Multilingualism and Racial (Re-)formation in the Contemporary U.S. Campus Novel

The Super Bowl is arguably America’s quintessential national event, attracting over a hundred million viewers from across demographic backgrounds. 2014’s Big Game, however, is remembered less for action on the field than for a multilingual Coca-Cola commercial coupling ‘America the Beautiful’ lyrics with a montage of Americans from diverse backgrounds. Former Republican Congressman Allen West afterward blogged: ‘If we cannot be proud enough as a country to sing “American [sic] the Beautiful” in English in a commercial during the Super Bowl, by a company as American as they come – doggone we are on the road to perdition’. Commentators responded by condemning nativism and hailing their immigrant families’ cultural and linguistic enrichment of the nation. The Super Bowl controversy epitomises the endurance of language politics in the U.S., and Benedict Anderson would have been unsurprised by the commercial’s inspiring such impassioned sentiment. In his landmark monograph Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Anderson described patriotic music’s power to engender ‘a special kind of contemporaneous community’.