Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
to refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone need not carry any racial, ethnic, class, or gender implications. Instead, the term opens up an analytical field for examining representations of different identities as they are reinforced by linguistic practices and aestheticized in text. Finally, to refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone makes no claim that this is an exhaustive accounting of that subject’s linguistic skills or affiliations. One can be an anglophone as well as an arabophone, a francophone, a lusophone, a sinophone, et cetera. In fact, it is these sorts of linguistic multiplicities within people that have for too long been overlooked. They have also too infrequently been invoked as tools that can open up texts we know—as well as ones we have yet to study well—in exciting ways. As a broad and multivalent term, then, “anglophony” represents a range of imbricated and always-evolving communicative procedures, many of which are salient elements in the definition of what counts as eighteenth-century literary and verbal art.
The present moment is one in which some anglophones are telling themselves triumphal, depoliticized stories about their language’s global importance, economic relevance, and aesthetic peerlessness. This is occurring while the globe is also witnessing the most thoroughgoing die-off of nonanglophone languages that it has ever known. Anglophone scholars (and others, one hopes) might chasten histories of anglophony and its subjects, its cultures, and its literatures by striving for what Édouard Glissant called “Relation.” Rather than a monolingual and neoimperial global public, Glissant asks humans to attune themselves to the dynamics of creolization by considering the following question: “how many languages, dialects, or idioms will have vanished, eroded by the implacable consensus among powers between profits and controls, before human communities learn to preserve together their diversities?”43
The Poetics (and Prose) of Relation
When we think with the porous framework of anglophony, multilingual subjects constellate themselves in productive ways. These constellations show that multiplicity—perennially contentious and always subject to grave impositions—has always been a generative and indeed essential part of anglophone cultural life, an idea that stands in tension with Benedict Anderson’s more general historical claim in Imagined Communities (1983) that “in the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the total population of Europe was quite small…. Then and now, the bulk of mankind is monoglot.”44 My argument is not that Anderson is wrong and that actually there were scores of bilinguals, trilinguals, and multilinguals throughout history.45 Instead, my claim is that Anderson’s term “monoglot” is overly limiting. Its fixity papers over the porous interstitial spaces between “bilingualism” and “monolingualism,” an infinite series of gradations where linguistic knowledge is always in formation.
Moreover, Anderson’s categories treat linguistic knowledge as something one can “acquire” in a perfect or complete form only over a long period of time. “If every language is acquirable,” he writes, “its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness, but one’s own mortality.”46 But what about people who learn a word, a phrase, a set of phrases, a passive understanding, an operational but perhaps limited ability in another language or languages? Put otherwise, a “bilingual” who has “acquired” another language by investing “a real portion of his life” over a long period of time is not the only subject who displays and draws on linguistic difference, and this is to say nothing of disability as it relates to language, a topic that is unfortunately outside the purview of this book. Taken in this more flexible way, multilingual pasts are recuperable and meaningful. Moreover, lineages can be drawn from these multilingual pasts to anglophony’s lively (but often disavowed) multilingual present.
Glissant’s account of the ways that monolingual thought is central to imperial practice is an important element of the theoretical apparatus that Multilingual Subjects puts forth going forward. This is because Glissant’s conclusion that “Relation … is spoken multilingually” advocates for multilingual forms of knowledge, education, and interaction that are under threat in the globalizing present.47 Departing from the notion that “the extinction of any language impoverishes everyone,” Glissant holds up the creolization of language in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean as a model for future forms of human relationality. He rightly diagnoses the sick present of global language politics, a present in which Standard English users too often assume that the rest of the multilingual world has facility in its communicative forms. “Whatever the degree of complexity, the one thing henceforth outmoded is the principle (if not the reality) of a language’s intangible unicity,” Glissant writes, later concluding that treating or teaching language and literature as though its “unicity” were real is an “epistemological anachronism,” although one might also call this an episte-mological error.48
The history of anglophony suggests that anglophones evade their own definition in aesthetically productive ways. Chosen for their exemplarity—in the contranymic sense of “exemplary” as totally unique but also utterly typical—the historical figures whose stories unfold in this book offer glimpses of anglophone life and aesthetics in forms that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to access. After this introduction, this book contains five chapters and a conclusion. Each of the chapters is organized around a particular form or genre of nonstandard, multilingual, or metalinguistic writing—linguistico-political writing, standardization theory, translation theory, intralingual translation, and interlingual translation. As such, the form of argumentation in each chapter conforms to the archive it studies. In addition, intercalated between each of the five chapters are short biographies of multilingual subjects of the long eighteenth century, human actors whose linguistic identities recapitulate the preceding chapter and anticipate the coming one. These biographies also attempt to refract the argument of each chapter in different and sometimes contradictory directions. In these short interludes, my own forms of metalinguistic writing come to the fore.
The short prelude to Chapter 1 examines the diverse linguistic identities of four escaped slaves who appear in a fugitive advertisement that was purchased by George Washington and published in the Maryland Gazette in 1761. Following on this first invocation of language, labor, and power, the first chapter begins with the uncanny similarity between a description of the coercive technologies used to teach English in Ireland during the 1790s and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s famous description of colonial Kenyan children being “taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community” via linguistic pedagogy.49 After tracing the representation of language and body in the eighteenth century through the emergent discourse of fugitive advertising, this chapter inverts the main terms of Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other (1996)—as well as recent responses to this book by Yasemin Yildiz, Thomas Bonfiglio, and others—in order to refigure eighteenth-century approaches to the multilingualism of the other as a curious pairing of aesthetic interest and political demonization. Highlighting this ambivalence between the aesthetic and political, I then argue that eighteenth-century cultural incursions made in the name of linguistico-imperial thought were anticipated, critiqued, subverted, and challenged. I make this case through close readings of Robert Burns and Phillis Wheatley, two multilingual anglophones who are rarely discussed together because as subjects they appear dissimilar. As multilingual subjects, however, the aesthetic and political terms of theirfamehavesurprisingcommonalities.
The interlude between Chapters 1 and 2 examines an Irish clergyman’s fatalistic lament that Irish language and literacy were dying. This lament functions as a transition into the second’s chapter’s discussion of Jacques Ranciere’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), a book that enables a discussion of the forms of eighteenth-century multilingualism that were permitted to rise to the level of aesthetic and literary appreciation during the century, as one sees in the case of Burns. In order to begin this discussion, I elaborate on how eighteenth-century anglophony was all at once aesthetically interested in and yet politically resistant to the multilingualism of the other. The texts of the