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CHAPTER 1

The Multilingualism of the Other

Politics, Counterpolitics, Anglophony, and Beyond

Violent Bequests

The Irish language and the Irish people were proscribed together. It was penal to teach and penal to learn the energetic dialect of our country. All of you recollect when it was a crime to speak it in the hedge schools, where we received the first rudiments of knowledge; and when the square bit of timber, called the score, suspended from the neck of each new scholar, gave intimation to the master, by a notch on its angles, when the stammering urchin relapsed into his mother tongue at home.¹

Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gĩkũyũ in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment—three to five strokes of the cane on the bare buttocks—or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witchhunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community.²

Although drawn from different periods and spaces, the scenes of learning above bear witness to violent and “humiliating” episodes of linguistic coercion. The first conjures up anglicization in Ireland during the 1790s while the second recalls the stiffening of British education policy in colonial Kenya after 1952.³ Taken chronologically, these two scenes portray language as cultural and later legal authority, a trajectory whose origins we can trace back to the long eighteenth century. Indeed it was during this century, in both the British Isles and North America, that a particular species of ethnolinguistic chauvinism organized around “proper” or “standard” linguistic behavior came to dominate anglophone cultural life. It was also during this century that the ideological groundwork was laid for making Standard English pedagogy into a constituent element of imperial rule, a process that Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (1989) chronicled nearly three decades ago.⁴ The eighteenth-century drive to standardization is a decisive chapter in anglophone history. It is one of the preconditions for the educational violence staged in the testimonies above. In this drive one finds an increasingly intrusive set of practices for eliminating certain forms of linguistic diversity, practices that have reverberated throughout anglophone cultural life ever since.

While Chapters 2 and 3 directly address the role of eighteenth-century standardization and translation theories as agents of linguistic homogeneity, in order to pave the way for that discussion this first chapter focuses more broadly on the relationship between linguistic identity and power in the period. I begin with these epigraphs because they are one possible endpoint of eighteenth-century linguistic thought. Specifically, they show normative systems of cultural and linguistic authority taking the extreme measure of adjudicating living human languages as “crimes” befitting “corporal punishment”—“a square bit of timber, called the score, suspended from the neck of each new scholar,” as in the first epigraph, or, “three to five strokes of the cane on the bare buttocks,” as the second has it. How are we to conceive of the cultural history that gives birth to this definition of “crime”? The starting point that I pursue here involves emphasizing the crucial eighteenth-century dialectic between the linguistically normative and nonnormative, conceptual immediacies that acquired fixed meanings over the course of the period.⁵ Among other things, these epigraphs show normative linguistic practices brutally harrying the nonnormative. In so doing they indirectly highlight multilingualism’s limited but provocative options for refusing its own eradication.

The first epigraph is taken from an 1827 speech delivered in Liverpool by an “Irish Catholic Clergyman” whose name appears in the record only as Reverend Lyons.⁶ In his bombastic speech, Lyons addresses an English Catholic organization as an invited guest, a native informant called on to quantify the tentacular reach of anglophony into Irish society. Delivered in Standard English, the speech attacks the “proscription” of “the Irish language and the Irish people” as it was practiced in Irish-run hedge schools before the establishment of the National School system in 1831. As his argument unfolds, Lyons challenges normalizing linguistic intrusions that are—in point of fact—the basic formal preconditions of his speech. After all, he was among the Irish-speaking students disciplined into anglophony by “the square bit of timber, called the score,” a wooden index of linguistic loyalty that shuttled news of subversive, nonanglophone behavior between the private space of the home and the semipublic space of the hedge school. The fact that this multilingual subject delivers his fierce criticisms of anglophone expansion as it interfaces with Irish culture and religion is interesting enough. More interesting still, however, is that speaking against anglophone cultural imperialism in Standard English and in England is a theoretical problem that Lyons manages in a proleptic way, a point I address later. I present Lyons’s words here and elsewhere in this book because his reflections invite scholars in the present to think carefully about multilingualism as a prerequisite for (and an enduring dynamic within) our own moment’s rapidly changing linguistic and literary practices.

The second epigraph is taken from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s essay “The Language of African Literature,” a masterstroke of postcolonial theory that was published in 1986 as one of the four parts of Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. As part of Ngũgĩ’s discussion of language’s role as a carrier of culture, his essay interrogates the destructiveness of anglophone schooling in late-colonial Kenya. The author skewers colonial linguistic intrusions with great energy, and rightly so. For him they produced the “colonial alienation” and “spiritual subjugation” that postcolonial writing must overcome.⁷ “In my view,” he writes, “language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner.”⁸ In addition to highlighting these metaphors of repression and confinement, I want to suggest that the colonial “politics of language” evoked by Ngũgĩ’s title and eviscerated in his text is the intellectual descendant of a more diffuse “monolingual politics of language” that takes shape in colonial as well as noncolonial spaces during the eighteenth century. This form of linguistic politics need not be legally ordained to have massive cultural ramifications.

To recap, both Lyons and Ngũgĩ attack the use of linguistic prohibition so as to “control a people’s culture” and thus “control their tools of self-definition in relation to others.”⁹ These authors’ twinned exasperation with these forms of control implies a “transtemporal” and transperipheral connection, one that embeds the cultural logics of Ireland in the 1790s, Liverpool in 1827, and Kenya in the 1950s into the cultural landscape of 2017 while also making space for the yawning gaps separating these unique historical episodes and geocultural spaces.¹⁰ Lyons and Ngũgĩ have both inherited a monolingual politics of language that developed during the eighteenth century. We too are the heirs of this monolingual politics of language in manifold ways, and we would do well to ask ourselves about the long cultural and historical developments required to place nonnormative linguistic identities like theirs under prohibition.

It is important to remember that linguistic situations like Lyons’s and Ngũgĩ’s are not outliers but instead common.¹¹ In the words of sociolinguist Rajend Mesthrie, a scholar who has catalogued British imperialism’s linguistic dimensions, “In territory after territory, from Wales to the Cape, India to Sri Lanka, a common practice in introducing English in schools was to silence the local languages.”¹² The verb “silence” in Mesthrie’s sentence is an obvious euphemism that masks more drastic practices.¹³ He alludes to but does not spell out these practices, stating simply that “the methods [of linguistic instruction] in territory after territory smacked of raw power.”¹⁴ Nor does Mesthrie discuss linguistic impositions in Britain, but it is safe to say that the dialectic of normative and nonnormative functioned similarly in eighteenth-century Britain’s constituent kingdoms and provinces, a phenomenon I chart in Chapter 4.¹⁵

Beyond highlighting the violence that has often accompanied linguistic intrusion, there is a better reason for starting with these two epigraphs. However coercive and dehumanizing, and whether by convention as in Lyons or imperial statute as in Ngũgĩ, the exercise of “raw power” on multilingual subjects at anglophony’s threshold has been the engine for startling modes of creative resistance. This is true in politics as well as in aesthetics.¹⁶ In the now long-standing political and aesthetic traditions that have emerged as responses to diverse linguistic intrusions—and which, it must be emphasized, are not the only way of responding to imposed languages—“education” often acts as a byword for linguistic proscriptions, proscriptions that diminish cultural variety by inculcating the “lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community” alongside but also as part of anglophone literacy and its itinerant versions of humanism.¹⁷ This rightfully cynical reading of “education” allows nonnormative linguistic subjects to anticipate, critique, manipulate, subvert, and challenge such intrusions—and often brilliantly. In other words, a politics of normative anglophone monolingualism has often naturally generated a counterpolitics of nonnormative multilingualism, a counterpolitics that is spearheaded by those under pressure to adapt their linguistic and community identities to inscrutable flows of capital and external forms of power.¹⁸ Just as we have inherited the monolingual politics of language that developed in conjunction with anglophony’s eighteenth-century expansion, so too are we heirs to exciting versions of linguistic counterpolitics, including those visible in Lyons and Ngũgĩ, both of whom choose autobiographical testimony to exorcise cultural violence. The stories told in this book address the mechanisms of linguistic intrusion. However, my primary goal is to describe forms of multiplicity, vitality, and creative productivity that have flourished in spite of linguistic intrusion from the eighteenth century to the present.¹⁹

Monolingualism as a Politics of Language

Up to this point, I have been using the terms “politics of language” and “counterpolitics of language” without defining them rigorously, which is a problem insofar as these terms can seem unsatisfyingly imprecise.²⁰ Like others who have considered the dialectic of normative and nonnormative language in culture, I submit here that one way we can start to access and fix the shifting meanings of the terms “politics of language” and “counterpolitics of language” is by way of Jacques Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other, a giant little book whose title has been reformulated as the governing metaphor of this chapter. For Derrida, as for Lyons and Ngũgĩ, colonial language politics are always monolingual in nature. “The monolingualism imposed by the other,” Derrida argues, “reduce[s] language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogenous.”²¹ In response, linguistic counterpolitics resists the “hegemony of the homogeneous” by featuring nonnormative multiplicities as a basic principle. Put another way, whereas a monolingual politics of language seeks to inculcate within varied linguistic subjects the law that “we [the civilized] only ever speak one language”—Standard English, for example—a multilingual counterpolitics of language spawns heterogeneity within the fantasy monolanguage itself.²²

“Monolingualism” in Derrida is a political construction. It is a discourse of control that is instituted through the purposeful imposition of normative language forms over a population that is perceived to be linguistically inferior, untethered in loyalties, and therefore threateningly mobile, as has regularly been the case in colonial and provincial situations. Following Derrida, Yasemin Yildiz has lucidly historicized the fetishized concepts of monolingualism and the “mother tongue” within the context of European nationalism.²³ Yildiz demonstrates that in Europe the long eighteenth century gave rise to a nation-based and “reified conception of language,” one that enabled the very “distinction between monolingualism and multilingualism” in the first place. The difference between monolingualism and multilingualism was not salient before this period, Yildiz argues. Relatedly, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio offers a detailed analysis of the eighteenth-century birth of “ethnolinguistic prejudice,” a way of thinking about language in which monolingualism as “modeled on the elite speech of the court and of the best authors” becomes “an organ of the political power of the nation and empire.”²⁴ In these authors, monolingualism is a contingent and historically situated method of centralizing cultural and political power. Under this regime, monolingualism buttresses and reproduces itself through sustained attempts to police or “imprison” the nonnormative and often multilingual linguistic behaviors of the other, to paraphrase Ngũgĩ.²⁵

For Derrida, monolingualism metaphorizes authority and “sovereignty” whereas nonnormative linguistic practices trouble both. Monolingualism is thus peddled as a form of linguistic identity toward which the colonized, subaltern, and multilingual are compelled to aspire, a form of identity that will presumably confer cultural capital, career advancement, and full humanity.²⁶ This fantasy vision of monolingualism is the very heart of the matter. The nonnormative linguistic subject is obliged through rhetoric, education, and “raw power” to see the monolingualism of the “master” as a terminus ad quem, a perpetually receding destination where—should they ever arrive—nonnormative linguistic subjects will attain normativity and thus be enfolded into the structures of cultural power. In this way, a politics of monolingualism becomes a tool of control. Monitoring, corralling, and attempting to eradicate nonnormative linguistic identities occurs whenever linguistic difference connotes danger, illegality, arrested development, or inassimilable alterity. In brief, the monolingualism that Lyons, Ngũgĩ, and so many others have faced is all at once political and nomothetic—“political” because it concerns the linguistic norms of the polis and “nomothetic” because it usurps the power to give names and form deliberate linguistic communities.

Derrida conceives of the politics of monolingualism in a way that productively resonates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose exploration of the “dialogic imagination” provides a capacious idea of multilingualism emphasizing the “peasant’s” obligation to move between diverse sociolinguistic registers, especially in dealings with “authority”: “An illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official-literate, ‘paper’ language).”²⁷ This passage encourages one to seek linguistic multiplicities where they do not initially disclose themselves. More generally, Bakhtin’s humanizing celebration of the “illiterate [but still multilingual] peasant” opens up new avenues for thinking normative linguistic power as it works to define nonnormative identities. The “illiterate peasant” is “multilingual” in his particular way, an unexpected qualifier, perhaps, but an instructive one. What I mean is that such a form of multilingualism allows the peasant to move from the linguistic registers of local life, family, and religion to the monolanguage of authority when the exigencies of subaltern life so demand. This is different from but comparable to the multilingualism displayed by cosmopolitan writers and translators of the eighteenth-century world republic of letters, people who transfer cultural material between different linguistic system like Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowth, Alexander Tytler, and others who are taken up in later chapters. Indeed, it is under the banner of a nonnormative multilingualism so construed that the “provincial” peasant can be brought together with the most highly educated translator. Monolingualism is, as in Derrida, a political construction. It is the simple idea that the great messy spectrum of human linguistic behavior can be singularized, standardized, and (forcibly) exported to others.

For me, the value of thinking with this binary of normative monolingualism and nonnormative multilingualism is that it brings together seemingly disparate ways of being in language. To be clear, the term “multilingual” as I will use it hereafter gathers in its fold subjects whose multilingualism is as commonly construed: an interlingual ability to communicate in different language systems, like “English” or “French” for example. The term also includes intralingual multilinguals, that is, subjects who choose or are compelled to code switch between differently marked forms of a particular linguistic system (in this case anglophony) irrespective of whether or not they are capable of using another linguistic system like French. The reason I have chosen to use these terms in this novel way is that, during the eighteenth century, these two figures—the multilingual cosmopolitan and the nonnormative, local “peasant”—both came into contact with the politics of anglophone monolingualism’s rapid and invasive spread. For me, this is the multilingualism of the other—whether as the interlingual ability to use different linguistic systems or as the intralingual obligation and ability to move from one’s local linguistic identity to “the official-literate, ‘paper’ language.” Both of these abilities amount to a counterpolitics of language that productively troubles those fantasies of linguistic homogeneity that have had a narrowing influence on anglophone culture.

In addition, the definitions of monolingualism and multilingualism that I am deriving here are supple in the way they bring together colonial and provincial space. For example, monolingualism has had inestimable implications for rural and nonmetropolitan spaces of England. These spaces cannot rightly be construed as subject to colonization, at least not insofar as we currently define colonization, but nonetheless, the monolingual politics of Standard English has had important cultural effects in these spaces. Katie Wales makes a related point in her book Northern English: A Cultural and Social History (2006). Wales points out that “there has also been a strong bias in histories of English towards both a metropolitan bias, and a southern one: what I shall term metrocentrism and austrocentrism respectively.”²⁸ With these terms metrocentrism and austrocentrism, Wales registers the geographical origins of the normative vision of Standard English around which the politics of monolingualism grew. While we can trouble this geographical origin by engaging with works staging the multilingualism of the other as well as a counterpolitics of multilingualism in metropolitan and “austral” parts of Britain—works such as Samuel Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language (1803), for example, which I take up in a later chapter—Wales’s point is instructive. The incursion of linguistic normativity emanating from the court, bar, and universities of metropolitan southern England had a particular impact on northern England, and this matters immensely during a period when northern England was experiencing rapid (though uneven) economic and demographic growth.

One way of summarizing what I have been arguing so far is to reiterate that a politics of monolingualism chases after linguistic difference wherever it resides. This is a metaphor, of course, but one that has literal manifestations in the historical archive. What follows in the next section is an investigation of the politics of monolingualism as it appears in a particularly naked form: fugitive advertising, a curious genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing in which nonnormative subjects are literally on the run. I choose fugitive advertising rather than grammars, dictionaries, elocution texts, style guides, and translation manuals at this early moment of my argument because the politics of monolingualism is unconcealed and instructive in these ephemeral documents. In addition, the hot pursuits that these ads index can serve as so many symbols for the progressive policing of linguistic diversity that a politics of monolingualism seeks. In addition to a politics of monolingualism, equally evident in these ads is the multilingualism of the other, by which I mean the diversely formed bodies and identities of nonnormative linguistic subjects, people like Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid, people whose bobs, feints, and flights metaphorize nonnormative models of being resistant, being in language, and being in the world. That a politics of monolingualism became a structural principle of anglophone culture during the eighteenth century—and through a variety of written forms including grammars, dictionaries, elocution texts, style guides, and translation manuals, but also through metalinguistic writing in commonplace organs like newspapers—is evident. And yet, the other’s multilingualism—however infelicitous the phrase and however imaginary the “other”—is often underinvestigated.

Sound Opinions: Of Language and the Body

Some instinct induced me to lay my hand upon a newspaper….

I threw a languid glance at the first column that presented itself. The first words which I read, began with the offer of a reward of three hundred guineas for the apprehension of a convict under sentence of death, who had escaped from Newgate prison in Dublin. Good heaven! How every fibre of my frame tingled when I proceeded to read that the name of the criminal was Francis Carwin!

The description of the person and address were minute. His stature, hair, complexion, the extraordinary position and arrangement of his features, his awkward and disproportionate form, his gesture and gait, corresponded perfectly with those of our mysterious visitant. He had been found guilty in two indictments. One for the murder of the Lady Jane Conway, and the other for a robbery committed on the person of the honorable Mr. Ludloe.²⁹

The eighteenth century was a period when newspapers carried abundant advertisements for fugitive apprentices, servants, slaves, soldiers, and suspected criminals.³⁰ Anglophone papers disseminated thousands of notices over the course of the century in pages where fugitives were flanked by ads for theatricals, tutors, books, commercial products, and many other commodities.³¹ In fact, as Marcus Wood and others have noted, British fugitive ads blazed discursive trails for the nineteenth-century explosion of fugitive slave notices in North America, a genre of writing that became financially critical to the business model of some newspapers, including Benjamin Franklin’s.³² These ads reveal some of the linguistic, racial, gendered, and bodily intersectionalities that constituted public identity for enslaved, indentured, and free people who appeared as outlaws in papers from Britain to North America, from the Caribbean to South Asia.³³ Beyond being the transatlantic archive of the economic entanglement between slavery and the press, fugitive ads should be seen as informative textual products common to anglophone communities around the globe. Irrespective of place, anglophone communities used fugitive ads to invent and propagate ideas of human difference as they related to embodied social interaction. In many cases the politics of monolingualism is in the foreground while the creative productivity of multilingual lives lurks beneath the surface.

If we view fugitive advertising as an important genre—and generator—of descriptive writing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and across the diverse spaces of the anglophone world, as I believe we should, then metalinguistic descriptions at work in these ads enable analytical insights about the emergent politics of monolingualism that I have been describing. For one, we can acknowledge that linguistic practices were viewed as an aspect of embodiment, an aspect that the ads’ metalinguistic writing must find ways to represent or “capture.” This is important because—in spite of the productive attention that has been given to identity as a visual interpretive event—critics have yet to think through what spoken language means in conjunction with identity schemas based on visualizing the body.³⁴ More generally, appreciating the copresence of visual and auditory descriptors in these ads allows us to see that only by virtue of the patterned interweaving of all these descriptive vocabularies do fugitive identities take shape in text. This is not to say that linguistic qualifications or descriptions are present in all fugitive ads; they are not.³⁵ Rather, I merely mean to suggest that a subsection of these ads gives us the opportunity to eavesdrop on the linguistic dimensions of public identity. When we seize this opportunity, we come into contact with a wide variety of subjects, all of whom are ordered with respect to one another and with respect to a politics of anglophone monolingualism in complex ways.

Furthermore, it is clear that eighteenth-century fugitive ads register the long development of our own enmeshed and misrepresentative racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, ability, and class (often occupational) categories. These ads refer regularly to these categories, just as they often luridly catalogue visible bodily differences and disabilities. I stress the linguistic components of these ads not because I want to deemphasize more familiar critical dimensions for analyzing the hierarchies of social reality, but rather because I want to build on the work others have done by thinking through linguistic embodiment as it reinforces and in some cases stands in for these other dimensions of public identity. Whereas features of identity like race are grafted onto bodies via an interpretive oscillation between visible somatic features and the discursive environment, an individual’s linguistic identity represents the interaction of that same discursive environment with the more ephemeral event of speaking, an event over which the speaker might have a certain control.³⁶ To reiterate, one theoretical opportunity that I see in these ads is the opportunity to think about linguistic identity in relation to other vectors of interpersonal difference, and more generally, to think about power and identity with and beyond the categories of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sex.

Consider the following descriptive cues as they intersect with legal and moral prejudgments in a London ad announcing a hefty bounty placed on the head of Elizabeth Baker, a Bristol “spinster” suspected of abetting the forced elopement of a wealthy heiress “for the lucre thereof.” In this description of Baker, her linguistic profile is a vital clue. We see its significance in the ad’s narration of Baker: “The said Elizabeth Baker is about 22 years old, stout limbed, handsome face, and fresh colour, is rather tall, dark eyes, and has a great deal of the Somersetshire dialect in her speech.”³⁷ Motivated reward seekers would have to keep their ears to the ground for a woman speaking in nonnormative West Country sounds.³⁸ “Somersetshire dialect” works here in tandem with the term “spinster” in order to cast a gendered suspicion on the suspect, a potentially unmarried woman who, according to the allegations, helped dupe another woman into abduction and marriage.³⁹ The ad for Baker creates a sprawling mesh of mutually reinforcing censures, including, most obviously, her criminal designs on “lucre.” With lucre in mind, it is worth noting that the ad for Baker, like most others in the period, incentivizes the reader’s careful internalization of this mesh with the promise of financial windfall, “100 guineas” in Baker’s case. A reader would be paid to properly envision, intone, and identify outlaws narrated in the paper.

Reaping the monetary rewards of reading fugitive ads like the one for Baker required readers to be familiar with anglophone life as it was structured around multiple, intersecting dimensions of embodied and vocalized difference. In British papers, language specifications register cultural, educational, and class divisions between province and capital, and it is around these core divisions that other aspects of identity tend to orbit. British ads also stress the linguistic abnormality and insularity of people from English provinces like Baker’s native Somerset. Implicit in the logic is the notion that suspects like Baker lack normative linguistic propriety to the same degree that they lack qualities that would permit them to be part of the imagined extension of a national community. In this vein, a 1771 advertisement in the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser announces a search for John Anderson, a sixteen-year-old apprentice accused of unlawfully absconding from his shipmaster, Captain Robert Elder, a seemingly reputable factor of British maritime trade. Anderson, the ad reveals, “speaks thick and mumbling, and has something of the Yorkshire dialect.”⁴⁰ This linguistic judgment directly follows the public declaration of the man’s deserter status. The “mumbling” fugitive’s linguistic deficiencies dovetail with his failures as a sailor, and vice versa. Caught in a related but different state of linguistic exception, Derby jail escapee Anne Williamson “talks in the Yorkshire Dialect and belongs to a notorious Gang of Gamblers, her Father, Mother, and another, being now in Leicester Gaol in order to take their Trial at the next Assizes, for stealing Great Coats at Melton Fair.”⁴¹ Williamson appears in this ad as a member of a criminal family existing well beyond the linguistic, bodily, and legal ideals of normative society, a family who resembles an early modern canting crew rather than the fundamental social unit of a society cinched together by a standard language propagated by the literate mother’s tongue.⁴²

Under a politics of monolingualism, disciplinary coercion is not just thinkable but practicable, especially so on bodies that are not fully (and perhaps never fully) enumerated as human owing to their precarious apprenticeships to the language being enforced and the other norms of identity that accompany standard language. At issue in the question of a monolingual politics of language versus a multilingual counterpolitics of language is the humanity of those who maintain ties to unauthorized or nonprestigious linguistic systems. Even in the earlier epigraphs by Lyons and Ngũgĩ, vocabularies of animality eclipse those of humanity as they pertain to multilingualism, a fact that the larger context of these two pieces bears out more fully. Both figures allude to being perceived and treated as multilingual, other, and even animal. In Lyons, the notched “score” is suspended from the “stammering urchin’s” neck to keep a damning tally of the speaking animal’s uncanny linguistic crimes. In Ngũgĩ, a metal plate reading “I AM A DONKEY” publicly proclaims the bestialization of its wearer to anyone who can read English.

The definition of the human is similarly at issue in advertisements that use a suspect’s linguistic embodiment in conjunction with explicitly ableist appraisals of physical structure, as though bodily and linguistic irregularities prefigure legal transgressions. When apprentice Thomas Norris escaped from his Battersea master in May 1747, the ad announcing the ten-shilling reward for his capture described him like this: “He is about Twenty Years of Age, near five Feet six Inches high, full fac’d, his Knees bending inwards, born at Sainsbury, talks the West-Country Dialect.”⁴³ The diagnosis, “knees bending inwards,” tries to characterize Norris’s exceptional body. The description then moves on to his place of birth and linguistic distinctiveness. The concatenation of these details invites the reading that they are correlative.

Fugitive ads show that central to the eighteenth-century’s emergent monolingual politics of language are the processes by which normative linguistic impositions made other linguistic identities into evidence of a speaker’s uncorrectable infrahumanity. After all, an infrahuman is capable of neither politics nor art. Another way of stating the principal drama of the last section’s two epigraphs—as well as fugitive ads—is that Lyons and Ngũgĩ are forced by a monolingual politics of language into that liminal space between human and animal. They must make the case, through Standard English—and only Standard English—for their humanity as multilingual subjects. This is predictable. For not only is there a long human tendency of relying on the shibboleths of others to determine who is a full-fledged member of one’s linguistic and cultural confraternity, there is an equally robust anglophone tradition of demanding that subjects prove their humanity in and through Standard English lest they be classified instead as animals, as in racializing discourse, or as commodities, as in the case of the slave trade.

The depiction of fugitive bank clerk John Carwardine’s linguistic embodiment offers a more pointed example. Not only does the ad inscribe a British provincial-metropolitan binary into the understanding of Carwardine, it reads the suspected embezzler’s delinquent dialect as indicative of a more general pattern of bodily deviance. Carwardine stands “five feet nine inches high, or thereabouts, very thin made, fair complexion, wide mouth, turned-up-nose, sickly look … two small red lumps near his right ear … the muscles of his face work very much when spoken to by a stranger; shews his upper teeth; which are large and yellow, and speaks the Herefordshire dialect.”⁴⁴ The distinctive mouth, teeth, and facial muscles—all elemental organs in the production of speech—seem to explain the suspect’s Herefordshire accent, which appears deficient through its disabling adjacency to his nonnormative body. Intensifying this effect, Carwardine, the ad claims, evinces still other elements of a singular physical presence: a “head leaning considerably to the left shoulder” and an asymmetrical gait that causes him to “swing his right arm a good deal.” Carwardine’s embodiment, Herefordshire linguistic habits, and legal transgressions reinforce and implicate one another, even to the point that they resist parsing. The simultaneous manifestation of crime, body, and language restricts Carwardine’s humanity to an insidious degree. His language practices are depicted as immature, badly developed, hyperlocal, or “rustic,” as the period’s literature would increasingly term it.⁴⁵ On the great chain of being, Carwardine occupies a lower rung by virtue of his linguistic embodiment.

Similar interest in the linguistic qualifications of humanity appears in ads that take a body and insist on its “dark” or “black” complexion, an overdetermined symbol in the period of race-based slavery’s greatest expansion. An accentuated complexion appears as the visible sign of criminality. Frequently, linguistic idiosyncrasy is the audible analogue to remarkable skin. This is one way of reading the ad for a woman going by the pseudonyms “Mary Webb, Clarke, Gardner, &c.” She was held for fraudulent merchandising in 1778 and described in the press as possessing both the “West Country Dialect” and “a black complexion.”⁴⁶ A dialect speaker appeared on the front page of a Scottish newspaper in 1789. His name was James Sloveright, a native of Angus, Scotland, “a thick man of black complexion,” an escapee from Perth Prison, a speaker of the “East [Scotland] country dialect.”⁴⁷ “William Lownds or Lowins,” who was accused of robbing a mail truck in 1790, was described as having “a dark complexion.”⁴⁸ It is tempting to see these kinds of examples as a pattern: white, dialect-speaking British criminals are linked via color to disavowed black bodies, bodies that were excluded from the European ethical concept of humanity, bodies on which were elaborated racist antimonies of good and evil. I entertain this interpretation but do not insist on it: the archive is too big and the patterns too tenuous to draw conclusions from the language used to characterize complexion. However, I do want to insist on the fact that in the rhetoric of the four cases above, a remarkable linguistic identity reinforces a remarkable complexion as well as a certain slippage of racializing discourse. So too, a marked complexion encourages the presumption of a strange linguistic identity.

The ad for “William Lownds or Lowins” further maligns the suspect by claiming that he “has been in Ireland lately, and has a little of that Dialect.”⁴⁹ Here the fugitive’s language appears corrupted by multilingual exposure to other linguistic and cultural environments. His tainted language speaks to the corruptibility of his national loyalties in the same way that his visibly “dark” complexion throws his character into a space of typological ambiguity. The linguistic admixtures ascribed to “Lownds or Lowins” capture another important way ads depict linguistic identity. Namely, many ads describe their suspects as evincing not arrested or deficient sublingualism but instead slippery and evasive multilingualism, which, depending on the prestige of the language, was viewed as a nascent “crime” in late eighteenth-century discourse. “Lownds or Lowins” is presented in this way. So too is John Cameron, “a Native of Fort-William, in North Britain [Scotland],” who was wanted in 1793 for “piratically and feloniously serving on board a French Privateer.”⁵⁰ Cameron’s ability to shift between different linguistic contexts was damning. As the ad reports, he speaks “French and English, with a little Scotch Dialect,” a set of skills that are called on to explain his “piratical” activities. In addition to fears of deficiency, metalinguistic descriptions register anxieties about how language could be imitated, dissimulated, multiplied, and counterfeited so as to obscure a speaker’s origins and loyalties.⁵¹

In North American, Caribbean, and South Asian contexts, we find many more fugitive ads in which race and multilingualism are central to descriptions of linguistic embodiment. More often than not, these ads imply that nonwhite racial identities carry with them the threat of linguistic subversion made evident by sonic traces of experience in different linguistic settings. In fact, at the intersection of nonwhite racial and linguistic identities, one regularly finds the specter of linguistic superabundance. In 1816, for example, the following apprehensive ad appeared in the North Carolina Minerva and Raleigh Advertiser: “TEN DOLLARS REWARD—Ran or absented himself from the subscriber, his black man Tom, well known in this place. He is artful and may procure or forge a pass as he can write—he is about 22 years old, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches high, of slim make and thin visage, an African by birth; speaks badly: from his appearance and dialect might be taken by some for a French negro.”⁵² “Artful” and “African by birth,” “Tom” speaks English, not in “dialect” per se, but “badly,” as though his English is erected over the shifting foundations of antecedent grammatical and phonological structures trained into the brain.⁵³ Whether or not he speaks French is unclear but implied, as the advertiser frets that “Tom” might be confused for a slave who does. Knowing what we do about transatlantic subjects like “Tom,” it is probable that French and English were acquired later in life and via exigency, perhaps as his second and third languages, but more likely as his third and fourth, or perhaps fourth and fifth. Complementing his linguistic plenitude is Tom’s subversive ability to write, a skill that could enable him to compose the documents authorizing his own free passage. Whereas today “Tom’s” description bespeaks the tortured loss of African languages in the Americas, to literate slave owners in the period, “Tom s” linguistic embodiment would have been threatening precisely to the degree that it was unfixed and mobile.

Others have written prolifically about the complexities of fugitive slave advertising in America.⁵⁴ Rather than repeat what has been said, it is worth gesturing toward the convergences and divergences of race and multilingual embodiment as they crop up in other anglophone spaces. It was not only slaves in America and the Caribbean who embodied and intoned threatening traces of interwoven racial and linguistic differences. A similarly anxious illustration of linguistic plenitude was published twenty-six years earlier in Calcutta, where in 1790 a newspaper announced the pursuit of “A BLACK MALABAR SLAVE BOY” who spoke English and “good French” (and likely several other languages).⁵⁵ The “thin” body, “very dark” skin color, and heterogeneous linguistic practices of this boy unite to form a visible and audible gestalt. As in the ad for “Tom,” the multilingualism of the “BLACK MALABAR SLAVE BOY” threatens his pursuer in a palpable way, most obviously because the ability to communicate with diverse parties facilitates the continuation of an escaped slave’s liberty.

As previously mentioned, the ad for “Tom” notes the risk of “Tom’s” language skills allowing him to pass as a “French Negro.” It treats “Tom’s” multilingualism as evidence of latent rebelliousness. The ad for the “BLACK MALABAR SLAVE BOY” does the same thing, but it also has an additional effect. It concedes that a South Asian slave’s multilingualism is in fact a great financial boon to its owner, because value inhered in the plural language skills of these slaves. Because owners would have used multilingual South Asian slaves as scribes, translators, procurers, and fixers, to name just a few roles, a slave’s flight represented a capital loss of several forms. This is more obvious still in an advertisement alerting the public to the search for “a Little Slave Boy about twelve years old [who] can speak, read, and write English very well.”⁵⁶ Remarkable for his youth, literacy, and multilingualism, the slave’s owner laments his loss in a speciously caring way. We can attribute this affect to the fact that the initial investment in the boy had likely not yet been recouped. Put another way, the longer the slave had stayed in subjection, the longer his language skills would have worked for his master, thereby amortizing the slave’s cost with every passing day. The master seeks the boy among the servants of other Europeans in South Asia. As he writes, “Any Gentleman discovering such a person amongst his servants, and [who] will give intelligence to the Printer it shall be thankfully received.” A crasser reference to the value of multilingualism and literacy among escaped South Asian slaves can be found in an ad for a “slave Boy aged twenty Years, or thereabouts … tall and slender … and mark’d with the small Pox.”⁵⁷ Here the “Mistress” from whom the “pretty white” slave escaped tells readers, “It is requested that no one after the publication of this will Employ him, as a Writer, or in any other capacity.” Be on the lookout for these nimble practitioners of linguistic plenitude, such ads enjoin. Multilingual escapees like these are capable of securing their own safety. Moreover, if proper attention is not given to their remarkable bodies, these thieves who have stolen valuable linguistic skills might get away.⁵⁸

The final fugitive ad I will mention in this section also comes from South Asia. It captures the dynamics of multilingual linguistic embodiment I have been tracing up to now. Like so many other ads, this one shows that, across the expanding anglophone world, linguistic embodiment was a way to communicate identity in text. Here then is the ad for another one of the legions of victims of forced labor, incidentally, another victim renamed “Tom” by his European master: “ELOPED on Monday last, A SLAVE BOY, about fourteen years old, fallow complexion, broad lips, very knock kneed, walks in a lounging manner, hair behind long and bushey, had on when he eloped the dress of a Kistmutgar, speaks good English, has rather an effeminate voice, went by the name of Tom, it is suspected that he has Stolen many things. Whoever will give information, so that he may be apprehended to Mr. PURKIS, at No. 51, Cossitollah, shall be handsomely rewarded, if required.”⁵⁹ From a wide and well-known avenue of British Calcutta, Mr. Purkis advertises in order to search for the young slave who had duped him. “Fourteen years old, fallow complexion, broad lips, very knock kneed, walks in a lounging manner, hair behind long and bushey.” These visual clues culminate in a reference to the unmistakable dress of a Khidmutgar, a servant charged with serving master Purkis his meals.⁶⁰ From there, the reader departs the domain of the visible for that of the auditory—“speaks good English, has rather an effeminate voice, went by the name of Tom.” Image and sound are conjoined, as are complexion and voice, embodiment and language, conversational interaction and, perhaps, desire. The visual image of a physically exceptional boy redoubles the intoned sounds of an “effeminate” slave speaking English, likely one language among several that “Tom” could speak. Purkis’s textualization of the fugitive “Tom” creates a character, one subjected to the politics of Monolingualism that underwrites all the ads I have described so far.

Having shown some of the ways language and body intersect in fugitive advertising, my argument now moves toward investigating language, embodiment, and aesthetics. Even while eighteenth- and nineteenth-century multilingual subjects are to some degree hobbled by their attempts to be included in polities organized around Standard English monolingualism, these multilingual subjects are also uniquely able to pursue aesthetic practices in newly multiple ways. Writers committed to forging literature with an aesthetics of linguistic difference are able to subvert monolingualism by putting the plenitude of their multiplicity on display. It is the basic premise of my argument regarding monolingualism, multilingualism, and alterity that normative linguistic impositions have often (and falsely) reconstituted the multilingualism of the other as an incoherent babble of mistakes, threats, subversions, and disloyalties; this process has had incalculable consequences. When monolingualism becomes a powerful political force in Britain after the mid-eighteenth century, and in U.S. America during the first decades of the nineteenth century, it corrals the multilingualism of all others by carving out small, contained, and falsely compensatory spaces for linguistic multiplicity.⁶¹ Often and importantly, these are aesthetic spaces, as I will show, and often and importantly again these are aesthetic spaces of comedy and farce, or criminality and villainy. In this way normative language practices become the precondition for community belonging as well as the obligatory framing mechanism for the contained staging of nonnormative languages as objects of aesthetic contemplation.⁶²

For subjects like Lyons and Ngũgĩ who experienced firsthand the ramifications of the politics of monolingualism that treated their multilingualism as a dangerous and dehumanizing signifier, the effects are indelible. At worst, the silencing of voices this politics demands results in linguicide. At best, attempts to silence language become the engine for the formation of a counterpolitics of multilingualism, a counterpolitics that holds on to and generates in suppressed counterlanguages even as those languages are maligned, attacked, and damaged. Eighteenth-century multilinguals in the British Isles and anglicizing spaces beyond the seas faced the same stark linguistico-political dilemma: either submit to the aesthetic appropriation, ghettoization, and slow death of local languages, or generate forms, genres, and aesthetic tactics for preserving them, however experimental. It happens that this paradigm links the eighteenth century to the present in ways that exceed political and aesthetic questions. It is impossible to ignore, for example, that ours is an era of unprecedented language death. This is a cultural catastrophe that no remediated politics of language will be able to solve. However, against the gloom of language loss, it must be said that linguistic multiplicity is still obviously and thankfully alive, which everyone should celebrate. This is true in spaces all over the globe just as it is true in contemporary anglophone aesthetic practice, the roots of which grow out of the long eighteenth century.

Anglophony’s Fringe: The Multilingualism of Phillis Wheatley and Robert Burns

Even in Scotland, the provincial dialect which Ramsay and he [Burns] have used is now read with a difficulty which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader: in England it cannot be read at all, without such constant reference to a glossary as nearly to destroy that pleasure.⁶³

Tracking anglophone linguistic multiplicity in ephemeral forms like fugitive advertising demonstrates its visibility in eighteenth-century culture. Similarly, tracing linguistic multiplicity opens up texts, authors, and poets in vibrant new ways. Furthermore, attending to linguistic multiplicity can provide students in the globalizing present with familiar dynamics from the cultural past. Consider, for example, the well-known case of Robert Burns. It is fascinating to examine with contemporary students the role of language difference in eighteenth-century aesthetic evaluation. Students approach with curiosity the fact that in early reviews, Henry MacKenzie and Tobias Smollett both question Burns’s use of Scots even while endorsing his poetic “genius.” MacKenzie writes, as above, that Scots is read by literate anglophones “with great difficulty” while Smollett, for his part, asserts, “It is to be regretted, that the Scottish dialect, in which these poems are written, must obscure the native beauties with which they appear to abound … render[ing] the sense often unintelligible to an English reader.”⁶⁴ In both MacKenzie and Smollett, Burns’s language is figured as a scrim that “obscures” rather than reveals “native beauties” for Standard English readers. But poetic “beauties” are still assumed to exist somewhere behind the unfamiliar linguistic forms. This is a generous assumption, an assumption that was perhaps borne out of Scottish solidarity for a native son. It is an assumption that clashes dramatically with those made in the reception history of Phillis Wheatley, Burns’s contemporary, a woman whose entire poetic career was organized around proving herself to be a capable user of Standard English.⁶⁵

Burns’s meteoric career can be explained in now-outmoded terms by citing the “heaven-taught Plowman’s” transcendental genius for capturing the spirit of his people, although non-Scottish students who are unfamiliar with Scots and who are struggling to read Burns’s actual language might not necessarily feel the weight of this genius. In a different vein, Burns’s canonicity can be explained as part of a much longer tradition of Scots-language writing, a tradition that happened to be experiencing its own cultural renaissance when Burns first brought Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect into the world in 1786. In this explanation, Burns’s status as contemporary icon of Scottishness derives from his ability to gather the linguistic and cultural practices of vernacular tradition—the ballad, for example—and then project those practices into the future as a prophylactic against anglophone encroachments. Students might digest this more easily, although the explanation implicitly places “Scots” and “English” writing in separate and noninteractive lineages.

Another way to see and teach Burns’s career, which many scholars have touched on, involves situating the poet’s work within the imperial linguistic dynamics of his era, an era in which the Scots world and the anglophone world intermingled at various levels. The geographic itinerary traced by the publication locations of the first three editions of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect—Kilmarnock, Scotland (1786); Edinburgh, Scotland (1787); London, England (1787)—speaks to the hierarchically organized linguistic and cultural matrix within which Burns’s reception occurred. Extending these observations, one might account for his past and present popularity, especially as that popularity is affixed to stock images of Scottish national identity, by noting that Burns was keenly confluent with the linguistico-cultural pressures of his period. He knew what it meant to pitch and sell his particular brand of Scots literature in Kilmarnock, Edinburgh, and London. His dedications and expanded glossaries in these various editions show this clearly.⁶⁶ As a multilingual writer whose prefaces and poems are themselves multilingual, Burns was attuned to the promise and limitations of cultural interest in linguistic difference—it helped too that his race and gender were unproblematic for readers of the period. Still, his poetry makes linguistic difference into an aesthetic object as well as a framework for dissent against existing aesthetic criteria. In a period of tremendous linguistico-cultural ferment, Burns gave readers what some were seeking: ethnolinguistic performance in which a Scots counterpolitics of language was embedded.⁶⁷

The specific form of Burns’s counterpolitics of multilingualism is thrown into relief when compared to Phillis Wheatley’s. Indeed, it is under the banner of anglophone multiplicity that figures like Burns and Wheatley can come together most felicitously. Both are poets, but more specifically, both are also multilingual anglophone poets. One need only rehearse well-known facts a bit differently to stress the importance of this multilingual dimension to Wheatley’s life. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reports, Phillis Wheatley was born somewhere along the banks of the Gambia River, exact place and date unknown.⁶⁸ She was forcibly brought to North America in 1761 on the slave ship Phillis, a boat whose name would soon become her own.⁶⁹ She was purchased by a well-to-do Boston family called the Wheatleys, a family whose name would soon become her own. Based on the invasive observation that she had adult front teeth at the moment she was sold, it is believed that she was roughly seven or eight years old, an age when one’s language skills are already well formed. Appraising her intellectual formation at her moment of sale, scholar John Shields speculates, “At this age she had doubtless already been influenced by a syncretistic amalgam of animism, hierophantic solar worship, and Islam practised in that region of the Gambia at the time of her birth.” Unfortunately he says nothing about her linguistic biography—but of course he can say very little, for nothing is recorded.⁷⁰ The child who was to be renamed “Phillis Wheatley” certainly spoke and thought in language when she arrived in Boston. Perhaps she spoke and thought in several.

Though these linguistic details are unknown, the determining fact in Wheatley’s life and subsequent career was that she was purchased by a family whose language and worldview would soon reformulate her existence entirely. The Wheatleys’ goal was to provide a proper religious education, and, for Phillis, the initial means to this proper religious education was Standard English. Against all trends of this barbarous period in transatlantic history, then, Phillis Wheatley was taught by this family to read Standard English and probably by an outside tutor to read Latin during her time as an unpaid servant in her owner’s house. Indeed, John Wheatley’s brief summary of Phillis Wheatley’s education triumphantly claims that, “without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.”⁷¹ Like Peros, who became “sensible” and “judicious” once in anglophony, Phillis Wheatley’s earlier language or languages must go unmentioned. Phillis Wheatley’s having “attained” English obviates their being mentioned. However, it does not mean that there was not suspicion surrounding her abilities in English. This is one reason why an attestation signed by eighteen of “the most respectable Characters in Boston” precedes her volume with the words, “We whose names are underwritten, do assure the World that the POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”⁷² Lest someone still suspect this multilingual subject of being incapable of writing anglophone poems of such a high caliber, the publisher also sees fit to note at the bottom of the attestation, “The original Attestation, signed by the above Gentleman, may be seen by applying to Archibald Bell, Bookseller, No. 8, Aldgate-Street.”⁷³

For me, it is crucial to reread these tantalizing biographical and paratextual details in order to emphasize that Wheatley’s education was primarily organized around mastering Standard English—“to which she was an utter stranger before”—as a conduit to biblical and classical knowledge. As Vincent Carretta notes, “The education that Phillis Wheatley received from Susanna and/or Mary Wheatley would have been very impressive for a white man of high social standing at the time.”⁷⁴ He also speculates that Phillis’s transgressive educational achievements might have been partially a result of John and Susanna Wheatley’s perverse desire to experiment with the education of an African-born woman: “Phillis Wheatley’s writings demonstrate that she was granted an education that went well beyond what was needed in order to be catechized on Christianity…. The Wheatleys offered her an extraordinary opportunity to develop her talents and interests. They may have done so as a kind of social experiment to discover what effect education might have on an African.”⁷⁵ As Carretta has it, this education represents an unusual contravention of racial, class, and social categories organized around educational and especially literate attainments. Whether her education was the product of a strange experiment or simply the Wheatleys’ avowedly Christian commitment to a form of literate anglophone religiosity that was spawned in the wake of the First Great Awakening, Wheatley’s natural aptitude and anglophone education enabled transformations in her subjectivity, as all linguistic education must. There is another wrinkle to recollect. The education the Wheatleys gave her was not her first. Phillis Wheatley’s natural aptitudes might have been complimented by her once and perhaps still multilingual mind. Her transatlantic transit meant that she was the kind of person forced to think about linguistic protocol, translation, and especially survival outside of and before her anglophone education. These earlier experiences would have informed the poetic projects she later undertook.

Wheatley is now widely known and taught as the first African American woman to publish an anglophone book in Britain, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). This quality of being “first” coupled with the importance of the transatlantic slave trade to eighteenth-century anglophone culture frequently means that the brief poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” one of the thirty-nine poems included in her first volume, is Wheatley’s most regularly taught and anthologized work. The assumed exemplarity of this poem derives from the fact that it speaks generally to the situation of enslaved transatlantic subjects as well as to Wheatley’s poetic disposition, which is frequently devotional, and not without irony:

‘TWAS mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.⁷⁶

The first four lines of this poem can be read as a Christian redemption story but also as an educational autobiography—a different version of what Lyons and Ngũgĩ provide. Wheatley’s past here is not an idyll (“Once I redemption neither sought nor knew”) but instead a spiritual state that the poetic persona has thankfully left behind. Her anglophone education, which was embedded in her Christian education, and vice versa, is figured as the happy result of her journey from Africa to America. The success of her education even allows her to reach across racial lines, as she also did in her correspondence with famous figures like George Washington and Samson Occom. In this poem, Wheatley reminds (white) Christians that devotion means more to one’s spiritual state than race, especially when it comes to entering into a state of grace believed to be the exclusive purview of a dominant racial group: “Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.”

The fact that this poem evinces thankfulness for anglophone and thus Christian education is most fascinating when set against the other poems in the book. If any one poem or poetic form predominates in this volume, it is the elegy—which is fitting, as it was her elegy on the death of George Whitefield that first brought her work into the public eye in October 1770. Fourteen of the volume’s thirty-nine poems are straightforwardly elegies or funeral poems.⁷⁷ Several others engage the question of death and mourning more obliquely.⁷⁸ Wheatley seems instinctively drawn to the elegy in the sense of requiem, a tendency critics have read in various ways.⁷⁹ One critic reads Wheatley’s use of the elegy in conjunction with the importance of elegy to the classical literature that Wheatley would have studied. In this reading, Wheatley’s translation of the form takes on a political function as an attempt to form community, “The elegy functioned as more than a funeral poem for classical writers, and it routinely expressed political positions…. Wheatley’s elegies created community by drawing local Boston together in corporate mourning for admirable or pitiable members of the community.”⁸⁰ Another critic, Mary Balkun, finds in Wheatley’s elegies an attempt to explore the spiritual doctrine of the transcendent soul’s independence from the material body: “The fourteen elegies that constitute a large portion of Wheatley’s book may thus be read … as a way to insist on the essential unimportance of the body.”⁸¹ Wheatley uses the elegy, in this reading, not to mourn the body but to adulate the saved Christian soul.

Balkun’s reading of the elegy moves me toward my own reading of how exactly the elegy functions in this multilingual writer’s work. Devona Mallory writes, “In Wheatley’s case, the recently departed may not be merely references to the deceased; they may be an attempt by the African American artist to console parents who have been separated, beyond their control, from their children.”⁸² This useful and sensitive reading calls on the biographical details of Wheatley’s forced removal from Africa in order to suggest that she possessed a heightened sensitivity—visible in her poetry—to empathize with those who had recently lost loved ones, especially parents, who in the normal order of things are not supposed to be predeceased by their children. Wheatley, having lost her ancestral home and gained another, uses the elegy in the sense of requiem because she knows intimately that this form’s plaintive properties come close to capturing the inexorability of loss.

I would add here only that the texture of the question changes if we imagine that Wheatley might also be writing about her lost language or languages, that swirling collection of sounds and meanings she would have learned in childhood and then never heard again after her arrival in Boston harbor, 1761. Several of her elegies invite this reading. For example, the middles stanza of “On the Death of a Young Lady of Five Years of Age,” implores mourners to “hear in heav’n’s blest bow’rs your Nancy fair, / And learn to imitate her language there.”⁸³ The titular character, who has undergone death’s passage from “dark abodes to fair etherial light” echoes Wheatley’s self-described exodus “from my Pagan land” at the hands of “mercy.” Just as Nancy has learned a new celestial language that her earth-bound relatives must attempt to divine, Wheatley too has entered a spiritual, cultural, and linguistic environment by leaving others—unnamed and perhaps only hazily remembered—behind.⁸⁴

This section’s juxtaposition of Burns and Wheatley is intended as a stark first example of the polarities engendered by the eighteenth-century experience of anglophone linguistic multiplicity. Whereas Burns chooses Scots as his poetic medium, thereby defending local culture as it is attached to a particular linguistic heritage, for Wheatley this is impossible because her language is in effect lost or forgotten. In both cases, educational history is essential to the story that is told about the poet in the paratexts that surround his or her work. Just as it is necessary for John Wheatley to authorize Phillis Wheatley’s poetic achievements by overtly stressing her remarkable and precocious education into anglophony, early reviewers of Burns’s work stress his authenticity and autodidacticism even as they critique his language. Because of her race and gender, Wheatley’s anglophone education must aspire to perfection, but Burns’s education is described by his reviewers as happily incomplete. As a case in point, Tobias Smollett’s review of Poems includes these lines: “We have had occasion to examine a number of poetical productions, written by persons in the lower rank of life, and who had hardly received any education; but we do not recollect to have ever met with a more signal instance of true and uncultivated genius, than in the author of these Poems.”⁸⁵ Burns has an “uncultivated genius” that has been touched but unspoiled by anglophone education. By contrast, Wheatley’s subject position as an African American slave of uncertain linguistic background requires that her genius be cultivated in a way anglophones understand. These are the extremes within which the multilingualism of the other is cognizable in the eighteenth century, either as terrific boon or horrific burden.

By evoking the complexities surrounding differently embodied multilingual figures like Wheatley and Burns alongside the homogenizing systems of commercial, cultural, and coercive power within which multilingualism has long been caught—and against which it has had to fight over the course of the last three centuries—I want to advance here the more general claim that attempts to capture, celebrate, and advance linguistic diversity have been the starting point for several important developments in the history of anglophone literature, in the present, yes, but in the eighteenth-century and Romantic-era pasts as well. Put more explicitly, I argue going forward that linguistic exchange, translation, subjugation, and resistance have long been generative elements in literary practice and aesthetic reception. Can we understand the linguistic interventions of known figures like Robert Burns, and Phillis Wheatley, and others as part of the prehistory of the linguistic aesthetics of the present? Indeed we can. Burns is the male multilingual poet who is able to play on the sonic and written traditions of his minority lect; Wheatley is the multilingual poet with no such recourse, a woman who can only channel the energy of linguistic loss into the necessity of poetry as a form of succor to all who can hear (or read) its strains. In this respect, Burns and Wheatley occupy polar ends of a spectrum of possible aesthetic responses to linguistic imposition, a spectrum that coming chapters flesh out more fully.

Since the standardization and imperial deterritorialization of English during the eighteenth century, disciplinary structures stressing national histories have not always made the investigation of topics like anglophony or anglophone multilingualism into a relevant optics for engaging with the literary object. This has resulted in the fact that broad scholarly methodologies for discussing multilingualism and linguistic difference in conjunction with literary products of the eighteenth century and Romantic era need work. Thankfully, contemporary scholars from various periods have provided good models to project forward and backward.⁸⁶ Even with these models, however, the problem remains difficult. Multilingualism’s extranational dimensions disrupt the coherence of national formations, and this is problematic if we consider the eighteenth-century and Romantic periods to be nationalism’s formative epochs. In general, the consideration of linguistic multiplicity within scholarship threatens to undo intellectual projects organized under the rubric of national history and national thought. Nor has it seemed relevant to think of mainstream cultural phenomena as conditioned by multilingual exchanges transacted at the fringes of national literary culture.⁸⁷ In the present, however, the economic processes of globalization, which seek both homogeneity as well as the marketability of tolerable differences, demand the further investigation of these phenomena. In a time like our own, scholarship that attends to linguistic multiplicity and what it indexes culturally is both imperative and overdue.