Rachael Gilmour

This essay explores Daljit Nagra's poetry (Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007), and Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger-Toy Machine!!! (2011)) in the context of contemporary British language politics. It argues that Nagra's approach to language – combining heteroglot, multivoiced experimentalism with an etymological attention to the historical constructedness of language – offers a riposte to monolingual ideologies, which also resituates English as a product and residue of colonial history. While Nagra's poems sometimes come close to regarding the histories enfolded within English as a linguistic and poetic impasse, they continue to invest in the notion of resistance and individual agency in language; and specifically, they revel in poetic dramatization of the accommodations and convivialities of everyday multilingual language practice.

This essay offers a detailed exploration and comparative reading of two poems published 20 years apart: John Agard’s “Listen Mr Oxford Don” (1985), and Daljit Nagra’s “Kabba Questions the Ontology of Representation, the Catch-22 for ‘Black’ Writers…” (2007). The former poem is well-known, being regarded by a range of scholars as the acme of (and often, shorthand for) self-reflexively dialogic black British voice poetry, as it emerged in the 1980s, that plays off the friction between writing and speech. The latter is a complex and satirical take on poetic convention and canonicity – including the legacies of 1980s black British poetry – that exploits a tension between written poetic convention and artifice on the one hand, and the idea of the voiced poem as conveying “presence” or “authenticity” on the other. Both poems direct us towards a structuring paradox in which the embodied immediacy of human voice is mediated through the graphic conventions of written poetry. Reading these poems together, the essay considers on the one hand, how ideas about poetic form, language, and voice emerge out of particular historical junctures; and on the other, how such attentiveness to context can help us to develop techniques of a postcolonial “close reading”, eschewing totalizing formulae or summative evaluations of linguistic dissidence.

This essay examines the notion of “translational writing” – literary texts which bear the traces of multiple languages, foregrounding and dramatizing the processes of translation of which they are both product and representation – through detailed examination of two recent novels set in London: Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007). Both novels are narrated by their female protagonists, whose movement between linguistic planes defines a distinctively feminized, translingual identity. Each works to destabilize the assumed relationship between language and national belonging, in part by recasting London as a space of translation: a city of immigrants defined by its polyglossia, and a node in a deterritorialized transnational linguistic order. Yet, while both novels explore the possibilities, risks, and limitations of a life lived between languages, they also demonstrate that translational literature, like translation theory, offers no consensus on the practice of translation. Their divergent conclusions – about the relationship between languages, about the nature and purposes of translation, about the connections between language and truth – reveal much about the complexities of translational writing.

Throughout the nineteenth century, driven by the need both to communicate with potential African converts and to produce written Scriptural translations, Christian missionaries set about studying, transliterating and transforming South African languages. Their work served, in various ways, the demands of the developing British colonial order; established new ‘standard forms’ of South African vernaculars; and facilitated the development of literacy among African people in the region. The close relationship between missionaries, colonialism and language study in South Africa has been documented and analysed by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. This article summarizes some of the key issues in the field, as they have defined critical debates since the 1980s, by focusing on models of ‘invention’ on the one hand and ‘reciprocity’ on the other, and exploring continuities and dissonances between these debates and the wider fields of colonial studies and colonial discourse analysis. It concludes by arguing for a balance. On the one hand, it is vital that we acknowledge the significance of missionary language study as a mode of colonial discourse with the power to shape the social, linguistic, and political realities it purported only to describe. On the other, this should not eclipse our understanding of missionary linguistic work in social context, as the product of fraught, complex, and often mutually transformative encounters between European missionaries and African speakers of the languages in question.

Although the relationship of missionary linguistics to colonial power in Africa has been well-documented, far less attention has been paid to the role of language-learning in forging missionary identities. This article examines a diverse range of responses to the Zulu language among missionaries in Natal in the 1850s and 1860s – the period in which missionary work became consolidated in the colony – addressing their relationship not only to the work of colonisation, but also to missionaries' own evangelical self-conception. It argues that for many missionaries, from a range of denominations and backgrounds, the experience of second-language learning came to be definitive of their evangelical identity. In a positive sense, learning to speak Zulu was considered as the indispensable key to the central tasks of mission, whether primary attention was given to preaching, translation, or interpreting ‘the minds and modes of thought’ of Zulu-speakers. However, attitudes to the Zulu language were driven as much by anxiety as by a sense of confidence, or cultural and religious superiority. The insecurities commonly felt by novice language-learners were sometimes exacerbated as missionaries were exposed to censure or ridicule by the Zulu-speakers they sought to convert, and concerns about the sinful nature of the ‘unsaved’ Zulu were mapped on to attitudes to language. This article thus demonstrates some of the ways in which missionaries established, reinforced, or reconsidered their own evangelical identities by means of their relationship to the Zulu language, and explores some of the worries and fears that underpinned their conceptions of language-learning. The themes of laughter and contamination symbolise in different ways the dangers which language-learning could pose to missionaries' sense of self, power, or propriety.

This first book-length study explores the history of postwar England during the end of empire through a reading of novels which appeared at the time, moving from George Orwell and William Golding to Penelope Lively, Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan. Particular genres are also discussed, including the family saga, travel writing, detective fiction and popular romances.
            All included reflect on the predicament of an England which no longer lies at the centre of imperial power, arriving at a fascinating diversity of conclusions about the meaning and consequences of the end of empire and the priveleged location of the novel for discussing what decolonization meant for the domestic English population of the metropole.

Reviews:

"An exemplary synthesis of literary-historical rigour and stylistic attentiveness."
"End of Empire unveils the ambivalent nature of post-imperial national identity, shedding a new light not on the empire as such but on its end, decline, and fall."

The study of languages was crucial to colonial power in 18th and 19th-century South Africa. This important book examines representations of the South African Bantu languages Xhosa and Zulu, revealing the ways in which colonial linguistics contributed to both the making of the colonial order and to instabilities at the heart of the project.

Reviews:
"Gilmour has a good command of the source material; her style is lucid and readable; and she deftly weaves linguistic and sociopolitical threads together, from the critical perspective of postcolonial studies." - Paul T. Roberge, Historiographia Linguistica
"Gilmour knows how languages work and she has provided an excellent foundation for the study of their history." - Patrick Harries, Journal of Southern African Studies