This dissertation examines how contemporary translingual writers navigate and expose the limitations of liberal democratic frameworks that promise justice through recognition, self-assertion, and critical openness. Focusing on works published between 2008 and 2023 by Israeli writers Shani Boianjiu, Omer Friedlander, and Ruby Namdar, and Mexican American poets Mónica de la Torre and Eduardo Corral, I trace how these authors engage with expectations that their language practices should perform specific kinds of cultural and political labor—resisting injustice, translating across difference, or modeling alternative forms of belonging. The dissertation argues that translingual writing serves as a privileged site for examining how liberal frameworks function in practice, particularly in contexts of ongoing structural violence: Israel/Palestine, anti-immigrant politics and structural racism in the United States, and weaponized accusations of antisemitism in US political discourse. Rather than celebrating or rejecting translingualism, these writers pause over the mechanisms through which they have been expected to perform justice, revealing how recognition, empathy, and testimony can become mechanisms for deferring material change rather than advancing it. Through close readings grounded in affect theory and attention to production and reception, I demonstrate three key operations. First, in English-language fiction by Israeli writers, recognition of Palestinian suffering becomes a deferral mechanism when acknowledgment gets funneled through affective hierarchies that elevate Jewish Israeli sorrow above Palestinian dispossession. Second, Mexican American translingual poetry chronicles how self-assertion encounters its limits as a path to justice, turning instead toward precarious reciprocal practices that redistribute interpretive labor between writers and readers. Third, Hebrew-language fiction published in the US demonstrates how translingual authority can be weaponized to manufacture uncertainty, guiding readers toward nationalist and patriarchal power while appearing to engage in good-faith dialogue. By attending to the affective infrastructures that organize how translingual writing circulates and becomes legible as political action, this work reveals the precise mechanisms by which frameworks meant to produce change instead preserve existing structures of inequality. By reading production and reception together, this dissertation demonstrates how contemporary translingual writers illuminate not only their own predicaments but also the contradictions embedded in the frameworks through which we imagine justice itself.
