Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue

by Yoko Tawada

ISBN: 9780349704197

Published: 2025-07-24

'Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own' The New Yorker on Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear Are you formed by your mother tongue? How might the world unfold if you stepped outside of its rhythms? In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the globally acclaimed Yoko Tawada reveals the poetics, politics and potential of existing outside one's mother tongue. From Senegalese writers discarding colonial-enforced French to the increasing use of loan words in her native Japanese, Tawada deconstructs the ways in which the world shapes and is shaped by languages: their hidden systems of power, their sweeping histories and, ultimately, the people who claim, reject, adapt or romanticise them. Exophony is an invitation to revel in the possibilities that emerge when we dare to seek beyond the familiar - and a sharp, incisive series of essays in which Tawada's erudite wit and multidimensional...