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Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
Читать онлайн.Название Multilingual Subjects
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isbn 9780812293999
Автор произведения Daniel DeWispelare
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Ingram
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