As discourses of Standard English normativity flourished, the period witnessed a proliferation of descriptive, characterological, and narrative strategies for rendering the linguistic habits of diverse individuals and cultures in print. Metalinguistic description—by which I mean the purposeful narration and description of language itself—is one of the long eighteenth century’s most pronounced developments in writing technique, a development the book tracks closely. Indeed, more writing of the period than is commonly acknowledged straightforwardly thematizes linguistic difference. So in the same way that the “subject of a painting” is the matter of its content, eighteenth-century writing is replete with other unexamined “multilingual subjects,” the most important of which are examined in this book as rhetorically generative tropes and topoi. Finally, I show that the many divergent and yet coexisting forms of the English language are themselves crucially important eighteenth-century “multilingual subjects.” Put another way, metalinguistic writing that addresses the internal differences and external relations of the English language is the book’s most frequently recurring and contentious “multilingual subject.”
With all these meanings in tow, Multilingual Subjects lays out the case for paying close attention to the changing cultural meanings of linguistic multiplicity in long eighteenth-century culture, especially insofar as these meanings proleptically announce some of the aesthetic and political dimensions of language and globalization in the present. Far from being minor or peripheral, the interpolation of linguistic difference and diversity into texts of the eighteenth century represents a set of market-oriented aesthetic strategies just as it represents a set of political assumptions relative to language, culture, and identity.20 Grasping linguistic multiplicity as it interacts with literary practice and aesthetic evaluation in the eighteenth-century world of empire and overseas adventurism can helps us critique and understand our own situation, one in which English in its many deterritorialized forms “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere,” to quote Marx’s most famous descriptions of the European bourgeoisie.21 Standard English in the eighteenth century and in the contemporary world: disrupting culture even as it enables it, subverting nonnormative forms of language even as it gives birth to new ones. Insofar as this work’s claims are presentist, then, they are also interested in the patterns of linguistic identity that we can recuperate from the eighteenth-century past as a way to think differently about the future.22
In keeping with the main premises of the last few decades of eighteenth-century research, Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) evokes “the Atlantic as an expanded social field, shared by millions of heterogeneous, previously unconnected people,” a description that is true to the period in question just as it is obviously informed by the moment of her book’s composition.23 In Buck-Morss’s words, “The collective experiences of concrete, particular human beings fall out of identifying categories of “nation,” “race,” and “civilization” that capture only a partial aspect of their existence, as they travel across cultural binaries, moving in and out of conceptual frames and in the process, creating new ones. Porosity characterizes the ordering boundaries of their world (as it does ours today).”24 Charting their interconnections, and showing how those interconnections challenge the disciplinary boundaries by which we understand the heterogeneous subjects of the past, Buck-Morss asks scholars to focus on identity’s porosity in that earlier world and in our own. By “porosity,” she means the tendency of subjects to slip inside and outside the categories that we use to define them, categories like “‘nation,’ ‘race,’ and ‘civilization,’” a list to which we should but often enough do not add “language.” Thinking with Buck-Morss, a category’s tendency toward porosity becomes more important than the category itself. Concretely, the archive and the present both demonstrate that one can slip in and out of linguistic categories—through language learning, intercultural experience, or mere communicative adjustment, as sociolinguistics also demonstrates. Porosity is thus another way to figure the multilingual subjects of the eighteenth century, as forms of reading, writing, and speaking that allow for and productively encourage slippages of nation, race, civilization, and also language.
For scholars and students in the present, a critical examination of histories of multilingualism and linguistic porosity are timely in several senses. Such examinations speak to the institutional and pedagogical demands of the present by allowing scholars to connect for students and society at large the diversities of the globalizing present with the diversities of the past. Many different stories culminate in the history of our own present. Too many of those stories are invisible because of the specific historical trends that we choose to privilege. If as scholars we are generally comfortable with the idea of porosity, then this comes as a result of the work of others who have brought that texture out of the past and showed how it conditions the present. Insofar as one of the jobs of the humanities is to attune students to the demands of globality, then critical histories of porosity have already partially served these goals. To the degree that multilingual and porous histories are sometimes invisible in the frameworks with which we train students to think about cultures of the past, students of the present find their cultural lives unaccounted for in some ways. They ought to have some sense that the period they live in has long ties to the linguistic diversity of the past, within the anglophone world and without.
Anglophones and Anglophony
During his tenure as editor of PMLA from 2011 to 2016, Simon Gikandi used several of his editor’s columns to reflect on the past and present of global linguistic diversity.25 Among other things, Gikandi’s columns investigated global linguistic diversity’s relationship to contemporary culture and politics. The specter of “the powerful myth of English as the global language” was never far from his mind. For example, on more than one occasion he puzzled over the way “English-only movements thrive in large parts of the United States.”26 Likewise, in several instances he ruminated on precarious languages in the process of disappearing: “Letting a language die is an injustice, a denial of will to those who speak it.”27 Interrogating the power of English in a world where “the global linguistic map appears to be a simple division between those with English and those without it,” Gikandi invoked Dipesh Chakrabarty in order to argue that English as a language should be “provincialized” in the interest of a new global order of relationality.28 Gikandi’s goal has been to “deprive the [English] language of the ecumenical status of the global and to represent it as one language among many … not as part of a global drive toward monolingualism but as part of the diversity and plurality of world languages.”29 In this respect, his essays are stimulating and provocative reading for their dogged insistence that English must be provincialized, pluralized, and sufficiently reconceptualized to account for the multilingualism of the present.
In keeping with this, I discuss the breadth of linguistic multiplicity that characterizes the eighteenth century and subtends its aesthetic production by employing the interpretive category “anglophony.” Common in contemporary studies, this term crops up only occasionally in literary and cultural histories that focus on periods before the twentieth century, most often as a way to disambiguate Britain from other areas of anglophone population density like North America.30 Calqued from the French postcolonial and neocolonial grouping francophonie, I use the noun “anglophony” to upend normative linguistic and cultural hierarchies—insofar as upending those hierarchies is possible—while also throwing the assumptions of those normative linguistic and cultural hierarchies into high relief. As in the context of francophonie, anglophony is a term that can be used to take together the “domestic,” colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial. As a way of provincializing English, this term acts as a supracategory of linguistic participation, a category comprising