Babel of the Atlantic

Abstract

Babel of the Atlantic explores the multilingualism of life in the colonial mid-Atlantic, which many colonists and visitors critically compared to the polyglot, biblical city of Babel. Wiggin and the volume’s contributors reconsider the negative associations of polyglot Pennsylvania, revealing instead the richness of a multicultural, multiethnic place. Beyond demonstrating the pervasiveness of various languages in colonial Pennsylvania and its surroundings, including Delaware, Dutch, English, French, German, and Mohican, the book’s authors highlight the ways translation and language were used to enforce power relations, define communities, and reflect interrelations among the diverse body of speakers in and around Philadelphia. The four parts of the book approach these linguistic processes from an interdisciplinary array of perspectives, including religion, education, race, and material culture.Part I, titled “New Worlds, New Religions,” investigates the languages used in religious disputes, education, and relationships. In chapter 1, Patrick Erben investigates a printed attack on the German printer Christoph Saur to reveal how Benjamin Franklin and William Smith used bilingualism and translation as a tool for simultaneously coercing and assimilating German immigrants. Studying the social efforts and theological teachings of the Moravian communities in British North America, Craig Atwood’s chapter demonstrates how the multilingualism and ecumenism of Moravians was considered a threat to established European cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, and sexuality norms. Katherine Faull continues the focus on Moravians by mapping the movements and networks of four Moravian women missionaries. By tracing the migrations and social lives of these women, Faull highlights how their everyday work facilitated cultural and linguistic translation in the Susquehanna Valley, particularly through their personal relationships with Native women.In Part II, Jürgen Overhoff and Wolfgang Flügel investigate the ways educational institutions and pastoral practices contributed to the preservation of German language and culture. Tracing how the founders of the nondenominational University of Pennsylvania modeled the school’s high level of discipline and prioritization of modern languages on European universities, Overhoff argues that the promotion of modern languages over biblical languages reflected a broader agenda to foster multilingual, American citizens. In chapter 5, Flügel explores how Lutheran pastors grappled with a loss of the German language among their German congregants in the late eighteenth century. In the increasingly multilingual world of early Pennsylvania, their adoption of the local English language reflected broader trends of German identity that had grown increasingly separated from linguistic affiliations and more closely tied to conceptions of ethnicity.Part III, “Languages of Race and (Anti-)Slavery,” begins with Katharine Gerbner’s study on German and Dutch Quakers’ diverse perspectives on slavery, which ranged from a “conversion ethic” that promoted evangelizing to enslaved people, to a rights-based anti-slavery argument. Analyzing how these Quakers attempted to reconcile their religious beliefs with the slaveholding practices in their own communities, Gerbner highlights the vital role ethnic and linguistic difference played in shaping their ideas. Birte Pfleger’s chapter expands scholarship on slavery and the eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic by looking beyond Quaker communities to Anglican German communities in Pennsylvania. Pfleger reveals how many German-speaking Anglo-Pennsylvanians opposed abolition in order to establish difference between Germans—who were considered non-whites—and Black enslaved people. As Pfleger points out, these early eighteenth-century legal and ideological anti-abolitionist efforts were largely rewritten by German-speaking abolitionists in the late eighteenth century, who depicted Pennsylvania as being a model example of German anti-slavery efforts. In chapter 8, Maurice Jackson explores the anti-slavery work of the French-born Quaker Anthony Benezet, which included establishing educational institutions for free Black people, publishing crucial research and writings on the horrors of the slave trade, histories of Africa, and religious- and secular-based arguments against slavery, and calling for reparations for freed Black people. Jackson traces Benezet’s influence on a global abolitionist movement that included William Wilberforce’s parliamentary debates, the Parisian Society of the Friends of the Blacks, the British abolitionist Charles Ignatius Sancho, and the African-born abolitionists Quobna Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano.In the final part of the edited volume, “The Languages of Wood and Stone,” Cynthia G. Falk and Lisa Minardi take up the task of considering how surviving material artifacts from the colonial mid-Atlantic served as a means of communication for Pennsylvania’s inhabitants. Falk analyses the aesthetic and functional characteristics of two Germantown homes, demonstrating how they embodied an increasingly standardized architectural form and style that crossed cultural boundaries in mid-eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Minardi’s chapter serves as a fitting final study, as it brings back into focus the volume’s main goal of challenging previous perceptions of people in the colonial mid-Atlantic as being monolingual and monoethnic. Exploring the construction, design, and social history of furniture and homes in colonial Philadelphia, Minardi argues that rather than simply replicating German styles and building approaches, these material artifacts reflect the fluidity and hybridity of ethnic identity during this period. As German builders and consumers prioritized refinement over ethnicity, they participated in what Minardi describes as “the formation of hybrid identities that were increasingly multicultural—and American—rather than German or English” (295).As Wiggin makes clear in the introduction, the aim of Babel of the Atlantic is to challenge prevailing narratives of a monolingual mid-Atlantic in order to contribute to ongoing decolonial work on German American history and the history of early America more broadly. The various contributions to the book highlight the diverse ways individuals and communities navigated the polyglot challenges and opportunities that came with living in the multicultural, multiethnic region of the mid-Atlantic. However, the volume as a whole prioritizes German- and English-speaking histories, despite attempts to recognize the ways Pennsylvanians of many different backgrounds deployed Indigenous, African, and European languages. This focus may have been a result of many of the chapters in this book having originated from a 2012 conference titled “Envisioning the ‘Old World,’” which focused largely on German-speaking peoples in early Pennsylvania. Faull’s chapter, in particular, points to possible future avenues for research that centers interactions with and the influence of languages beyond German and English, as well as the role of dialects.One of the book’s greatest strengths is its consideration of not only what was being communicated but how processes of communication were carried out. Part IV of the volume, especially, offers intriguing methods for exploring various means of communication, including material culture. Though Falk and Minardi limit their focus to homes and furniture, their contributions raise additional questions about how clothing and fashion, foodways, music, and other nonverbal, nontextual artifacts might have been used to communicate both within and across shared languages. Expanding definitions of communication beyond the textual could also allow for consideration of languages and dialects that were strictly oral traditions. Minardi’s discussion on the rise of hybrid identities points to similar processes of linguistic and dialectal hybridity that likely arose in the “contact zones” of early Pennsylvania, where African, European, and Native speakers interacted.Since much of the evidence used throughout this volume was sourced from the extensive linguistic, ethnohistorical, and cultural records of the Moravian Church, the book also offers important new insights on Moravian history. Questions surrounding hybrid processes of language raised in the volume are validated in the intentionally multilingual, multiethnic, multigeographic Moravian Church. Scholars of Moravian history will likely find the chapters by Atwood, Faull, and Jackson especially useful. While highlighting the pervasiveness of multilingualism among Moravian communities, their contributions also reveal how Moravians used language and translation to cross ethnic and cultural borders in order to establish extensive and influential networks that had both localized and global effects.