Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-7-2026

Publication Title

Journal of Literary Multilingualism

Abstract

This article deals with translingualism, race thinking, and Pan-Americanism in Argentine polymath Xul Solar’s Los san signos. The purportedly autobiographic, mystical text is written in Neocriollo, an artificial creole that the author created as a lingua franca for the Americas. Based on visions that he claims to have received using the I Ching, Xul Solar elaborated his work during the 1920s, a period marked by transnational debate on the meaning of Pan-American politics in light of US imperialism and race thinking. Los san signos mobilizes the mystical union of self and Other as a trope for regional unity, metaphorized by the translingual sublimation of the linguistic differences between the languages of the Americas in the amalgamated Neocriollo. Xul Solar uses the term “Neocriollo” to refer both to his hybrid language and to its ethnically mixed speakers, who, he suggests, have overcome hierarchical race thinking through miscegenation in the same way that his first-person narrator has overcome ontological divisions through mysticism.

While scholars have criticized Xul Solar’s translingual Los san signos as elitist, less attention has been paid to the intersections of translingualism, race thinking, and Pan-Americanism in his avant-garde sublimation of boundaries. I will consider Xul’s translingual Los san signos as a South American intervention into Pan-American race thinking that leverages Latin Americanist constructions of linguistic and racial hybridity against US imperial discourses of Anglo-Saxon purity.

First Page

1

Last Page

32

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/2667324x-2026xx19

ISSN

2667-324X

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript (AM) version of this article. The final published article is available through the publisher at https://doi.org/10.1163/2667324x-2026xx19

Primo Type

Article

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