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that exceed political and aesthetic questions. It is impossible to ignore, for example, that ours is an era of unprecedented language death. This is a cultural catastrophe that no remediated politics of language will be able to solve. However, against the gloom of language loss, it must be said that linguistic multiplicity is still obviously and thankfully alive, which everyone should celebrate. This is true in spaces all over the globe just as it is true in contemporary anglophone aesthetic practice, the roots of which grow out of the long eighteenth century.

      Anglophony’s Fringe: The Multilingualism of Phillis Wheatley and Robert Burns

      Even in Scotland, the provincial dialect which Ramsay and he [Burns] have used is now read with a difficulty which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader: in England it cannot be read at all, without such constant reference to a glossary as nearly to destroy that pleasure.⁶³

      Tracking anglophone linguistic multiplicity in ephemeral forms like fugitive advertising demonstrates its visibility in eighteenth-century culture. Similarly, tracing linguistic multiplicity opens up texts, authors, and poets in vibrant new ways. Furthermore, attending to linguistic multiplicity can provide students in the globalizing present with familiar dynamics from the cultural past. Consider, for example, the well-known case of Robert Burns. It is fascinating to examine with contemporary students the role of language difference in eighteenth-century aesthetic evaluation. Students approach with curiosity the fact that in early reviews, Henry MacKenzie and Tobias Smollett both question Burns’s use of Scots even while endorsing his poetic “genius.” MacKenzie writes, as above, that Scots is read by literate anglophones “with great difficulty” while Smollett, for his part, asserts, “It is to be regretted, that the Scottish dialect, in which these poems are written, must obscure the native beauties with which they appear to abound … render[ing] the sense often unintelligible to an English reader.”⁶⁴ In both MacKenzie and Smollett, Burns’s language is figured as a scrim that “obscures” rather than reveals “native beauties” for Standard English readers. But poetic “beauties” are still assumed to exist somewhere behind the unfamiliar linguistic forms. This is a generous assumption, an assumption that was perhaps borne out of Scottish solidarity for a native son. It is an assumption that clashes dramatically with those made in the reception history of Phillis Wheatley, Burns’s contemporary, a woman whose entire poetic career was organized around proving herself to be a capable user of Standard English.⁶⁵

      Burns’s meteoric career can be explained in now-outmoded terms by citing the “heaven-taught Plowman’s” transcendental genius for capturing the spirit of his people, although non-Scottish students who are unfamiliar with Scots and who are struggling to read Burns’s actual language might not necessarily feel the weight of this genius. In a different vein, Burns’s canonicity can be explained as part of a much longer tradition of Scots-language writing, a tradition that happened to be experiencing its own cultural renaissance when Burns first brought Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect into the world in 1786. In this explanation, Burns’s status as contemporary icon of Scottishness derives from his ability to gather the linguistic and cultural practices of vernacular tradition—the ballad, for example—and then project those practices into the future as a prophylactic against anglophone encroachments. Students might digest this more easily, although the explanation implicitly places “Scots” and “English” writing in separate and noninteractive lineages.

      Another way to see and teach Burns’s career, which many scholars have touched on, involves situating the poet’s work within the imperial linguistic dynamics of his era, an era in which the Scots world and the anglophone world intermingled at various levels. The geographic itinerary traced by the publication locations of the first three editions of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect—Kilmarnock, Scotland (1786); Edinburgh, Scotland (1787); London, England (1787)—speaks to the hierarchically organized linguistic and cultural matrix within which Burns’s reception occurred. Extending these observations, one might account for his past and present popularity, especially as that popularity is affixed to stock images of Scottish national identity, by noting that Burns was keenly confluent with the linguistico-cultural pressures of his period. He knew what it meant to pitch and sell his particular brand of Scots literature in Kilmarnock, Edinburgh, and London. His dedications and expanded glossaries in these various editions show this clearly.⁶⁶ As a multilingual writer whose prefaces and poems are themselves multilingual, Burns was attuned to the promise and limitations of cultural interest in linguistic difference—it helped too that his race and gender were unproblematic for readers of the period. Still, his poetry makes linguistic difference into an aesthetic object as well as a framework for dissent against existing aesthetic criteria. In a period of tremendous linguistico-cultural ferment, Burns gave readers what some were seeking: ethnolinguistic performance in which a Scots counterpolitics of language was embedded.⁶⁷

      The specific form of Burns’s counterpolitics of multilingualism is thrown into relief when compared to Phillis Wheatley’s. Indeed, it is under the banner of anglophone multiplicity that figures like Burns and Wheatley can come together most felicitously. Both are poets, but more specifically, both are also multilingual anglophone poets. One need only rehearse well-known facts a bit differently to stress the importance of this multilingual dimension to Wheatley’s life. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography reports, Phillis Wheatley was born somewhere along the banks of the Gambia River, exact place and date unknown.⁶⁸ She was forcibly brought to North America in 1761 on the slave ship Phillis, a boat whose name would soon become her own.⁶⁹ She was purchased by a well-to-do Boston family called the Wheatleys, a family whose name would soon become her own. Based on the invasive observation that she had adult front teeth at the moment she was sold, it is believed that she was roughly seven or eight years old, an age when one’s language skills are already well formed. Appraising her intellectual formation at her moment of sale, scholar John Shields speculates, “At this age she had doubtless already been influenced by a syncretistic amalgam of animism, hierophantic solar worship, and Islam practised in that region of the Gambia at the time of her birth.” Unfortunately he says nothing about her linguistic biography—but of course he can say very little, for nothing is recorded.⁷⁰ The child who was to be renamed “Phillis Wheatley” certainly spoke and thought in language when she arrived in Boston. Perhaps she spoke and thought in several.

      Though these linguistic details are unknown, the determining fact in Wheatley’s life and subsequent career was that she was purchased by a family whose language and worldview would soon reformulate her existence entirely. The Wheatleys’ goal was to provide a proper religious education, and, for Phillis, the initial means to this proper religious education was Standard English. Against all trends of this barbarous period in transatlantic history, then, Phillis Wheatley was taught by this family to read Standard English and probably by an outside tutor to read Latin during her time as an unpaid servant in her owner’s house. Indeed, John Wheatley’s brief summary of Phillis Wheatley’s education triumphantly claims that, “without any Assistance from School Education, and by only what she was taught in the Family, she, in sixteen Months Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.”⁷¹ Like Peros, who became “sensible” and “judicious” once in anglophony, Phillis Wheatley’s earlier language or languages must go unmentioned. Phillis Wheatley’s having “attained” English obviates their being mentioned. However, it does not mean that there was not suspicion surrounding her abilities in English. This is one reason why an attestation signed by eighteen of “the most respectable Characters in Boston” precedes her volume with the words, “We whose names are underwritten, do assure the World that the POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”⁷² Lest someone still suspect this multilingual subject of being incapable of writing anglophone poems of such a high caliber, the publisher also sees fit to note at the bottom of the attestation, “The original Attestation, signed by the above Gentleman, may be seen by applying to Archibald Bell, Bookseller, No. 8, Aldgate-Street.”⁷³

      For me, it is crucial to reread these tantalizing

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