Chapter one considers the language politics of Scotland, in relation to claims for Scottish postcoloniality, as a way into considering the work of Scottish writers James Kelman and Tom Leonard. In their essays, as well as their prose and poetry respectively, both probe the evident distance between the written norms of Standard English and the Scots language-world of white working-class Glasgow, finding in the dynamics between writing and speech a synecdoche of the class system. As this chapter argues, Leonard and Kelman both in different ways draw on postcolonial literature, anticolonial politics, and Chomskyan linguistic thought, and claim solidarity in particular with Caribbean and black British writers, seeking on the grounds of language to reconcile a committed literary localism with an expansive anticolonial internationalism.

The Conclusion discusses the work of French-Norwegian poet and multimedia artist Caroline Bergvall, which challenges the ways in which English is employed in the contemporary moment to patrol the borders of national belonging, and makes the case for its radical openness to other kinds of language. Returning to arguments made in the Introduction and throughout, the Conclusion finishes by turning to the contemporary moment – the run-up to Britain exiting the European Union, and the UK Government’s 2018 Integrated Communities Green Paper – and political and popular discourses that focus on language in the context of anxieties about border security and national belonging. By way of response, it restates the importance of literature’s resistant capabilities, to follow Bergvall in trying to imagine ‘a future perfect of English as language practice’.

Starting with Vahni Capildeo’s poetry, and also considering Sam Selvon’s novels and short stories, the Introduction suggests how writers’ everyday experiences of multilingualism give form to their work and how English signifies as a language of power and exclusion in their writing, but also as a form of language open to critical reshaping. Turning to think about the politics of language as a context for literature, it considers how English has been asserted and contested as a signifier of national belonging in Britain, in political and popular discourses, in education and debates over citizenship throughout the past 50 years – from Enoch Powell to the aftermath of the 2011 riots. The Introduction surveys scholarship on literary multilingualism and argues for the value of bringing together writers diverse in race, class, and ethnicity under the rubric of ‘bad English’.

Chapter six reflects on the relationship of language to regimes of border security, beginning by considering the asylum seeker as the preeminent multilingual figure of our times, endangered not least by the monolingualist ideology of the nation state and its enactment in asylum law. This chapter discusses a range of literary texts – the Refugee Tales project, James Kelman’s Translated Accounts: A Novel, and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North – which conjure asylum as a regime of ‘hostile language’. As this chapter argues, both Kelman’s and Chikwava’s linguistic experimentalism operates to make a self-enclosed language-world of paranoia, confusion, fear, and grief, constantly threatened with its own violent appropriation, which satirises and upends the asylum system’s demands for transparent testimony in an English that is supposedly infinitely capable of transmitting meaning without loss.

Chapter five considers the novelists Leila Aboulela and Xiaolu Guo, for whose women protagonists translation is a permanent and inevitable state of existence, and English a linguistic medium to be travelled into and out of. Aboulela writes in the conscious recognition of a global Islam in which the majority do not speak the language of the Qur’an, Arabic, and about Muslim communities in Britain in which multilingualism and transnational connectivity are everyday facts. For Guo, the back-and-forth transit between English and Chinese is at the centre of a ‘multimodal’ way of seeing in which all kinds of systems of meaning – linguistic, visual, filmic – are in dynamic, mutually energising relation and tension with one another. Comparing these two very different writers as examples of what Waïl Hassan calls ‘translational literature’ reveals two very different conceptualisations of the relationship of the individual to language and the nature of translation. Aboulela, regarding translation as fidelity, finds earthbound acts of translation inevitably falling short, and imagines spaces beyond the constraints of human signification and exegesis. Guo, seeing translation as iconoclastic and transformative, invests in it as a form of self-dissolution and self-remaking with individually and collectively radical creative potential.

Chapter three discusses the polyglot poetry and prose of British-Scottish-Asian novelist Suhayl Saadi and poet and multimedia artist Raman Mundair. As this chapter argues, both writers stage scenes of linguistic prosthesis and performance throughout their writing, treating languages not as fully interior systems of meaning but as samples, sounds, and fragments, reflecting theorist Rey Chow’s insistence that for the postcolonial subject, the encounter with ‘language as a foreign object’, with which one must ‘wrestle in order to survive’, is to be able to recognise more fully its reality as ‘prosthetic’. As both Saadi’s work and Mundair’s is at pains to point out – for example, in Mundair’s poetry in Shetland Scots – despite nativist fantasies to the contrary, no particular form of language has an essential relationship to the inner self. This chapter explores, in this context, how Saadi and Mundair navigate questions of linguistic authenticity or inauthenticity, of experimental or commodified, radical or self-exoticised multilingualisms, and argues that each models a politics of language predicated on the denial of all such fixed distinctions.

Chapter four focuses on British Asian poet Daljit Nagra, whose poetry plays – often riskily – with ideas of linguistic authenticity and performance, and the racialised voice. As this chapter argues, his highly stylised British Punjabi poetic personae play out self-consciously against a backdrop of British linguistic racism, from the ‘racist television programming’ of the 1970s and 1980s to contemporary stigmatisation of South Asian languages in political and popular discourse. Nagra casts his work as that of ‘reclamation’, reinstituting complexity, depth, and ambivalence to performed voices that are nevertheless works of mimicry, haunted by the legacies of British racism. The constant question in Nagra’s poetry, this chapter suggests, is that of linguistic provenance: where words come from, what histories they carry with them, the potentiality and peril of using language which is in Bakhtin’s terms always ‘half someone else’s’. Nagra’s poems unsettle English, with a particular emphasis on how the English language, and the contemporary multilingualism against which it is often antagonistically pitted, are equally products of a shared colonial and imperial history.