and mixed languages as subversive strategies that reclaim and legitimize linguistic plurality. However, Cathy Park Hong’s dystopian poetic narrative Dance Dance Revolution warns against viewing multilingualism as a fundamentally revolutionary tool without first interrogating the colonial conditions that necessitate it. This article analyzes “Desert Creole,” the hybrid language of the protagonist, the Guide, through the lens of what Rey Chow (2014) calls the “xenophone,” the postcolonial subject’s “foreign-sounding speech/tone,” in order to demonstrate that the diasporic Guide’s speech is an allegorical representation of the consequences of a globalized society that operates under the logic of colonialism. Rather than championing the use of non-standard Englishes and intermixed languages as radical expressions of transnational identity, which extant scholarship on this work has suggested, I argue that Hong’s speculative poetry complicates utopic visions of hybrid language as cosmopolitan commodity in order to confront the hegemonic systems that sanction language use.