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