Imagining a Welsh Print Culture; or, What to do with a Language You Can't Read

Languages create their own climates: of belonging, uncertainty, defiance, and fear. They are ways of being in the world, and of being in and of—and apart from—the nation. This panel asks a series of questions about the... [ view full abstract ]

Languages create their own climates: of belonging, uncertainty, defiance, and fear. They are ways of being in the world, and of being in and of—and apart from—the nation. This panel asks a series of questions about the climates and politics surrounding “foreign” language literatures and print cultures in the nineteenth-century United States. These questions include what role non-English literatures currently play in our study of US literary traditions; what roles they could play; what constitutes a print culture; and what happens when English itself is a foreign language. Whether through translations, bilingual texts, or English being taken up and deployed by Native authors and editors, this panel finds that questions of language politically, legally, institutionally, and culturally complicate the idea of “the nation” mentioned above. By querying the place of non-English traditions in our study of nineteenth-century US literary culture, we seek to defamiliarize English as the dominant language within that culture—and to reassert the ways in which language both aligns with and cuts across expected political, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic divides.

In the first talk, a collaborative expedition into a (putative) Welsh-language print culture, Meredith Neuman and Maria Windell demonstrate how non-speakers and non-readers might still engage essential questions regarding non-English print cultures. The fugitive traces of several obscure Welsh pamphlets in a disbound compilation of multi-lingual publications by the American Tract Society raise provocative questions regarding the linguistic bias of archival encounters as well as the idiosyncrasies of personal and institutional collecting. Attempts to locate a Welsh print culture in colonial and nineteenth-century North America—even as the question of what constitutes a coherent print culture remains unresolved—yield unexpected insights. Welsh speakers appear to be particularly assimilable within an English-language hegemony that privileges white, Protestant, bourgeoisie identity, for example, and the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the ATS demonstrates how the linguistic modularity of translated texts reflects the technological modularity of early machine press and its proliferating capacities.