This chapter shows how part of Kerouac’s motivations for his literary experiments was to bring English closer to himself and at the same time to move it away from the monolingualism that dominated US literature and culture. He aimed to create a prose that in its syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms was open to foreignness, which many critics and scholars both then and now have taken for simply bad writing. Though French was his starting point, he wanted to bring American English closer to all languages. Correlatively, in his fiction he depicts peoples of a variety of ethnic and linguistic heritages. In On the Road, the road is Sal Paradise’s means to encounter these different populations and their languages, the place where they all encounter each other. In his other novels, Kerouac paints tenderly detailed pictures of the Franco-American population of Lowell, Massachusetts that he hailed from, as well as towns and cities in places such as France and North Africa. This chapter shows that a major impulse of his writing is to imagine a utopia of global cultural and convergence and to contribute to ushering it into existence.

The liberal international order of states has engendered a global order of transnational and supranational agents, institutions, and practices, generating a nascent global polity. This polity is animated by social purposes, including peace and security, economic growth, global health, and the rights and well-being of individuals. It also champions a distinctive diversity regime, centred on the moral primacy of the individual. Focusing on six components of the emerging global polity, the chapter describes both the institutional lineaments and the cultural core of the global polity-in-formation, including its distinctive diversity regime. Ethnic, religious, and other forms of cultural difference are legitimated, but only so long as they do not compromise the fundamental equality and autonomy of the persons who stand as global citizens. The global polity is also in fundamental tension with the liberal order, ultimately challenging basic principles of the nation state: sovereignty, citizenship rights, and national boundaries.