Monolingualism tends to be imagined pejoratively, as a lack or a shortcoming. The current popularity of language-learning apps attests to the fact that the presence of more languages is usually considered desirable, more sophisticated, a worthy goal. After all, what kind of a person would choose not to pursue the advantages that language-learning purports to offer, whether maximized potential, broadened horizons, or increased brain function? While acquisitive approaches to language learning are sometimes criticized, there is nonetheless a loose consensus that we (whether we are individuals or scholarly fields) should strive away from the narrow confines of monolingualism. As many thinkers have now established, though, simply learning or incorporating more languages—as if that were such easy work!—does not actually provide an exit from monolingualism. This is because monolingualism is not just a numerical descriptor referring to the presence of one or the absence of many. Instead, monolingualism is a structure “that organizes the entire range of modern social life” (Yildiz 2). We cannot escape monolingualism through self-improvement or changing graduation requirements: it is a force that shapes the societies we live in, affecting how we understand subjectivities, disciplines, institutions, ethnicities, cultures, and nations. So, while there is plenty of criticism of monolingualism—as in, saying that it's bad—there is still not enough critique of monolingualism: as in, synoptic evaluation and description of the overall effects of its historical processes. In abjuring the monolingual, we've left it inadequately theorized and poorly understood.

I think it's important to begin this inquiry at the local level. In my work elsewhere, I've endeavored to show how monolingualism structures life where I live, in the anglophone settler colonies of North America. Perhaps these so-called nations of immigrants, with their five-decade-long, if-now-somewhat-weakened embrace of liberal-multicultural policies, seem strange cases for the study of monolingualism. Monolingualism, after all, is usually understood as a phenomenon that emerges in, and in tandem with, the European nation-states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The homologization of language, culture, ethnicity, and nation that structures these countries’ conceptions of themselves defines a “monolingual paradigm” that has become dominant throughout much—but not all—of the world (Yildiz 2). While scholars of South Asia, Africa, and other regions where multilingualism predominates have offered important correctives to the perception that monolingualism is a global norm, it is also challenging to apply the monolingual paradigm to places like Canada or the United States. The one-to-one relationship among language, culture, and ethnicity that defines monolingualism doesn't straightforwardly apply. To many Canadians and Americans, the “sameness” attributed to the nation-state and its population seems troubling, even regressive.

However, we in anglophone North America do not readily recognize that a mandated linguistic “sameness” plays a structural role in our societies, too, subtending our multiculturalisms.Footnote ¹ Canada and the United States are both structured by brutal and ongoing histories of monolingualization that vividly illustrate one of the most frequently recycled truisms in settler colonial studies: “invasion is a structure, not an event” (Wolfe 388). The position of English (and, in different ways, French and Spanish) in Canada and the United States is not simply an extension, a reflection, or an after-effect of monolingualist pressures that existed at some long-ago moment in history. Rather, monolingualisms in Canada and the United States take shape through the long-standing and still-operative processes of genocide and amalgamation of Indigenous people, through the structural alienation of Black people and (some) other racialized populations, and through the simultaneous self-indigenization and naturalization of (mostly white) settlers and the societies built in our image. While theories of monolingualism have primarily worked to explain the relationships between language, ethnicity, and culture in the European context, the anglophone settler colonies of the Americas provide a related but distinct site through which monolingualism can and should also be theorized. Monolingualism plays a crucial role in consolidating and expanding the settler society. It is critical to managing the distinctness of racialized populations and producing their relationships to the state and to the territory that it claims. As I've argued elsewhere, monolingualism undergirds the multiculturalisms that are imagined to distinguish settler colonies from European nation-states (“Elimination”; Translingual Poetics)—and yet, there is not much scholarly interest in accounting for these tensions and contradictions, or in providing a descriptive account of the monolingualisms that have evolved here (and that often precede their European counterparts).Footnote ² I would like to see this change!

As this is a Theories and Methodologies cluster, I want to propose two theoretical approaches to monolingualism—two modes of structural critique—that are particularly pertinent to the anglophone North American settler colonies, and that might contribute to the theorization of monolingualism more broadly: dispossession and biopolitics. In drawing on these theoretical tools, my goal is not to extend their reach to enfold the new domain of language, bringing it within their grasp. Rather, I'm interested in how attention to the monolingual serves to transform these analytic categories, opening them to new possible uses. First, to approach monolingualism as an ongoing process of settler colonial dispossession is to highlight how discourses of possession—about whom the nation belongs to, and who belongs to the nation—don't just circulate in language; these discourses are structured in relation to a particular language. Ideas about property and possession are important to analyses of monolingualism offered by Yasemin Yildiz, Jacques Derrida, and others—how might these be brought into conversation with the critiques of the “possessive logics” that structure settler colonialism, as they are described by the Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson (xii)? How might they be discussed in relation to the “expansive dispossession” that the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg theorist and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes as structuring settler colonialism? To theorize monolingualism in relation to dispossession does not require that we start thinking of languages as inert objects to be owned; instead, this approach highlights practices and processes of claims making, as well as practices and processes of Indigenous removal and erasure. Analysis of monolingualism allows us to name these processes, to contest their naturalization and perpetuation, and to disrupt the normative accounts and images of who rightfully possesses and belongs to these settler societies and the territories that they claim.

The second theoretical approach I'll suggest is biopolitics. Although the critiques of Michel Foucault's work in this area with respect to colonialism are well known, biopolitics has been used by theorists including Scott Lauria Morgensen, Audra Simpson (Haudenosaunee), and Alexander Weheliye to illuminate important aspects of settler colonialism. Building on their work, I suggest that biopolitics is particularly useful for theorizing monolingualism in settler colonial contexts because it provides a vocabulary and methodology through which to understand the modes of population management that are accomplished in and through monolingualism. As Lordedana Polezzi and Rey Chow have each shown, biopolitics makes it possible to analyze the ways that languages can be made vulnerable to death or stimulated into ongoing life. Within the context of settler colonialism, the biopolitics of language is a uniquely tense and dynamic site of population management, but biopolitics is also useful because this account of power and governmentality insists that the management of populations is never entirely successful or consistent. It therefore allows us to avoid the dangers of what Bernard C. Perley (Maliseet) calls “mortuary linguistics,” or accounts of language extinction and death that totalize genocide and entrench settler colonialism, even while seeming to oppose it (140). Biopolitics makes it possible to highlight the vitality of languages, what Édouard Glissant evocatively describes as their “sparkle,” their endless capacity for change, development, and endurance (98). In a surprising way, biopolitics readily admits “the inexhaustible motion of the scintillations of languages, heaving dross and inventions, dominations and accords, deathly silences and irrepressible explosions” that we teachers of language and literature still struggle to embrace in our broad-based preference for the “elitist practice[s]” where we remain experts, in control (101, 100).

Neither of these approaches constitutes a complete or definitive theory of monolingualism as it emerges in a settler colonial context, but both are intended as provocations to further analysis. The processes of monolingualization that structure the history and present of anglophone North America have been so significant and so violent that to theorize monolingualism without recourse to this region, and to theorize this region without regard to its dominant linguistic ideology is a shocking abdication of scholarship—but one that is as mundane and unremarkable as monolingualism itself.

Let's begin with a discussion of dispossession. In her own influential theorization of monolingualism, Yildiz explains that within the monolingual paradigm speakers are “imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their mother tongue” (2). “Through this possession,” she explains, they are “organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation” (2). For Yildiz, a “premise” of monolingualism is that “a language is the property of a particular group.” She describes two forms that critiques of monolingualism tend to take: either they contest the dominant notion of who possesses the language, or they offer an “ethical injunction to transcend proprietary thinking vis-à-vis language(s)” (42). A key example of the second critique is Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. This playful dialogue-cum-autobiography repeats different versions of the statement “Yes, I only have one language, yet it is not mine” (2). Derrida draws a distinction between having a language (being able to speak it) and possessing a language (being identified as a proper, natural, recognized, authorized, or expected speaker of it). Having clarified this difference, he explains that “it is possible to be monolingual … and speak a language that is not one's own” (5). Although Derrida draws on the works of postcolonial theorists and includes autobiographical descriptions of his childhood in Algeria, his argument defaults to a universalizing critique: that language in general is unpossessable. However, his insights about the ways that language is imagined as a property, and specifically as a property of which one is “deprived,” seem significantly more fruitful (61). Given how persistently languages are discussed in terms of possession and dispossession in scholarly and vernacular contexts, it makes sense to connect the logics of possession articulated in discussions of monolingualism with the increasingly prominent discourses of dispossession that shape both Indigenous critique and the study of settler colonialism. Moreover, linguistic deprivation forms the grounding of the monolingual in North America: despite high levels of bi- and multilingualism in both countries, vast swaths of the Canadian and United States populations are comprised of people whose ancestors were dispossessed of their languages.

Although its common-sense definition may suggest otherwise, dispossession doesn't just refer to the transfer of property from one person or group to another. Within Indigenous critical theory, it describes the transformation of something into property as it is transferred to the control of a particular group. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains, dispossession is “a strategic structure” of settler colonialism (12). She uses the term “expansive dispossession” to describe the structural practices of removal and erasure aimed at eliminating all evidence of ongoing Indigenous political orders. Disrupting the transmission of Indigenous languages is one such practice; it is an important technique for erasing “the political orders and relationships housed within Indigenous bodies that attach [Indigenous people's] bodies to [their] land” (42). In this way, linguistic dispossession combines with and reinforces other techniques including physical displacement, the disruption of family relationships, the breakup of communities, and the breakdown of cultural ties. Attention to language can help to bring this expansive structure into view: discussion of specific techniques of monolingualization practiced by Canada and the United States (we might think of residential and boarding schools, adoption schemes, the contemporary weaponization of “care,” or mass incarceration) helps us to see how the settler state works to disrupt Indigenous communities at specific historical moments and over time, eliminating their political orders to secure settler dominance and control. Looking at languages vividly demonstrates how the settler state attacks and attempts to erase Indigenous societies, building its new society in their place and then naturalizing its own existence.

While discussions of child removal and language loss are fortunately becoming more common, the less frequent cases where Indigenous languages were (and are) learned and taught can also raise important questions about possession and dispossession. As a number of theorists have shown, the codification, transcription, and teaching of Indigenous languages tend not to produce widespread support for Indigenous nationhood or territorial claims, as the European model of monolingualism would lead us to expect. Rather, as Sarah Rivett demonstrates, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Christian missionaries understood their practices of transcribing Indigenous languages into written forms as a process that would force the languages and their speakers “to submit to a European-derived grammatical rule” (10). Similarly, in their study of bilingual education for Indigenous students in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Bayley J. Marquez (Santa Ynez Band Chumash) and Juliet Rose Kunkel show how white settler educators worked to “accumulate, inhabit, and weaponize Indigenous languages,” positioning these languages as objects of white expertise and possession (461–62). Thus, while some of the best-known theories of monolingualism reject the framing of languages as property, stepping aside from the European framework shows that monolingualism is indeed intimately connected to dispossession. This is not to say that languages are property, but to acknowledge that within a structure of expansive dispossession, language ideologies play a crucial role in structuring possessive logics. They determine what can be possessed and by whom, who is dispossessed, and who emerges as a possessor.

Monolingualism is more than just an unintended consequence of settler colonial dispossession; it is a key part of the structure. In the teaching of languages and of cultural texts, we ought to be pushing our students (and ourselves) to ask what these texts reveal about linguistic possession and dispossession. How do these texts construct or reflect ideas about linguistic ownership? In what ways do they demonstrate awareness of the linguistic ideologies within which they are embedded? These are questions with surprisingly broad applicability, but they could have much greater uptake.

Now let's turn to biopolitics. If monolingualization played and still plays a crucial role in the shaping and building of populations, then monolingualism is critical to the “calculated management of life” through which Foucault defines this concept (Introduction 140). To trace the histories of monolingualism as population management is to write a longer, fuller history of biopolitics than Foucault himself managed, or perhaps envisioned. While there is a small amount of scholarly work on the biopolitics of language, notably by Chow and Polezzi, this has yet to be meaningfully connected with the important studies of the biopolitics of settler colonialism by Morgensen, Audra Simpson, Weheliye, and Dale C. Spencer and Raven Sinclair (Ótiskewápíwskew), among others. But there are good reasons to draw these bodies of scholarship into dialogue: as Eve Haque notes with respect to Canada, and as Jonathan Rosa and Nelson Flores claim in regard to the United States, population management has historically been, and still often is, accomplished on the terrain of language. In both countries, racial orders of difference and belonging are established and articulated through language, in service of the ongoing project of white settler nation-building.

However, to view monolingualism exclusively as a technique of state power is to cede too much ground to the dominant, ideological, and state-based version of the monolingual, and to misstate Foucault's account of the operation of power. Monolingualism cannot be conceived strictly as a mode of repression, grinding downward from on high, even if state power is an important part of the story. What of the other ways in which languages and their speakers are solicited, sustained, and multiplied over time? Is it possible to theorize monolingualisms without positioning the state as sole or primary actor and agent? The state is not the only entity whose work is “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order,” to borrow another phrase from Foucault (“Right” 43). To fully examine the biopolitics of language, we must attend not only to monolingualization as a form of repression and death but also to the ways that languages slip beyond or exceed attempts at their management. We need to look at the complex ways that languages are taken up and made to circulate. If the work of biopolitics is to make live and let die, then we must take seriously that languages can occupy either position, and place greater emphasis on their animacy and liveliness as a counter to the settler colonial complacency that often arises in response to accounts of Indigenous genocide.

The linguist Bernard C. Perley has argued that it is important to move away from the overemphasis on death that animates scholarly discussions about language and to find new metaphors through which to describe practices of language sustenance, revitalization, and reawakening. Perley highlights the dominant metaphors of “language death,” “endangerment,” “extinction,” and “vanishing,” pushing these to their logical conclusions in order to examine their unintended meanings and consequences. At stake in these metaphors, he argues, is “the underlying ideology of today's language experts: specifically, first, the long history of linguistic colonialism has forced many native communities to speak (as well as curse in) the colonial languages; and, second, today's rhetoric also masks the privileged status of expert knowledge, as experts promote saving languages through documentation” (140). In other words, metaphors of death, extinction, and vanishing tend to reinforce the need for “salvation,” which often comes from outside the community, and is continuous with the source of the threat to the language—with colonialism itself. We scholar-teachers of language and literature like to think of ourselves as being on the side of languages because of our long apprenticeships and deep learning. But Perley (like Glissant) suggests that our expertise can stop us from noticing important new kinds of language use. If correctness and propriety have historically disciplined our approaches to the teaching and learning of language and literature, biopolitics can offer a surprising and useful redirection of our focus. It can show us how, as they say in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way.”

More than mere tools of biopolitics or targets of biopolitical control, languages proliferate in unexpected ways. In contemporary poetry, for example, we see languages used in ways that do not respect the purity of the abstract code, but that offer opportunities for speakers to experiment. In her recent poem “Settler—Anishinaabekwe—Noli Turbare,” the poet Liz Howard (settler-Anishinaabekwe, as the title of her poem states) includes numerous words in Anishinaabemowin, and even some in Latin. The poem ends as follows:

Howard's use of Anishinaabemowin can be understood as working to keep a line of communication open for herself and other speakers. The lines “Boozhoo. / Aaniin. / Hello” fulfill what Roman Jakobson describes as the phatic function of language: one possible translation is “Hello. / Hello. / Hello.” Because this endeavor is enclosed within a discussion of what is “only just alive” and what is “over,” the poem points toward the histories of monolingualization that would close the channel, and that form the ground condition of its lyric speech (and of most readers’ engagement). Howard highlights the difficulty of maintaining communication, but she still does it. As we read across her collection, we are asked to draw relationships between family history, illness, tragedy, and the rich propulsion of language, English and Anishinaabemowin both.

Poems like Howard's suggest that whether we speak one language or many is a matter less of virtue than of circumstance. It is a matter of where we are positioned at this moment of “mortuary sunrise,” amid the histories and present conditions of dispossession. It is a matter of what has been made to live, and what has been left to languish. Her poem asks that we cultivate an attentiveness to the kinds of relationships that we have to languages, to the many possible modes of living with and among them. This might provide an escape from the condemnation of monolingualism that falls heaviest on those who have least. It might also provide the possibility of describing an array of relations to language that exceed the narrow bounds of monolingualist possession.

Howard's poem also challenges the standard-language paradigm that continues to undergird and inform literary studies, and that remains stubbornly structured by the homologous categories of nation, language, and culture that derive from the monolingual paradigm so crucially defined by Yildiz. I ask not so much that we oppose this paradigm, although that is valuable and necessary work. More importantly, I ask for further scholarship akin to Yildiz's: Can we endeavor to describe the other monolingualisms operative alongside the one that she has theorized, and can we offer accounts of how, or to what extent monolingualism structures life as it is lived elsewhere, and especially here, in North America? As I hope I have shown, these monolingualisms are not simply extensions or modifications of a preexisting European template; they are significantly different from their better-theorized counterparts. In analyzing these monolingualisms, we can better understand the structures that shape the worlds in which we live.