LITMIR.BIZ

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une multiplicité politique. La langue se stabilise autour d’une paroisse, d’un évêché, d’une capitale. Elle fait bulbe. Elle évolue par tiges et flux souterrains, le long des vallées fluviales, ou des lignes de chemins de fer, elle se déplace par taches d’huile.” (“There is no mother tongue but instead a power seizure by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language is stabilized around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It bulges. It progresses by way of stems and subterranean flows, along river valleys or railroad lines; it spreads like an oil stain.”)³⁹ In this short passage, the writers overturn commonplace notions of language as a system of filiation where one self-contained tongue naturally gives birth to another and where each gains cultural and political power according to the logic of natural selection. When we think without the profitable pretense of a nationally sanctioned “mother tongue,” as Deleuze and Guattari suggest we should, then it is easier to see historically contingent usurpations of linguistic and cultural authority that have always been carried out in loci of power like parishes, bishoprics, or capitals. Armed with the powers invested in these and other institutions, a dominant dialect or acrolect seizes power. Deleuze and Guattari offer nonessentializing ways to think of language as a space of lateral linguistic mixing and nonhierarchical cross-pollination. Their emphasis on contact and contingency helps reveal the complexity of eighteenth-century anglophony even if power relations try to occlude it.⁴⁰

      The passage quoted above provides two metaphors for language that help flesh out the methodological openings offered by the term anglophony as this book uses it. First, language is a series of networks that mimic commercial networks. A dominant language moves by subterranean flows, up river valleys, and along train tracks, which are also often the primary routes of trading activity. In this way, a dominant language is the copilot of commerce and communication, traveling wherever the two can be facilitated together, inundating spaces where other linguistic varieties or lects intermingled before. This is why understanding the British Empire’s metastatic eighteenth-century growth and hardening—both overseas and within the British Isles—is obligatory for grasping the linguistic and aesthetic texture of a period that sees Standard English gradually becoming a disciplinary pedagogical space in Britain and abroad. A dominant language form greases the arteries of exchange. Like trade, it traces the globe’s geographical contours and overcomes geographical obstacles where profitable. Any study of literature of the long eighteenth century that foregrounds anglophony as a conceptual category must take into account the interstitial spaces where Standard English is emergent and other interpenetrating linguistic forms are perceived as residual or moribund.

      The second metaphor that is methodologically pertinent here concerns the idea that a dominant language can be conceived of like the random pattern of an oil stain, a splotch here, a blotch there, scattered densities cast on a surface in the shape of an archipelago. We can see this splotchy design of dominant language by considering the silos of educated, acrolectic Standard English speakers and writers in irreducibly multilingual places like London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, Kingston, Bridgetown, Calcutta, and beyond.⁴¹ The metaphor of a dominant language superimposed over the language system as an oil stain enables scholars to think of the coming of standardized English as a spray of intermittent, separated, and ineradicable linguistic blots superimposed over the diverse and ever-changing surface of global linguistic practice. This insight forces network thought, a kind of thought wherein individualized trajectories through disorganized linguistic space become meaningful. Geographical containers like the nation, the British Isles, and even the imperium are here assumed to be innervated with linguistic difference from every direction. As such linguistic difference must negotiate the oily congelations of linguistic propriety that increasingly disperse on its surface.

      To recapitulate the justification for the term anglophony I have been advancing until now, when applied to eighteenth-century literature, the term “English” hides more than it reveals. Intended to connote an internally coherent tradition of language and nation—and hence teachable traditions of literature and history—“English” as a category has long been recognized as too limited. More idealization than historical or empirical reality, the flattened and flattening term “English” is a detail-obliterating abstraction whereas anglophony is a detail-recovering one. Other scholars have sought out replacements for “English” that offer increased granularity, terms like “British,” “Archipelagic,” and even “Imperial” English.⁴² In this book I opt for “anglophony” because I relish the conceptual work this term does as well as the methodological practice it encourages. I am also suspicious of objectifying and geographizing language, for language is a process and not an object or space. One aspect of my argument, for example, is that by prizing Standard English over difference and multiplicity, anglophony disavows its unmappable and ongoing interlinguistic contacts—and to its own aesthetic detriment.

      The fact that the term anglophony is derived from and has analogues in French postcolonial vocabularies thus intentionally enacts the multilingual intervention I hope to make here. By self-consciously using this borrowing as a borrowing, I want to disrupt any inference that the term is a product of critical parthenogenesis. If it is true, as I claim, that one of the tendencies of anglophone aesthetics and linguistic history has been to naturalize borrowings in such a way that their origins in external and subaltern linguistic systems are effaced, then the traces of the term anglophony’s explicit borrowedness start us down a road toward unraveling those aesthetic and historical tendencies. My point is that, in the present, it is obligatory that students of literature have a better model of what language is, how it changes, how it spreads, and how—following an insight made by sociolinguistics long ago—language rapidly communicates subject positions as well as semantic meaning in any interaction as in any moment of reading.

      As an additional benefit, the term anglophony’s third and fourth syllables etymologically foreground voice and sound as salient components of linguistic interaction—and thus aesthetic and cultural exchange. This gesturing to voice (φωνή / pho¯ne¯´) informs the close readings of dialect writing that occupy parts of subsequent chapters. Even so, the preservation of the endonym “anglo-” in the term “anglophony” might give some readers pause. This preservation might seem to circumscribe the diverse linguistic practices I discuss within narrowly construed ethnic or national frameworks. This is not at all my intention, as this book takes as axiomatic the fact that non-English users of different forms of anglophony have always been critically important to anglophone aesthetics. Yet, the “anglo-” in “anglophony” seems to me to serve practical as well as analytical functions. On the practical side, I am using this term to name a dynamic spectrum of semimutually intelligible linguistic forms. If there is a unifying core to the linguistic forms that I will discuss here, then the “anglo-” in “anglophony” captures that grammatical and dictive core, however infelicitously. It does so not by way of ethnicity or nation, however, but instead, by way of invoking the exclusive ethnic and national claims against which many anglophones must constantly fight. On the analytic side, then, the “anglo-” in “anglophony” evokes a specter of English homogeneity that the ongoing deterritorialization of the language constantly contradicts.

      Faithful to the idea of the specter, I have also chosen to preserve the “anglo-” in “anglophony” because this allows the word to serve as a ludic, bifurcated pun that throws into question the ontological reality of its first part: “anglophony,” wherein “phony” is taken not to mean voice or sound but instead “fake,” “ersatz,” “simulated,” or “parodic.” In the interest of continually emphasizing anglophony’s multilingual texture, it bears noting that the word “phony” is the etymological derivative of the slang Irish word fawney meaning “ring finger,” a metonym for the trick of selling a brass ring as a gold one—or so lexicography tells us. The word has been absorbed into English as a noun that indicates the artificial and inauthentic simulacrum of a particular thing. The “anglo-” in “anglophony” represents a simulacrum of Englishness in a world where the vast majority of anglophones are not and have not been English since the late eighteenth century.

      As a piece of terminology, I see the way in which the term “anglophony” subverts and dissects itself as methodologically liberating and also new. To refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone existing within anglophony is not to say that person is English, far from it. Instead,

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