Sara E. Johnson
University of California
Sara Johnson is an Associate Professor of Literature at UCSD. She is working on a book documenting the work of Moreau de Saint-Méry, a late eighteenth-century Caribbean intellectual. Her book The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas is an inter-disciplinary study that explores how people of African descent responded to the collapse and reconsolidation of colonial life in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. Johnson is the co-editor of Kaiso! Writings By and About Katherine Dunham (2006) and Una ventana a Cuba y los estudios cubanos (2010).
This panel explores multilingualism as ideology and practice—both during the long nineteenth century, and in the retrospective construction of knowledge about it. Language ideologies drove decisions about which writers and texts to translate, to collect, and to publicize in the sphere of letters; informed missionary, political, and trade ventures; and shaped reception climates. These papers describe networks of textual influence and circulation across national and linguistic borders, exploring how “improper” pidgins, learner-languages, and translations leave traces in the body of literature “proper.”
The panel raises questions about the epistemological status of non-English works in the field. In the two decades since the Sollors-Shell anthologies of multilingual American literature appeared, has the field adopted multilingual works into its canon? If non-English archives and comparative perspectives have become more normalized in early American studies than in nineteenth-century studies, is this a logical division of intellectual labor, or a continuing blind spot? Should our teaching acknowledge the heritage speakers and immigrants in our classrooms?
Sara Johnson: “The Study of African Languages in the Nineteenth-Century Americas”
In 1803 the amateur linguist Baudry des Lozières published Vocabulaire Congo, a French-Kikongo text designed to teach his fellow French colonial planters “useful” phrases to manage their slaves from west Central Africa. I make a threefold argument about the mobilization of Kikongo. First: foreign-language study—including concerns with mutual intelligibility, control over others, and the transcription of speech that would be used for both knowledge production and tense everyday situations—was important to slaveholders. Second: the Vocabulaireillustrates that Kikongo was a lingua franca of the colony; African languages were critical to the functioning of slave-holding societies, and we must address their continued absence in scholarship. Third: this project was undertaken to maximize labor extraction and to create a psychological instrument of abuse. However, the term Congo increasingly became synonymous with determined, efficacious resistance on the part of the enslaved: thus the Vocabulaire exemplified the hope of transforming a tool of revolutionary exchange back into one of attempted domination. An invaluable literary artifact of this moment, the Vocabulaire illustrates what it means to speak of language as a weapon of war.
