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