THE SENTINELLE AFFAIR: A STUDY IN MULTILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES

Rhetorical historiography needs to disrupt existing archival arrangements of language differences. These arrangements preserve an ideology of linguistic modernity that effaces and oversimplifies the complex multilingual practices of actual language users. By disrupting the principles of selection and arrangement that make up an archive’s evidential value, rhetorical researchers can undermine ideologies of linguistic modernity and can recover an array of rhetorical resistance strategies that multilinguals have historically taken towards the political and socioeconomic dominance of English. This project does this disruptive work by analyzing the multisitedness of Mount St. Charles, a Catholic high school in Rhode Island. In its original planning and construction, Mount St. Charles was viewed on one hand as part of a system of English-language diocesan high schools and on the other hand as part of a system of French-language écoles des hautes études. The project thus constructs Mount St. Charles as a site of interaction for local linguistic and material economies through which the socioeconomic value of French literacy and English literacy were negotiated in relation to each other. The project opens a space in which researchers in rhetoric and composition can begin to write translingual histories of language difference in the United States. Using the disruptive and multisited methods of this project, other researchers can critically engage the historical suppression of multilingual identifications in the construction of whiteness. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the tireless support of my co-major professors, Dr. Nedra Reynolds and Dr. Caroline Gottschalk-Druschke. I hope that seeing the development of my thought has been as rewarding for them as their guidance and advice has been helpful for me. Dr. Kenneth Rogers first directed me to the archives of the Emmanuel d’Alzon Library at Assumption College. These archives—both the collections of the French Institute and the USJB collections held there—were central to this dissertation. I would not have embarked on this project without the encouragement of Dr. John Trimbur. Our conversations over the years have had an enormous impact on my ability to think translingually. The influence of those conversations is on every page of this dissertation. Many scholars and archivists of Franco-American history guided me in my attempts to navigate the multilingual seas of French-English relations in North America. In particular, the work of Robert Perreault, former archivist for the Association Canado-Américaine (ACA), was helpful to my analysis of Daignault’s writing style in chapter three. Dr. Leslie Choquette, director of the French Institute at Assumption College, guided me in my attempts to understand the ideology of la survivance. Dr. Choquette and Nina Tsantinis, the archivist for the French Institute, pointed me to the Paul P. Chassé Papers, which form the basis of chapter four. Elizabeth Maisey—the archivist in charge of processing the Union St. Jean Baptiste Archives for the d’Alzon Library—arranged permission for me to photograph five of the scrapbooks in the USJB Archives in their entirety. I cannot describe how important

Now, standing in this library again after a twenty-year absence, I am struck by the fact that this newspaper-whose fate speaks directly to my family's language and immigration history and to my own acquisition of monolingual English-was in a flat file right over my head, while I mused over New Critical interpretations of e.e. cummings's poetry. Today, arguments from the 1920s advocating French language instruction in New England's Catholic schools might seem rather esoteric, but they cannot be more so than critical essays tracing the signification of typographical I do not mean to imply that the Sentinellist movement in and of itself had such a major 2 impact on the continent. Rather, the ideology of the Sentinellists was one strain of a proto-Québecois nationalism that began to emerge at the turn of the twentieth century. The ideas espoused by Daignault and his colleagues were ideas that were being generated by a conservative nationalist movement centered in Québec and affiliated with the conservative L'Action Française in Montréal. These nationalists were themselves influenced by a similar organization in France with the same name, L'Action Française, which itself would also be banned by the Vatican, and which was sympathetic to the royalist (and fascist) politics of Charles Maurras. The arguments that I claim had far-reaching consequences, then, were not Sentinellist arguments per se, but rather were part of a larger discourse about French nationalism both in North America and in Europe. This larger discourse resulted in the transformations of a neoliberal Québecois identity later in the twentieth century which would have major implications for French-speaking populations beyond the Québec border. contexts in which it is used. Thus Harris's history seems to move out of a disciplinary paradigm undergirded by a monolingual English ideology and toward a paradigm informed by language difference-in practical terms, informed by the multilingual character of American students. By the end of A Teaching Subject, the question "What is English?" must be answered in an American multilingual context; that is to say, by asking what English is in relation to other languages.
To that end, in characterizing Min-Zhan Lu's contributions to the study of error in writing, Harris recapitulates her argument in these words: We do not teach a contextless Standard Written English…but a specific kind of writing closely tied to the particular aims and needs of university work. We thus need to recognize there are other Englishes, tied to other contexts or communities, which are not simply underdeveloped or less public versions of academic discourse, but that work toward different ends and whose use may express a competing or oppositional politics (89).
It stands to reason that failing (or refusing) such recognition is equivalent not to avoiding the political altogether, but rather to tacitly endorsing another's politics, though a politics more difficult to detect because it enjoys the benefits of having been made into what is " real" or "natural." Yet, in his afterword, Harris fails to come to the ! 10 same conclusions as Min-Zhan Lu. He argues that multimodality-rather than multilingualism or translingualism-is the next logical step in the history of composition.
Significantly, the Dartmouth Conference-which Harris uses as a point of origin for tracing the disciplinary development of composition in the US-is also the point of origin for studying the relationship between composition studies and the "Sentinelle Affair." One of the consultants at that conference, the American sociolinguist Joshua Fishman, delivered a paper titled "The Depth and Breadth of English in the United States," in which he cited the "Sentinelle Affair" as part of a history of bilingual language instruction in the US which English-only instruction has suppressed (48). Fishman's paper is an important source in John Trimbur's "The Dartmouth Conference and the Geohistory of the Native Speaker " (163). Together, so far as I have been able to determine, Trimbur and Fishman are the only two sources that mention the "Sentinelle Affair" in the literature of composition and rhetoric. I argue that such exclusions of the study of writing in languages other than English is part of the work of an ideology of English monolingualism, an exclusion that has received scant attention in the past fifty years of scholarship in composition studies.
It may be helpful here to offer a definition of what I mean by ideology in general and by a language ideology in particular. In Language Ideologies, linguistic anthropologist Kathryn Woolard describes ideology as "power-linked discourse" (7).
According to her, ideology has to do with systems of "subjective representations, beliefs, [and] ideas" with which we make sense of the world (5). More than mere ! 11 consciousness or culture, however, ideology is more like consciousness-in-context, as it represents "the experience or interests of a particular social position" as though it is "a universally true" way of thinking (6). In "the struggle to acquire or maintain power," ideology offers the interests of one social position as being representative of the entire social context, thus covering over material differences or conflicts through "distortion, illusion, error, mystification, or rationalization" (7). Ideology, thus, can be understood as the means by which the unequal exercise of power is represented in social relations so that it does not appear to be in fact an unequal exercise of power but rather a natural relation.
Extending Woolard's conceptualization of ideology to questions of language, anthropologist Paul Kroskrity articulates a language ideology specifically as the "perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group " (8). In the case of the Sentinelle Affair, for example, the educated Franco-American élite disseminated literature to other Franco-Americans about the necessity of preserving French, at a time when the demand for English was growing among non-English speakers. This valuation of French on the part of the 3 élite can be understood as necessary for protecting their own socioeconomic interests; their social position as an ethnic minority élite was predicated on the maintenance of the ethnic minority as a linguistic minority who needed the representation of an educated élite. Likewise, Anglo advocates of English sought to extend standard English literacy to all Americans as an instrument of upward mobility, but one of the See, for example, the pamphlet Mount St. Charles / Oeuvre Nationale, described briefly 3 below and discussed in more detail later in this dissertation.
! 12 consequences was that bilingual speakers whose English literacy was deemed substandard were sorted in the workplace accordingly, and they could look to their own poor language performances as justification for their social position. Attending 4 to historical moments when the issue of language is explicitly addressed-when "contending groups" are forced to articulate what they believe language is, what it is for, what it can do and how it should do it-enables me to refute "the myth of the sociopolitically disinterested language user or the possibility of un-positioned knowledge, even of one's own language" (Kroskrity 8).
Understanding language ideology thus, as the explanations that social actors construct to make sense of the socially situated character of their own language practices, Woolard contends that the goal of analyzing language ideologies is to identify "the way they transform the material reality they comment on " (11). In other words, while claiming to be merely describing or reflecting a natural order of languages in relation to each other, language ideologies in fact do the work of making those relationships. As Woolard has it, studies of language ideologies call attention to "the performative aspect of ideology under its constitutive guise: ideology creates and acts in a social world while it masquerades as a description of that world " (11). This constitutive work is carried out through institutionally sanctioned uses of language, The labor politics of the French in New England was shifting at this time, as the non-4 English-speaking working class was experiencing increased instability in an economy shifting towards increased professionalization and the scientific management techniques of Taylorism. Education in English became a priority in order to train a newly emergent "professional managerial class" of workers in the industrial economy (Ohmann 39), making obsolete the once-respectable career path of Franco-Americans who had entered the factories as manual laborers and enjoyed a stable working-class career with only a primary school education. See Gerstle, Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960(Princeton UP, 2002. ! 13 such as the educative language of schooling or the adjudicative language of the law, both of which "arrogate truth and value to some linguistic strategies and forms while ruling others out of bounds " (15). Kroskrity notes, though, that this constitutive work is not carried on by one social class at the expense of another. Rather, he observes that "even those who do not control the standard will often manifest compliance with its authority," identifying themselves with the very standards that dominate them, participating in the very processes that link language with social class, so that standard languages take on a "dual role" as "embodiments of both national identity and stateendorsed social inequality" (28).

! Language Ideologies and Archival Arrangements
In addition to schooling and the law, another of the institutionally sanctioned uses of language is the institutional archive. Like schooling and the law, the arrangement of the institutional archive "arrogate[s] truth and value to some linguistic strategies and forms while ruling others out of bounds" (Woolard 15 Island on May 7, 1900, and headquartered in Woonsocket, about one-fifth of a mile west of the Woonsocket Harris Public Library. Its incorporation charter states that the society's purpose is "to render mutual aid and assistance to its sick and disabled ! 14 members and to provide for the dependents of deceased members" (Quintal 4). In other words, the society provided accident and life insurance to its members and their families, paid through annual dues and revenue generated from various social activities. At its height in the 1950s, the USJB had over 78,000 members (Quintal 64) and $10.6 million in assets (Quintal 65). According to the February 1927 issue of L'Union, the official USJB newspaper, the society reported almost $3.4 million in assets, roughly equivalent to $46.5 million today.
If the arrangement of the Woonsocket Public Library collections of the 1980s excluded French, the arrangement of the USJB archives of the 1920s put French on an equal footing with English. The USJB was built on a model of the francophone national society, a hybrid social, cultural and financial organization founded by the French as a way to protect their interests against the English in the United States and Canada. The first of these national societies was the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste, founded in Montréal in 1834, just a few short years before the 1837 French rebellion against English rule in Canada and the British Parliament's subsequent Act of Union, passed in 1840. Recognizing their emerging second-class status in Canada,and 5 perceiving the need to protect their own interests from British political and economic hegemony, the French founded national societies and the first credit unions (caisses The Act of Union joined Lower Canada and Upper Canada, the former being largely French 5 but more sparsely populated, and the latter being largely English and more densely populated. The Act was the British Parliament's attempt to eradicate the French presence in Canada via political and economic assimilation. It was drafted after the recommendations of Lord Durham in his infamous Report on British North America, in which he called for the political, economic and cultural absorption of the French by the English as the only way to unify the two territories into a single British-controlled province. populaires), both of which catered to people who had been rejected by the banks (Chartier 115).
In addition to its financial operations the USJB, as a francophone national society, recognized its responsibility to preserve French culture from English assimilation. It did this by producing and distributing a national imaginary very much in line with Anderson's notion of an imagined community. That is to say, French nationalism in North America was produced by the discourse of an educated élite and distributed through various institutional means, such as the French Catholic parish, the French-language press and the French national society. This discourse was designed to instill in its people (les nôtres) a vision of a past, a present and a future common to all people of French descent in the New World. The efficacy of this vision rested on the élite's ability to persuade les nôtres that it was their duty to identify with what it meant to be French in the midst of Anglo domination. Thus Adolphe Robert, the president of the Association Canado-American (ACA), another national society located in New Hampshire, could write in 1936 of a "scattered" (éparpillée) French-Canadian "nation" that encompassed the entire extent of North America and that shared "an identical history" of struggle against "the same enemies" ).
Robert perceived the mission of the ACA to be very much in line with the Sociéte ! 16 Saint-Jean-Baptiste of Montréal: to join all French-speaking peoples in North America in "solidarity" against the forces of assimilation . 6 Crucially for our purposes, French national societies helped to produce French nationalist discourse by building archives that documented the history of the French presence in North America and that likewise documented that the French would be just as capable of modernization and development as the English, if only they had the ability to self-determine as a people. The USJB archives are one of the United States's best repositories of such materials on the French in North America. In 1908, the society acquired the library of Major Edmond Mallet, a Civil War veteran and Inspector General for the Indian Affairs Bureau under Grover Cleveland (Quintal 26).
The Mallet library collected thousands of items from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries focusing on the French and the Native Americans of North America ("Edmond Mallet"). In addition to this library, the USJB collected thousands of printed ephemera-newspapers, personal correspondence, booklets, pamphlets, drawings, and photographs-and pasted them into a series of thirty-three large scrapbooks that, taken together, document the establishment of the French in New Although originally founded with a similar vision of francophone survival, the USJB would 6 emerge in the 1920s as a more moderate organization in comparison to the ACA. While the ACA actively sought to build a cross-border French "nation" that encompassed the United States and Québec and was impervious to Anglicization, the USJB struck a more conciliatory note with English America. ! 18 reveal important insights into the "uneasy settlement of English in the United States" (Trimbur "Linguistic" 166).
These five scrapbooks contain over two thousand artifacts. These artifacts consist mostly of newspaper clippings from over two dozen newspapers in English and French, arranged chronologically. For example, page 193 of scrapbook XVI, the third volume of La Controverse du Rhode Island, contains three articles published between April 6-7, 1928, from three different newspapers, two English and one French, all concerning the announcement by the Vatican that Elphège J. Daignault and his followers were to be excommunicated by the Bishop of the Diocese of Providence ! 20 imaginary; 2) by justifying or protesting the social, political, or economic status of one language in relation to other languages, and then making arguments for or against certain institutional programs based on that status; and 3) by using monolingual ideologies to make arguments about the "natural" meanings and contexts for language in the construction of a social reality. By this third practice, the making of arguments about "natural" meanings and contexts, I have in mind a series of legal decisions handed down from the Rhode Island Superior Court and the Rhode Island Supreme Court resolving the civil complaints the Sentinellists made against the Diocese of Providence. These decisions are the basis for my discussion of the value of English in chapter two, as they put into practice a particular ideology of English monolingualism in the interpretation of corporate law.
In considering the way archival arrangements are informed by language ideologies, it is noteworthy that these scrapbooks are arranged in such a way that the Sentinelle Affair is isolated from the rest of Franco-American history and attributed almost entirely to the work of its central figure, Elphège J. Daignault. This arrangement preserves the official institutional stance of the USJB against La Sentinelle. As producers of French nationalist discourse, the USJB leaders of the 1920s-Elie Vézina and Eugene Jalbert-were anxious to purify the organization of versions of French nationalism that were critical of church and state structures in the US political context. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, one of the central tactics of the Sentinellists was to challenge the centralization policies of the Catholic Church education system in the United States. Sentinellists wanted to keep ! 21 the administration of French-language parishes in the hands of local pastors and their congregations as was the case for parishes in Québec. Sentinellists theorized that locally-controlled parishes would allow a French-language pastor (curé) and his French-language congregation to administer French language parochial schools and sacraments without interference. The bishop of the Diocese of Providence, William Hickey, was tasked with implementing national centralization policies that took control away from the curés and mandated English as the language of instruction in all schools. He thus became the immediate target for many Sentinellist criticisms.
The national Executive Committee of the USJB declared that La Sentinelle's criticisms of the Church hierarchy were counter-productive to Franco-American interests. They issued a "Declaration and Protestation" against La Sentinelle, signed by the entire Executive Committee ("Declaration et Protestation"). At the same time, however, thirty-one USJB regional chapters passed resolutions supporting La Sentinelle and protesting the actions of the Executive Committee in taking its public stand. The USJB as a national society was conflicted: the discourse produced by the élite Executive Committee accommodated the bishop's centralized education policies, but the membership was not unified in this accommodationist stance. The selection and arrangement of the USJB's archive on the Sentinelle Affair seeks to justify the position of the Executive Committee in support of the diocese and in opposition to Sentinellism.
The evidential value of the archive-consisting of the combination of the content, structure and context of the materials in relation to each other (Millar 9)-is ! 22 heavily weighted toward the conclusion that the "Sentinelle Affair" was largely the result of one person's political agitation. The archive does this by suppressing the possibility that 1) Sentinellism could be deeply rooted in the very history of the French presence in North America, and 2) that Sentinellism was a legitimate representation of French cultural identity informed by that presence. Where the archive does acknowledge these points, it allows them validity only in the Canadian context, not in the US context. That is to say, the archive disallows the possibility that a virulent strain of American nationalism could be connected to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the United States in any language other than English. The idea of a French nationalism supported by the Church and hostile to English was relegated to Québec, despite the protests of Sentinellists that this version of French nationalism was an integral part of the history of the United States. The most glaring evidence of such suppression is the strategic inclusion and exclusion from the scrapbooks of actual articles from La Sentinelle. The scrapbooks contain only twenty-seven articles from La Sentinelle in all, six articles published in November and December 1924, and twenty-one published in the first three months of 1927. Other than these two brief periods, the voice of La Sentinelle is silent in the institutional record.
Rhetorical historiography must take into account the way the evidential value of the archive enabled and constrains the kinds of knowledge that can be produced based on these strategies of inclusion and exclusion. If we analyze the selection and arrangement of articles from La Sentinelle within the USJB archive, we see that the isolation and suppression of Daignault's arguments were an attempt on the part of the ! 23 USJB leadership to protect its precarious political position in relation to an assimilationist church and state. A brief comparison of the different contexts of 1924 and 1927 will illustrate how the USJB used La Sentinelle to protect its own position in the face of assimilationist and English Only pressures.
On January 18, 1927, Bishop Hickey published a pastoral letter addressed to all Catholics in his diocese. In that letter, he lamented the "unfortunate agitation on the part of a small number of a certain element of our population" and prayed that the publishers of La Sentinelle and all their supporters would "abandon this road which must surely lead to the loss of membership in the Church." The letter seems to be a warning to all who may sympathize with the protests to abandon the cause or face Church sanctions. What makes this letter important to our understanding of the suppression of La Sentinelle from the USJB archive is that L'Union, the USJB's official newspaper, published the pastoral letter in its February 15th edition ("Rome Parle"). This publication amounted to a tacit endorsement of the bishop's position and a repudiation of the Sentinellist protest. Most of the twenty-one La Sentinelle articles included in the USJB archive from this time period consist of criticisms of the USJB's publication of the letter. Thus, the purpose of including a dissenting voice in the institutional record seems to be only to justify the official position of the institution itself.
Interestingly, the inclusion of La Sentinelle articles from 1924 demonstrate a much different relationship between the newspaper and the USJB, coming as they do years before the Bishop began to take action against La Sentinelle. At that time, Mount It will be open to all and will be supported by men of the different races and different creeds. The spirit of parochialism will be stamped out" ("Hopes").
Two weeks later, Vézina wrote to the USJB Bureau General, advising them not to speak publicly about Hickey's article until the Bureau could discuss it at their next meeting. He writes, "I believe it is much wiser not to give any publicity to the Providence Visitor article; certainly there were misunderstandings that will be explained later. In the present circumstances, the motive behind all our actions should be caution" (Vézina). Certainly he felt some anxiety over his own participation in promoting the French nationalist aspects of the school. Moreover, Vézina's concern ! 25 stemmed from the fact that the bishop's comments confirmed a widespread suspicion in the Franco-American community that, despite the nationalist proclamations of leaders like Vézina himself, the high school was not going to be part of a Frenchlanguage school system, but was in fact being planned as a centralized high school that would assimilate non-English speakers using a curriculum in which English would be the language of instruction. Behind Vézina's caution, then, seems to lay a fear of betrayal-both his own betrayal of the Franco-American people for touting the school as well as the bishop's betrayal of him-and a fear that "the fruits of [Franco-American] sacrifices" were beginning to be usurped by a centralized diocesan authority. Oeuvre Nationale, a piece of Franco-American propaganda that unequivocally envisions Mount St. Charles as a "crown jewel" of the French-language school system in New England. The six La Sentinelle articles follow the inclusion of this booklet, as part of a section of news articles from many French and English newspapers in praise of the school. La Sentinelle, however, is not praising the school. Instead, it openly questions the motives of the bishop and reveals the underlying corporate structure that legally owns and administers the school. Daignault writes that Mount St. Charles "is the property of a civil corporation" whose board of directors is "composed of the Bishop, his grand Vicar, the curé of Precious Blood, a certain number of Brothers, and two members of the laity" (Juillet "Le Collège" 21 Nov 1924). The article argues that ! 26 the Bishop ultimately controls the naming of each person to this board of directors.
The school, then, is "quite simply the collège of the Bishop of the Diocese of Providence." Daignault further demands that the bishop respect the rights of parents to determine the course of their children's education, "the right to pray in the language of their parents; the ability to confess in their maternal language; and a spiritual direction that conforms to their particular ethnic sense." The lack of caution in these articles is noteworthy especially when considered in light of Vézina's specific call for caution in his letter to the USJB Bureau General.
It stands to reason that some part of what he feared the Bureau General might express was exactly what Daignault expressed in the pages of La Sentinelle. We might conclude that the only distinction between the position of the USJB and the position of La Sentinelle in 1924 was that the USJB occupied a discursive role more constrained by its politics than did La Sentinelle. Daignault was free to voice the very complaints that Vézina felt obligated to suppress among the members of the USJB Bureau General. By 1927, Daignault would bear the full consequences of his discursive choice -free speech over proscribed speech-as he was repudiated both by his Church and by the leading Franco-American fraternal benefit society of which he was a member, risking losing both his access to the sacraments of the Church, the Catholic path to heaven, as well as his life insurance policy.
The content, structure and context of the USJB archive thus preserves evidence of the Sentinelle Affair, but in the context of the conflicted historical identity of the USJB as a moderate Franco-American institution. If the material arrangement of an ! 27 archive is thus informed by ideology, it follows that in order to research a history of ideological struggle over language-as that struggle has been preserved in archival collections-I find myself working against the basic principles of archival arrangement, the principles of provenance and original order. In their description of the processing of the James Berlin Papers at Purdue University, Sammie L. Morris and Shirley K. Rose describe the importance that archivists place on preserving provenance and original order, as these principles secure the internal structure of the collection and the overall context in which archival documents must be interpreted.
The structure and context provided by the archive are foundational to what Laura Millar has called the "evidential value" (104) of the historical documents in the archive. Morris and Rose define provenance as the archivist's ability to establish the original creator of a document in order to ensure "the authenticity and integrity of the materials as evidence" (Morris and Rose 54). Morris and Rose define original order as the choices the original creator of the collection made in arranging the archive's materials (55).
Thus, Elizabeth Maisey, the archivist who is processing the USJB archive at Assumption College's d'Alzon Library, must attend to provenance and original order in maintaining the archive as a reliable source of evidence of the institutional life of its creator, the USJB. But in order for me to use this archive, I must consciously avoid using the terms set by the archive itself, terms which would compel me to write a history of a white ethnicity's inevitable struggle towards assimilation, a history that the USJB was helping to make. Instead, I am trying to tease out of the content, structure ! 28 and context of the USJB archive a history of difference that will allow composition scholars to dismantle the neat equations of language and nation that frame the master narratives of American pluralism, and that will allow us to see language practices as constitutive of rather than reflective of social inequality. This dismantling project requires me to hold the arrangement of the USJB archive-its provenance and original order-at arm's length, lest I find myself "practicing the discourse [I] intend to analyze" (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 339).

Re-contextualizing Composition's History
In "English Only and US College Composition," Bruce Horner and John Trimbur refer to "unidirectional English monolingualism" as a particular arrangement of the modern languages curriculum around the assumption that all language instruction has as its ultimate goal the mastery of spoken and written communication in English (605). They critique the "territorialization" of the modern languages in the departmental structure of the modern university (595), where the English department had sole control of the university's required composition courses. Horner and Trimbur note that histories of rhetoric and composition typically neglect to consider the discipline's relationship to languages other than English, taking for granted instead the institutional "affiliation" (595) of writing with English and communications as a natural point of departure for tracing the field's historical origins (see Berlin; Brereton Origins; Connors Composition; and Douglas for a few canonical works that take this location for granted). This historiographical approach has lead, for example, to the ! 29 identification of Harvard's implementation of a first-year writing requirement in 1874 as having initiated composition's modern history.
Composition's history, though, has been a function of the particular archives identified as rightfully belonging to it. That history has been dominated by the kinds of material Connors describes as our field-specific "Archive" ("Dreams" 17)-the composition textbooks, writing manuals, documentation of programs and course development, and samples of student writing that make up the field-specific materials of composition. More progressive histories have sought out these kinds of material in an attempt to document composition's "extracurriculum" (Ruggles Gere 79), various sites of writing instruction outside of university writing programs. Others have sought to counter the Harvard-centric historical narratives of composition's origins by looking at less-studied institutions like normal schools and historically black colleges (Donahue and Moon). Still, these approaches write composition's history in a way that naturalizes the ideology of unidirectional English monolingualism by viewing language difference only in terms of how it is valued by monolingual English language instruction: as error, as writing deficiency, and as poor language competence. This approach to writing composition's history fails to consider that the values that adhere to English could be in some important way relative to the presence of other languages and to the values attached to those languages in relation to English.
One tentative example might help to clarify what I have in mind here. The writing program at Wellesley College in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries has been written about in histories of composition and English studies (see Campbell ! 30 "Freshman";Garbus;Graff). These histories have relied on field-specific materials like published reports from Wellesley English faculty and the Wellesley department of English's annual President's Report. These documents have enabled composition historians to document the goal of English education in the Wellesley writing program as the moral improvement of students, training them through rhetorical education to "prudently" discern "moral truths" in working "for the good of the community" (Garbus 79). The curriculum moved from initial courses that taught women "to write clear, correct, well-constructed sentences" (Garbus 82) to advanced courses that trained women to participate in the public sphere through courses like Social Ideals in English Letters (Graff 83).
This attachment of English language instruction to moral development and engagement in the public sphere strikes me as a rather conventional way of thinking about English education--a conventional way perhaps made radical by its application to the education of women for participation in public life. Still, no composition historian seems to have pointed out the correlation between this way of thinking and that of British colonial educational policies in their territories of the nineteenth century. Colonial administrators sought to develop a civilized, English-speaking class of colonial subjects who could administer colonial territories in the periphery on behalf of the colonial powers in the metropolis (Pennycook Cultural 82 were found at Wellesley, then, must be viewed in part as an outgrowth of colonial policies for the regulation and exclusion of subjected peoples from the public sphere. The ideologies that inform such policies are not confined to the imperial relationship of the metropolis to the periphery. By re-contextualizing the Wellesley writing program in terms of the linguistic realities of the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States, we begin to see the goals of moral improvement for participation in a public sphere as part of a regime of linguistic and cultural purification in this country. The 1920s saw a rise in nativist sentiment in the United States as a reaction against the second wave of immigration, largely from Eastern and Southern Europe but also from Québec, over the previous four decades . Since the 1880s, nativists had sought to limit the influence of immigrant languages and cultures--similar to the Know Nothing movement against the Irish in the 1850s--leading to restricted immigration laws in the early twentieth century and after-hours Americanization classes for immigrant factory workers (Sterne 188). These classes included English language instruction and moral instruction from the point of view of a Protestant ethos that was suspicious of the large number of foreign Catholics (Sterne 231). The emphasis on language instruction in English was informed by fears of civic leaders that multilingualism would lead to a breakdown of public discourse and the triumph of anarchy. The emphasis on morality was informed by eugenicist fears about the polluting effects of Eastern and Southern European stock on the purity of Anglo-Saxon genetics.

! 32
These fears were perhaps most dramatically articulated in an 1881 Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Report that called French Canadians "the Chinese of the eastern states," who had no interest in becoming citizens and learning "our" language (Anctil 126). Wellesley itself was about thirty miles equidistant from three major French-speaking enclaves, the cities of Lowell, Worcester and Woonsocket, Rhode Island, all of which had multiple French language newspapers, multiple French-language Catholic parochial schools, a francophone economic sector in banking and commerce capable of supporting a francophone bourgeoisie, and essentially a burgeoning francophone public sphere whose metropolitan center was not Congregationalist Boston but rather Roman Catholic Québec. This francophone network was predicated on a set of cultural tactics known as la survivance, designed to ensure "a French presence in the midst of Anglo domination" (Peters 567).
Whatever might have been the social ideals of this francophone public sphere, they were not locatable in Wellesley's "Social Ideals in English Letters" course, nor could they be properly articulated in "clear, correct, well-constructed sentences in English." Thus writing programs like Wellesley's, developed as they were at the tail end of this second wave of immigration, must be viewed in part as implicitly defining public life through the exclusion of potentially contaminating foreign languages and foreign genes. This exclusion must be taken into account when attempting to articulate the values historically attached to literacy instruction in English in the United States.
As Lisa Arnold has pointed out, the presence of writing in other languages, once acknowledged, will call for a revised historiography of composition, an historiography ! 33 that will change our sense of "what counts" as writing and, by extension, what counts as composition's history ("[Re] Working" 260).
This need to work against the arrangement of the archive has been addressed before in rhetoric and composition. In Jessica Enoch's accounts of the research that led to her book Refiguring Rhetorical Education, for example, she describes some of the limitations she encountered searching archives traditional to composition and rhetoric in an attempt to document Chicano/a public education in Texas during the Mexican Revolution. Enoch found that these materials, or rather the lack of Chicano/a voices represented in them, only served to reify a "myth of Mexican indifference towards public education" (Glenn and Enoch 14). Enoch had to work against the ideological arrangement of composition and rhetoric's archives in order to historicize the construction of this myth. In doing so, Enoch found La Crónica, a Spanish-language newspaper that took the lead in protesting "the discrimination of Mexican students in Texas public schools" (Glenn and Enoch 14) during the period she was studying. It seems to me that an important correlation must be made between the specific exclusion of La Crónica and La Sentinelle from rhetoric and composition's archives, and of the isolation of these materials more generally from discussions about the role of language in education in the United States. Such exclusions are necessary predicates for the construction of an American public sphere in English, and they can only be avoided by first working against the original order and the provenance of existing archival arrangements. Only then can rehabilitative historiographical work ! 34 make use of these materials to reveal the contested nature of unidirectional English monolingualism in histories of US composition.

Conclusion
What to the archivist must be treated as a value-neutral "given order"of texts must to the rhetorician be treated as "an ideological order" (Graban 210). The strategies of selection and arrangement of any archive can thus be read rhetorically to reveal the ideological order of the historical discourse it attempts to preserve. The researcher's goal is not to respect the principles of selection and arrangement, but rather to disrupt them in order to avoid maintaining the original assumptions and respecting the original silences of the archive's creators. A key strategy of disruption in archival research is to frame archival texts within contexts that are broader than the collection itself (Graban 208).
The applied linguist Alastair Pennycook says that "in order to construct itself as a respectable discipline, linguistics had to make an extensive series of exclusions" (Language 6). I argue that the same is true for rhetoric and composition.
In "Rethinking Our Archive," John Brereton notes an "uncomfortable fact" of archival work in rhetoric and composition: the fact that "we still aren't sure what should be in our archive, or how access can be broadened, or which tools we should bring to our task of exploring the past" (574). A history of cross-language relations in the United States, however, challenges the idea the "we" should even have "our" own archive, even a multilingual one. Such an archive would by necessity need to be arranged Brereton implies that a problem in our field's historiography is that our scholars "have been making use of an archive assembled by others, with other purposes in mind" ("Rethinking" 575). But I argue that this is exactly the value of rhetoric and composition's historiography: the recognition of the "other purposes" of these collections is exactly what our research should seek to critically engage.
Changing the structure of an archive-or at least learning to write alternate accounts of its construction-changes what kinds of histories can be written from it. Ferreira-Buckley indicates that this has been the ultimate purpose of archival practice since the French Revolution. She sees a continuous historiographical trajectory beginning with the French Revolution's respect des fonds, leading from the revolutionary sense that a government be held accountable to its public, and from the initiation of public scrutiny of the state agencies through which society's inclusions and exclusions were enacted, to the writing of progressive histories that shift our thinking about "who counts and who was worth writing about" (578).
The archival researcher's work, then, consists first of not locating an archive from which he can deduce historical truths, but rather creating an archive specific to ! 36 his project, drawn from multiple sources (Ramsey,et. al.,5) in a way that enables him to reveal the ideological constraints under which each particular collection was assembled and under which specific documents were produced. The insight a researcher can draw from archival materials will derive from the combination of materials he chooses to juxtapose with one another. For example, Peter Mortensen's ingenious studies of the paper industry's impact on the creation of illiteracy in the Appalachian South has lead him to juxtapose historical records of a paper mill in Kingsport, Tennessee, with statistical reports on book consumption from Publisher's Weekly (Mortensen 45). These records are housed in different institutional locations and were originally produced to make visible different aspects of industrial capitalism.
The documents concerning the construction of the paper mill in Kingsport touted the mill as evidence of a burgeoning manufacturing sector in the early twentieth century South (Mortensen 46), while the Publisher's Weekly articles were intended to document market trends and consumption patterns for the publishing trade houses of Boston and New York. The combination of the two types of documents is specific to Mortensen's project; it does not exist in any single physical location. It only exists in his writing, which enables him to link industrial paper production with book consumption-and thereby to study the effects of industrial paper processing on the making of literacy and illiteracy-in a way that no single institutional collection could have made possible. The practice of historical writing becomes a practice of working across and against existing archives in order to remake history. Writing is archiving, and the practices of writing are the rhetorics of the archive.  These mandates stipulated that English was to be used as the only language of instruction in all public and private schools, and that French was to be taught one hour per day as a foreign language. In this scene, Daignault appeals to their collective strength as a French race distinct in all regards from the English. He appeals to their common struggle for survival as a conquered people on this continent.
By April 1928, a few short months after this demonstration, Daignault and dozens of his supporters would be excommunicated by the Catholic Church for activities related to their language activism ("Daignault and Supporters"). Examining this photo, one wonders how many fellow Catholics in that crowd might have silently aligned themselves with Daignault and his policy of militant resistance to an Anglo dominated Church and state. One wonders how many might have instead sympathized with the more moderate position espoused by other French cultural leaders-like that of the USJB, one of the French fraternal benefit societies of which Daignault himself was a member. As we have seen, the USJB opposed Daignault and instead advocated an accommodating stance, accepting the benefits of French-English assimilation that would come with English language schooling. The USJB maintained that the French people would continue as a distinct race despite the language situation. Finally, one The editors of La Sentinelle held many of these demonstrations between 1925 and 1928.  A much different understanding emerges, however, if we view the conflict as primarily one between local multilingual language practices and centralized language planning. Despite the fact that it garnered national headlines in the US and in Canada; that its arguments were heard on the floor of the 96th US Congress; that its merits were argued before two Vatican tribunals over the course of the 1920s-despite all of the far reaching consequences of this conflict, historians must acknowledge that it was first and foremost a local fight between Woonsocket politicians and diocesan French literacies both in relation to each other and in relation to temporal goods.
Language was explicitly viewed as the social capital with which language users could improve their socioeconomic positions in local and regional material economies.
English Only advocates complained about the degraded value of English in this linguistic economy, and expressed dismay at the ascendent value of French. Finally, by attending to these economies in relation to each other, we gain a critical understanding of how multilingual complexities have been effaced and oversimplified by institutionalized assumptions about linguistic modernity that have informed centralized language research, language teaching and language learning in the United States.

Chronology
Before looking closely at the multilingual complexities embodied by the construction of MSC, it will be helpful to outline a brief chronology of the Sentinelle Affair so that we understand how individual incidents like the above demonstration (see Fig. 4) fit into the conflict's overall trajectory (see Fig. 5).
At the beginning of the 1920s, a number of laws were passed by twenty-two states across the country, restricting education in languages other than English (Chartier 122). In Rhode Island, "An Act to Secure More Adequate Economic Support and More Efficient Administration of Public Education" was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1922. This law, informally called the Peck Act (after the state senator who sponsored it), mandated that private school instruction "in all ! 42 studies, except foreign languages and any studies not taught in the public schools, [be] in the English language" (H. 823,6). The law authorized the state Commissioner of Education to determine whether such instruction was "thorough and efficient" (6). The Peck Act essentially attempted to take control of the state's Catholic parochial schools away from diocesan administrators and to give it to the state's Board of Education.
Since diocesan school administrators had taken a hands-off approach to local parishes' parochial schools and had allowed national parishes to teach in their maternal languages, such a move threatened to suppress French as a language of instruction in the schools of French language parishes and to replace it with English.  This law came on the heels of an earlier law passed in Rhode Island in 1920, titled "An Act to Promote Americanization." This law mandated that certain cities and 2 towns establish "public evening schools…in which the speaking, reading and writing of the English language shall be taught for two hours on each of at least one hundred nights between the first of September and the first of June" (H. 720, 1). Students educated in private schools had to pass a state examination in order to be "deemed as having acquired reasonable facility in speaking, reading and writing the English language" (3). This push towards English Only Americanization at the state level reflected a similar initiative at the federal level following World War I designed to curtail Catholic parochial education in languages other than English on the grounds that they were un-American (Chartier 122).
Also in 1922, the Catholic Church's National Catholic Welfare Council-a national conference of bishops in the United States-published A Catechism of Catholic Education, a policy manual for American parochial school curriculums. One chapter of the Catechism, on the "Americanism of the Catholic Schools," states thatin order to prove the American character of Catholic education-all Catholic schools in the US must "make the English language the medium of instruction and teach our children to love and respect that language and its literature" (Ryan 79). Debates about how best to respond to this policy at the level of the local Providence diocese would Surprisingly, this law is still in effect in the Rhode Island General Laws as RIGL sections 2 §16-29-1 to §16-29-14, a series of sections on Americanization schools. §16-29-9 still stipulates that any person between the ages of 16 and 21 who cannot speak, read, and write the English language "in accordance with standards approved by the department of elementary and secondary education" can be "committed to an institution during his or her minority" for persistent refusal to attend an Americanization school. The original 1920 law was Chapter 1802 of Rhode Island Public Law. envisioned as a school of "advanced study in commercial, technical and industrial arts," professional skills considered "indispensable to our intellectual and material independence" as a distinct French people (Robert [A Messieurs]). According to the FCFA's publicity materials, this school would be the first of its kind in New England, but one of many eventually planned at "strategic points" across New England (see Fig.   6). The FCFA envisioned a burgeoning French-language secondary school system throughout New England and Québec that would receive students from the existing parochial school system and would act as feeder schools for the industrial professions and for the collèges classiques already in place for post-secondary education. The FCFA was less successful, however, in rallying the popular support of the French people of New England to financially support the construction of MSC. They organized an elaborate year-long, $500,000 fundraising initiative, a door-knocking campaign that sought to visit every single French-speaking household in New England to solicit at least one dollar in contributions from every person of working age. The fundraising training manual advised solicitors, "don't be content with a single small donation from an entire family" and "never collect less than $1.00" from each person (Collège). "When it comes to the salvation of the race," the FCFA press committee wrote, "everyone must be ready to make sacrifices." After seven months, the Rhode Island district alone, which was one of eight districts that covered all of New England, would raise just $5557.63. Assuming the ! 47 At the same time that the French were struggling to execute their plan to build French-language secondary schools throughout New England, William A. Hickey, the bishop of the diocese of Providence (see Fig. 7), was developing a plan to build English-language high schools throughout his diocese. Mount St. Charles was located in his diocese. Hickey took over the failed FCFA fundraising campaign and secured a loan to build the school as part of his diocesan high school project. In an article published in the Providence Visitor, his official diocesan newspaper, he repudiated the francophone vision of the school, saying that, "erroneous reports to the contrary, the new Academy of Mt. St. Charles will not be a distinctly French institution. It will be open to all and will be supported by men of the different races and different creeds.
The spirit of parochialism will be stamped out. There will be nothing of the parish spirit about it" ("Hopes"). The following year, the NCWC published its Catechism of Catholic Education, declaring English to be the language of instruction in all of its schools. When Hickey took over the fundraising drive of MSC as part of his larger project of building a number English-language diocesan high schools, some French leaders saw the move as a subjugation of the French by the English. French-language schooling in an Anglo-dominant context was actually a thriving concern of the Catholic Church in a different political context. I will address his politics of style in more depth in the next chapter.
In the fall of 1924, the newspaper carried a series of editorials written by Daignault under the pseudonym "Blaise Juillet" critical of diocesan control of the school. In November, Daignault expressed concern that the MSC curriculum not only taught "Latin and catechism…in English" but that "students were encouraged to confess their sins in English" (Juillet "Programme"). This curriculum, he argued, was the result of the corporate structure of the school, which gave the bishop ultimate administrative authority. MSC was "the property of a civil corporation composed of the Bishop, his grand Vicar, the curé [pastor] of Precious Blood, a certain number of Brothers, and two members of the laity." The article argued that, since the Bishop ultimately controlled the naming of each of these persons to their respective ecclesiastical A word needs to be said about the early administration of this newspaper. La Sentinelle was 5 originally a daily newspaper published by Daignault and edited by J. Albert Foisy (Daignault Le Vrai 17). Foisy would later leave the newspaper and instead join La Tribune, where he would write some of the most critical articles of Daignault and his work. La Tribune and La Sentinelle would in fact antagonize each other over the next four years. However as editor, Foisy must have known about and endorsed all of the basic positions of La Sentinelle from the beginning: its stance toward the bishop, towards the NCWC and their plans to appeal to Rome (Daignault Le Vrai 19). Sorrell notes that at the outset the version of French nationalism expressed by La Sentinelle was very similar to that expressed by La Tribune (Sorrell Sentinelle 216).
Daignault took over editorship in November 1924 (Sorrell Sentinelle 216). According to him, Foisy had run through $50,000 in start up money in seven months and left the company in debt (Le Vrai 17). This is around the same time that the newspaper switched from daily to weekly publication. According to Chartier, Daignault was forced to cease daily publication when he proved unable to secure a subscription to the Catholic news service of the NCWC (148).
In addition to Daignault, the staff included Phydime Hémond, who had served in the FCFA fundraising drive for the Rhode Island district, and who had previously worked for L'Union, the USJB official newspaper (Chartier 149). Daignault and Hémond were joined by Henri Perdriau, a naturalized Canadian citizen who was a native of France and an immigrant to the US via Canada. Perdriau wrote some of the most incendiary articles for La Sentinelle under the pseudonym "Etienne Lemoyne," and he received some of the harshest treatment in the English and French press for his dubious citizenship status and his motives for leaving Europe and Canada before coming to the US. In Europe, Perdriau had been part of the conservative Royalist (and fascist) faction L'Action Française (Chartier 156), which itself would be interdicted by the Vatican in the 1920s.

The Sentinelle Affair and Ideologies of Linguistic Modernity
As I read through the documentary evidence of this conflict, I'm struck by the fact that opposing sides often found themselves making the same arguments but for different causes. The first evidence of this underlying same-ness is the fact that many of the most vehement adversaries started out as allies. The often bewildering shifting allegiances among historical actors in the Sentinelle Affair is what led historian Richard Sorrell to describe it as an "internecine" conflict (Sorrell "Sentinelle" 69).
Foremost among these allegiances is the complicated relationship of five prominent members of the French political and cultural élite in New England: Elphège Daignault, J. Albert Foisy, Phydime Hémond, Eugene Jalbert and Élie Vézina (see Fig. 9). All of these men worked together at one point or another in the struggle to protect French ! 53 language rights. They all cooperated to oppose state and federal English Only legislation in the early 1920s. Many of them were organizers in the failed FCFA fundraising campaign for MSC. Not only were they members of the two major fraternal benefit societies in New England, the Association Canado-Américaine (ACA) and the USJB, but they had executive privileges and voting rights as officers and representatives of these societies and worked together to help run them.
The Sentinelle Affair itself, then, did not merely reflect entrenched and already-held differences, despite what the historical actors themselves claimed.
Following the large public gathering in Woonsocket in 1927, Foisy, as editor of La Tribune, wrote that the position of La Sentinelle was "satanic" because it was in opposition to the Church ("Un Manifeste"). A few months prior, he had written that Daignault was forcing Catholics to choose between God and the Devil ("Dieu").
However, in his own memoir, Daignault points out that Foisy was himself the original editor of La Sentinelle, had been recruited from Québec by Daignault to help him found the newspaper, and was one of the movement's first supporters (Le Vrai 18).
The conflict was not simply an ideological clash between fundamentally opposed forces, as Foisy would have it. The differences articulated in the press were not necessarily in opposition to each other. Rather, through a series of motivated language acts made by erstwhile political allies in response to a series of materially invested rhetorical situations, the social reality of the historical actors involved was constituted, and what were once merely political differences were arranged into oppositions. The Sentinelle Affair, in other words, was a rhetorical conflict.

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In order to recover the multilingual complexities of the francophone experience in twentieth century New England, it is necessary to first identify and bracket off the ideological move that arranges these differences into mutually opposed categories: good versus evil, God versus Satan, French versus English. In fact, the complexities of multilingual language practices have been effaced and oversimplified by an ideology of linguistic modernity that pervades the discourses of the Sentinelle Affair. An ideology of linguistic modernity defines languages as discrete and whole systems of reference that are perfectly bounded from other languages. According to this ideology, there is a one-to-one correspondence between language, speaker and identity. Language performance is idealized in the figure of the monolingual native speaker, whose language represents the language system at its most pure. One cannot be a native speaker of multiple languages at the same time, and the authenticity of one's national and cultural identity are irrevocably tied to one's native language. 6 Most importantly, ideologies of linguistic modernity clarify multilingual complexities by separating languages into different temporal and spatial realms. In the context of the Sentinelle Affair, this arrangement locates French temporally in the past -as the language of tradition, as the carrier of Western civilization since the fall of In formulating the tenets of an ideology of linguistic modernity, I am influenced by the work 6 of Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs. In Voices of Modernity, as well as in several essays, Bauman and Briggs trace the construction of modern languages through the philosophical writings of Locke and Herder. In rhetoric and composition, the arguments made during the Scottish Enlightenment in favor of English vernacular studies over classical Latin and Greek take up the ideas of Locke and Herder in service of a nationalizing and standardizing agenda for English. See especially Book II in George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which he discusses the establishment of a teachable standard based on "reputable use" (141), and the need to police the boundaries of English to protect its "grammatical purity" (169) from "barbarisms" (171). See also Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres for arguments in favor of codification of English grammar (in emulation of similar work done in French) in order to make it a national language of England (75).

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Rome, and as a living embodiment of Latin (Juillet " Programme"). English, by contrast, is located in the future-as the language of scientific progress and economic development. The arrangement locates French and English spatially, too, by separating them into different national languages, with French on the Canadian side of the US-Québec border. French speakers in this arrangement are "foreigners" in the US context ("Fausses") and English monolingualism is equated with "one hundred per cent Americanism" ("No Racial"). Language conflicts arose when these arrangements were violated-when claims were made for French as an American language or as a language capable of supporting scientific progress.
According to ideologies of linguistic modernity, the purpose of language instruction is not to teach students to strategically operate multiple discursive regimes or linguistic registers simultaneously in their own interests relative to a given rhetorical situation. Rather, the goal of language instruction is to purify students' linguistic resources, separating out the contaminating influences of multiple languages from each other. The correlation of such purification is the construction of linguistic hybrids, those whose multilingual language practices embody the premodern and are in need of remedial instruction. Thus, graduates of French-English bilingual schools were judged harshly by English monolingual speakers as speaking both languages poorly, while the French élite themselves eschewed the mongrelized bilingual linguistic innovations of the working classes in favor of the imagined purity of a Parisian French heritage, the language of culture, of civilization and of the intellect itself (Juillet "Programme"). It's important to note that these views of language did not ! 57 reflect the realities "on the ground" during the Sentinelle Affair. Repeatedly, historical actors showed themselves incapable of seeing the complexities that lay beneath the ideological lenses they were using. Daignault, Vézina, et. al., saw these processes of purification and hybridization as a perfectly natural state of affairs, rather than as political acts motivated out of socially constructed beliefs. English speaker trying to pass as one hundred per cent American.

Linguistic Regimes and the Linguistically Disabled
For almost a century, the French had developed la survivance into a sophisticated set of tactics for fighting the political and economic hegemony of the ! 60 English in North America. Among these tactics was a strategy of infiltration into 7 Anglo-dominant institutions, whereby the French élite sought to occupy key positions in government and finance and to use those positions to advocate for les nôtres, the French people. A second strategy was to disseminate the ideology of la survivance through media-the newspaper and the radio. This dissemination constructed a francophone public that viewed itself as a unified people, a distinct race whose experience in the New World was marked by colonization, subjugation and diaspora at the hands of the British. This "imagined community" (Anderson Imagined 7) was essential to garnering the popular support needed to enact strategies of infiltration and representation. A third and final strategy made use of the relationship between Church and state to essentially make a quasi-territorial claim despite the political disenfranchisement of the French. In Canada and in the US, they incorporated Frenchlanguage Catholic parishes and used those parishes as miniature fiefdoms: run by French-speaking clergy, sponsoring French national societies, operating French-La survivance was an ideology of the French élite. It emerged in response to the British 7 Conquest of New France in 1763 and the 1840 Act of Union. Bouchard points to François-Xavier Garneau's 1845 Histoire du Canada as having "defined the parameters" of the ideology of la survivance (Bouchard 81). Garneau's Histoire is written as a direct response to Lord Durhams' 1839 Report on British North America, in which Durham recommended the forced assimilation of the French on the basis that they were a "destitute" nationality "with no history and no literature (Durham 294). Durham's Report led directly to the 1840 Act of Union.
With the subsequent "closure of the political and economic routes" to French nation building, Garneau advocated "building the nation through culture, promoting a cultural identity instead of a nation state" (Bouchard 82). The French élite described la survivance as the simultaneous conservation of Catholicism (la foi), the French language (la langue), and cultural customs (les moeurs) (cf. Robert Les Francos). However, my interest in la survivance concerns not the ideology but the tactics, the set of resistance practices that put the ideology in action.
! 61 language schools, and using parish finances to materially support the spread of French institutions.
In subsequent chapters, I will address the first two tactics described above.
Here, I want to focus on the political use of Church incorporation laws in Rhode Island. These laws were the basis for the lawsuits filed against the parish corporations.
The legal decision handed down by the Rhode Island Supreme Court reveals the way language-specifically the orthography and syntax of English-is made into law through a series of interpretive acts undergirded by an ideology of linguistic modernity. We will see that, in order to make language law, the Rhode Island Supreme Court responded to the indeterminacy of English orthography and syntax by turning it into a politically neutral referential system that naturalized the corporate body of the Providence diocese. It bears emphasizing that a church has no body-its incorporation into a legal personality must be performed through these kinds of ideological acts. We will also see that in the process the Court suppressed alternate linguistic realitiesspecifically, the existence of a decentralized and multilingual diocesan structure-and by extension it delegitimized the multilingual body of the church (and perhaps the actual multilingual bodies of parishioners). This decentralized and multilingual structure had been built out of decades of practice, by allowing national churches to establish themselves wherever large linguistic minority congregations had settled. It at least had the legitimacy of practice, if not the legitimacy of the letter of the law.
In some states, like New York, the congregation itself was incorporated into a parish (Jalbert 1). Once incorporated, the members of the congregation constituted the ! 62 corporate body of the parish-every member of the congregation had a legal right to the temporal goods of the parish and could decide how parish finances were administered. Daignault's legal actions sought to establish whether this was also the case given the Rhode Island statutes for church incorporation. In Rhode Island, the parish corporation consisted of a corporate board of directors. The bishop sat on every board in his diocese (Jalbert 6), but each board also included two lay parishioners.
Daignault sought to establish what property rights the entire congregation had in the temporal goods of its parish based on this structure. When a parishioner contributes money to the weekly collection basket, does the parish have any legal obligation to use that money for the causes to which the parishioner is contributing it? Could that money be transferred to other parishes, or be sent directly to the diocese, to be used for other projects? This question had a direct bearing on the ability of French-language churches to fund their parochial schools and their obligation to contribute parish funds to the construction of centralized, diocesan-run, English-language high schools.
Daignault sought to establish the legal flow of capital through the corporate structure of the Providence diocese, as it affected the ability of language difference to be embodied in the church educational system: buildings, curriculums, teacher training, and student literacy.
In order to establish that flow, the Rhode Island Supreme Court had to rule on competing interpretations of one sentence in Section 3 of the Rhode Island Act of 1869, which incorporated the first Catholic diocese in Rhode Island, the diocese of Hartford. The sentence reads as follows: provided, that no one corporated congregation shall, at any time, possess an amount of property, excepting church and buildings, parsonages, school-houses, asylums and cemeteries, the annual income from which shall exceed three thousand dollars" (Jalbert 2-3).
Daignault contended that, according to the language of the statute, the purpose of a parish corporation's funds is to support the individual parish ("that church") in worship according to Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals. Lawyers for the church (led, yet again, by Eugene Jalbert), contended that the phrase "that church" referred to the Roman Catholic Church itself; so the purpose of parish corporation funds is to support the larger Church, not the individual parish. Daignault countered that if the phrase "that church" were meant to refer to the Roman Catholic Church, it would use an uppercase C-Church instead of church. The court decided: No grammatical reason exists which calls for a capital "c". The natural antecedent of the word that is "Roman Catholic". To construe that as referring only to the local parish corporation would be inexact. …It would be a forced construction to hold that the first part of the sentence was dealing with generalities in the type of worship and that the latter portions suddenly shifted to localisms in the type of charitable or educational institutions. …The natural ! 64 meaning of the paragraph is that the uses to which the general funds and property of the local parish corporation may be put are such as are connected with the Roman Catholic church in general" (Mederic).
Despite the court's attempt to locate "natural" meaning in the un-"forced" syntactical constructions of "plain" English, in fact the court's decision verified that linguistic meaning in the Sentinelle Affair was a function of ideologically constructed discursive regimes. English orthography and syntax were made to reflect social reality by the court's exercise of institutional power through that orthography and syntax.
This exercise of power didn't explain what the language meant; it made the language mean. The decision rests on the identification of a parallel structure in the sentence ("the first part of the sentence…the latter portions"), and argues that such a structure can not shift from "generalities" in one part to "localisms" in the other. However, the court excludes the actual beginning and ending of the sentence. The beginning refers to "such body corporate," which Section 2 of the statute unequivocally identifies as the parish corporation. The court might have accounted for the phrase "that church" in terms of the phrase "such body corporate." More puzzling is that the end of the sentence refers to a "corporated congregation," implying that the congregation itself has some stake in the corporate body of the parish, which was exactly Daignault's claim. The court might have accounted for the use of the word "congregation" in a ! 65 section the language of which apparently excluded the congregation from membership in the parish corporation. 8 The point here is not that the court read the statute wrong, nor that there is a more accurate reading available. Rather, the point is that different reading strategies produce different meanings from the same language, depending on how the language is framed. In the case of this lawsuit, the Rhode Island Supreme Court framed Section 3 of the Rhode Island Act of 1869 in such a way that capital flowed through the corporate structure of the diocese in a centralized way, from parish to diocese. In making this reading, the court authorized the bishop to take funds from an individual parish "church" and distribute those funds to the English-language high schools being built by his diocese, with the implicit argument that those schools-and not Frenchlanguage schools-were the only schools being built on behalf of the entire Roman Catholic "Church" (Mederic). Thus, not only were multilingual literacy rights ultimately suppressed by the political position of English, but the Supreme Court's decision further reified the power of English to "naturally" reflect social reality.
At the end of its decision, the court makes a cheeky display of its power to determine the 8 significance and insignificance of lowercase and uppercase letters. After leading the reader through its interpretation of Section 3 of the RI statute, the court composes two consecutive sentences towards the close of its decision. One sentence contains the phrase: "…the Roman Catholic church in general." The next sentence contains an almost identical phrase: "…the general policies of the Roman Catholic Church." The use of a lowercase c in one phrase and an uppercase C in the next cannot but be a performative display of the court's power. After declaring that no grammatical reason exists to use a lowercase or uppercase letter, the court shows that there may be political reasons to do so. Having just declared church/Church to be grammatically interchangeable, the court uses them interchangeably in its own decision, as though to indicate that the meaning of orthographic convention in English emanates not from the inherent and natural properties of the language but from the political influence of the court itself.

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The Supreme Court's decision disrupted the strategy of attaching French political interests to the corporate structure of the Church in the United States. The result was the breaking of la survivance into a conceptual binary marked by two opposing discourses. The discourse practiced by La Sentinelle and by the ACA was relegated to the French Canadian political context. The discourse practiced by La Tribune and by the USJB was relegated to the US political context. Both still attempted to respond to the same basic problem: how to ensure francophone cultural survivance in the midst of anglophone domination in North America. The key difference was in the valorization of one kind of "purity" over another. In the Canadian context, the racial and linguistic purity of the French was valorized over the racial mixing of assimilation. In the US context, the purity of American identityemblazoned as "one hundred per cent Americanism" ("No Racial")-was valorized over the racial and linguistic mixing of "fifty-fifty Americans" (cf. Dexter).
In the complex interplay of la survivance, the language of Church incorporation statutes, and state adjudication of English orthography and syntax, we see the ideological work of exclusion in the interests of national purity and linguistic purity. We also see the discursive work that directs the flow of multilingual social and material capital through the monolingual channels of corporate law. These are the complexities of multilingual language practices overwritten by ideologies of linguistic modernity and, in closing this chapter, I'd like to explore the consequences for multilingual bodies subjected to this linguistic regimentation. These ideologies betray an American anxiety over impurity, a fear that in lacking a national language, the ! 67 country lacked a tradition and a basis for allegiance. In The Huddled Masses, his survey of American immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, historian Alan Kraut describes this anxiety in terms that suggest a mass psychosis on the part of middle-class America in response to the traumatic vision of foreign intrusion presented by the second wave of immigration and concomitant fears of foreign contamination.
As early as 1891, immigration laws established sanitation regulations that required vaccinations, antiseptic baths, and disposable bedding on trans-Atlantic immigrant passenger ships (58-59), to guard against cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and polio, each of which were associated with specific immigrant groups (175).
The fear was not limited to pathogens. The physical manifestations of malnutrition and "bodies deformed by vitamin deficiencies" combined with unfamiliar clothing styles and different skin tones put Americans in fear of "the influence of foreign blood on the vitality of the American population" (175). Baynton cites routine medical inspections of immigrants as one of the practices that constructed ethnicity into a disability in American politics. A set of regulations for such inspections "included a long list of diseases and disabilities that could be cause for exclusion, among them arthritis, asthma, bunions, deafness, deformities, flat feet, heart disease, hernia, hysteria, poor eyesight, poor physical development, spinal curvature, vascular disease of the heart, and varicose veins " (27). The concept of disability became equated with certain ethnicities, so that "the charge that certain ethnic groups were mentally and physically deficient was instrumental in arguing for their exclusion" from the US (27). The influence of eugenicist research in the 1920s and the racialist ! 68 theories of writers like Lothrop Stoddard "seemed to lend scientific justification to the demand for immigration restriction" (Kraut 194).
The Americanization pressures which sought to purify the language practices of multilingual Americans were informed by these conceptual frameworks of ability/ disability and corresponding fears of foreign contamination. In effect, these pressures constructed multilingual language practices as linguistic disabilities. Although they were not trans-Atlantic immigrants, the French were often targeted by these fears. The Chicago Daily Tribune-the self-styled "American Newspaper for Americans"published an article on April 11, 1927, titled "Bishop Fights to Americanize French Flocks." In that article, Henning paints a menacing portrait of French-language 9 parochial schooling, claiming that "American-born children by the tens of thousands were reaching maturity unable to speak English and ignorant of the history and institutions of their country by birth, though well versed in French-Canadian history," more interested in their allegiance to Québec than to the United States.
Dr. Charles Carroll, professor of education at the Rhode Island College of Education, would similarly argue on the floor of the Rhode Island legislature that Franco-Americans were "a race not closely allied with America…paying traditional allegiance to a country other than the United States" and were represented by a "dangerous [voting] bloc" of legislators in the General Assembly ("Representative").
Each of these arguments elicited impassioned responses from the French élite that one The article was written by Arthur Sears Henning, the same correspondent whose prediction  Vézina "it will still be necessary for the powers that be to understand that the Irish must stop seeing themselves as the designated leaders of the Catholic Church in America" (Chartier 164). Vézina replied with the exact argument Daignault had been making for years in La Sentinelle, which sought to limit diocesan powers and to protect the autonomy of individual parishes. "The parish needs to be allowed more latitude," he said, "regarding the administration of funds contributed for the Catholic cause; but especially those earmarked for the development ! 71 of parish activities" (qtd. in Chartier 164). Vézina believed that diocesan institutions should be established "without undermining the generosity of the faithful who prefer that, as much as possible, the monies they give to the pastor remain in the parish" (qtd. We also see traces of this linguistic memory in the modern languages curriculums of American schools, which continually construct languages as discrete systems of reference, wholly perfect in themselves, distinct from one another, and attached to specific peoples in specific political territories. These curriculums consist of a series of political compromises that emerged out of conflicts like the Sentinelle Affair and that are today automatically recognizable as "foreign language" instruction in the United States. First, students may elect to take a foreign language beginning in middle school. The foreign language elective is a tacit prohibition of teaching languages other than English in the primary grades, the same prohibition that the US Supreme Court found unconstitutional in Meyer v. Nebraska. In her study of the way familial relationships in Tongan culture are projected outward onto Tongan institutional structures as part of "Tongan nation-making ideology," Philips argues that language ideologies attached to "nation-state-making" diffuse through multiple contexts or "sites" (231) throughout civil society. Philips describes ! 75 the terms "site" and "context" as two correlated terms that both lend a sense of materiality to discursive practices, so that concrete moments or places become instantiations of discourse (232). Thus, in her study, a courtroom in Tonga becomes a site for imagining the Tongan nation state, as the discursive practices of individuals in the courtroom embody and re-produce the constructs of Tongan brother-sister relationships, even when nobody in the courtroom is actually related as brother and sister (254).
Philips argues that the ideologies underlying the making of nation-states are "multisited" (229), harnessed and used not just by the government but throughout all of civil society, as part of the work of "imagining a Tongan nation-state" (234). Where Philips is examining the way language practice at one such site (a courtroom) imagines a homogenous nation-state to which all at that site belong, I am examining the way language practices create multiple "sites" from a single institution, MSC.
Rather than seeing MSC as one of many sites onto which a homogenous nation-state could be projected, I argue that MSC was conceived of and built out of multiple and overlapping language ideologies. Philips sees social actors beginning with the ground they stand on-a local site-and universalizing their relations at that site outward to an imagined nation-state. I see social actors beginning with grand abstractions like race, culture and nation and provincializing them onto local economic realities.
When I re-contextualize MSC within local linguistic and material economies, what immediately emerges is a triple view of the school, one English and two French.
First, it was a "strategic" collège des hautes études-a school of advanced study. This  In 1922, Bishop Hickey embarked on a fundraising campaign to build Catholic high schools in his diocese. He created a controversial quota system, requiring each parish to raise a certain amount of money. If a parish could not meet its quota through its own fundraising efforts, the Bishop authorized money to be taken directly from the parish treasury. This potentially meant taking money that had been contributed by parishioners for other parish-specific projects, like the funding of a parochial school.
Four Catholic high schools were established in the diocese during the years of the ! 77 Sentinelle Affair (see Fig. 10). Two of them-Saint Raphael's Academy and Portsmouth Abbey-were funded directly through the fundraising campaign for diocesan high schools. Although it wasn't initially conceived as one of the bishop's schools, the plans to build MSC were taken up by the bishop after the FCFA failed to raise enough money on its own. MSC was originally conceived not as an English-language high school, but as a collège des hautes études specializing in technical and industrial arts, modeled after similar institutions that had recently been built in Québec to train students to work in a growing industrial sector. These collèges were secondary schools, but were affiliated I call this transnational and multilingual system the collège classique system (see Fig. 11), an entirely separate school system from state-sponsored, Englishlanguage higher education in Canada and in the US. By examining the way people worked language in local linguistic and material economies in the planning and construction of MSC, we see the potential for the collège classique system to disrupt ideologies of linguistic modernity that equate literacy instruction with native fluency in a target language, which in turn is equated with both socioeconomic mobility and national identity. A re-contextualized understanding of MSC reveals that multilingual language practices and multilingual systems of education have always existed ! 79 alongside modern US higher education, and they problematize our understanding of the social value and function of literacy. These institutions were not pre-modern, archaic, and obsolete; rather, we need to see them as strategic multisites: localized and layered articulations of multiple language ideologies and their associated discursive practices. By doing the work of re-contextualization, we can recover the socioeconomic and political functions of the collège classique system as part of the history and lineage of US higher education. It can be made part of the "useable past" of language instruction in North America (Huot 495). In 1922, Felix Gatineau, a representative in the Massachusetts legislature, conducted a study of French representation in that state. He counted forty-seven state representatives and senators in the Massachusetts legislature from 1900-1935.
Rhode Island-which only sends two representatives and two senators to Congresshad at least one French-speaking US Senator and one US Representative serving between 1925-1935, and at least four state representatives in the RI General Assembly were French during that time. Maine had at least fourteen French-speaking state representatives serving in its legislature between 1910-1922. New Hampshire had at least four French-speaking state representatives serving in its legislature between 1910-1925. Many of these politicians had studied at parochial schools, and at French or bilingual collèges. See Belanger, vols 4 (1922), 7 (1925) and 10 (1933 for information about individual politician's educational careers.  if official A from province B administers province C, while official D from province C administers province B…that experience of interchangeability requires its own explanation; the ideology of absolutism, which the new men themselves, as much as the sovereign, elaborate (55-56).
Anderson further argues that the colonial logic that makes subjects interchangeable in the administration of empire is appropriated by the subjects themselves and transformed into the logic of nationalism: "born in the Americas, [the creole] could not be a true Spaniard; ergo, born in Spain, the peninsular could not be a true American" (58). This logic divides the colonial subject from the imperial center, forming a new provincial consciousness-a nationalist consciousness-among those creoles who shared the same pilgrimage circuits. The collège classique system provided such a circuit, through which the French in both the United States and in Québec could travel together en français. This is exactly the suspicion that English Only advocates had of Frenchlanguage schooling: it was forming an enclave of American citizens with sympathies to the Catholic Church and to Québec rather than to the mythology of America's founding. Dr. Charles Carroll-a professor at the Rhode Island College of Education who had represented the state commissioner of education in the deliberations to revise the Peck Act-warned that public education is "seriously threatened . . . by a determined and unconcealed propaganda that has for its purpose the preservation and perpetuation in America of racial and national characteristics that are generally hostile to American democracy" ("Educator Says"). When the construction plans for MSC  Organizers cited not only the need to "safeguard" the traditional elements of la survivance-the Catholic faith and the French language-but also the need to protect "interests that will assure the well-being, the influence, the success of our people on the economic battlefield" (Le Mont).
The traditional French élite understood the shifting local economy that was dividing the francophone presence in North America into French Canadian manual labor, Franco-Belgian capital and intellectual labor, and English-French bilingual legislation, all of which was settling into a complicated multilingual social order that was effaced and oversimplified by English Only conceptions of language difference that reduced language contact and conflict to French vs. English. Instead, the élite perceived the connection between material and linguistic economies, and perceived the need to intervene in a linguistic economy that was privileging not English over  (Redonnet 72). This was the variety of French imagined as the "maternal" language ("L'Américanisation"), the means of preserving "ancestral" traditions and a connection to Québec as a diasporic homeland ("La Langue"). It was used by the francophone press in New England and Québec, both in print and on the radio. The French press regarded their role as journalists to be partially the preservation of this linguistic standard in the francophone public sphere. They guarded this language variety fiercely and judged language use harshly in response to perceived violations of linguistic standards, but only those violations that dipped into joual, a basilectal variety of Canadian French perceived to be un mauvais français (Redonnet 72). [that] students were encouraged to confess their sins in English" (Chartier 148). This curriculum, he argued, was the result of the corporate structure of the school, which located the authority to administer the school firmly in the office of the bishop. Mount  One has to at least admire the audacity of Daignault's journalistic career, if not the quality of his journalism. He was often blinded by racial prejudice against the Irish, whom he called "race traitors" for promoting the language of their oppressors (Sorrell "Sentinelle" 69). He criticized the head of St. Georges school for being of Irish descent, even though he was a native of Québec and spoke French fluently.
In the 9/3/25 and 9/10/25 issues of La Sentinelle, Daignault wrote about an alleged $27,000 6 gift of land that the bishop of Manchester gave "without conditions" to the teaching order of the Sisters of Ste. Croix for the operation of a school in St. Georges. Citing anonymous sources, Diagnault argues that the "gift without conditions" actually carried with it a tacit deferral to the bishop's curricular plans ("Plaidoyer"). Although Daignault refuses to name his sources, he indicates in the September 10 article that the treasurer of the Sisters had reservations about a number of clauses in the contract that deeded the land to the order and she refused to sign it ("Se Trompent"). He also notes that the Mother Superior, who wrote a letter criticizing some minor errors in La Sentinelle's reporting, nonetheless "has complete faith in our sincerity and of our good faith in exposing the situation imposed on her Community" and would be "without a doubt very surprised that one could act in such bad faith" as have the bishop and the New Hampshire press sympathetic to him. These details suggest that the treasurer and the Mother Superior were his informants.
In the August 6 and August 20 issues of La Sentinelle, Daignault describes the curricular 7 structure of the parochial schools in the diocese of Manchester based on what he claims to be first-hand accounts from the parents of children in the schools. A teacher in a school in Claremont is not French and teaches the children to mispronounce French words (qtd. in Perreault 128). At another school in St. Georges, students "will be given only 45 minutes of French per day, religion taught in English, and all the exams will take place in English" (qtd. in Perreault 132).

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Daignault often contradicted himself, especially when he was publicly called out for a particularly incendiary statement. For example, in 1927 Daignault claimed that he had never directly attacked the bishop. In response, The Rhode Islander quoted articles from La Sentinelle in which Daignault had written that Hickey was engaged in "criminal work" and was trying to "strangle" the French. In response, Daignault wrote, "if in the heat of controversy we have been rude and have seemed to lack courtesy for men high in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the cause must be found in the sincerity of our intentions and in the frankness of our procedure" ("Daignault's Own").
Diagnault was accused of using the language of the street, using le langage de carrefour, writing the way people might speak to each other at the intersection when one driver has cut the other driver off ("Plaidoyer"). In a 1926 article, for example, he writes that La Tribune "has finally reached a point, that old thing, where it vomits upon the Franco-Americans all the filth that the dirty Irish have placed in its mouth" ("Diagnault's Campaign"). In 1927, he would write in response to an anonymous article published in La Tribune that if the author would make himself known, "we could then make this hack, hiding in his own rubbish, swallow the drool emerging from his stinking mouth" ("Les Grands"). In December Eugène Jalbert, president of the FCFA and legal counsel to USJB, accused the Sentinellists of "parading" their grievances before the public, which only "drags respect for authority through the mud and sows the kind of disdain and hate that leads to schism" (Chartier 152 I contend that Daignault's writing style was not merely reckless; rather, he was motivated by an anxiety over the distance between the Franco-American élite and the people who they claimed to represent, specifically as that distance was measured by language difference. As I have already noted, the French language in New England In other words, Daignault uses the basilectal dialect of Canadian French known as joual. In one article, for example, in which he irreverently argues that the head of school in Manchester is more concerned with the cleanliness of the bathrooms than with pedagogical questions, the word he uses for "bathroom" is la bécosse (Perreault 10). Bécosse is an anglicism, a non-standard word derived from the English word "backhouse," meaning "outhouse" (Colpron 103). La bécosse/the backhouse is an anglicism found in joual but not in standard Canadian French. Daignault's use of joual marks a telling stylistic move, for it seems he is trying to rhetorically position himself alongside the common people (les nôtres) by representing in writing a particular way Cf. Clark (1968) and Crunican (1974). 9 ! 99 built on a nationalist ideology disseminated through print capitalism. According to Anderson, the newspaper is one of the seminal forms of national identification, in that it synchronizes disparate individuals in space and time by reporting the daily events of a territorially bounded polity (Imagined 61). But publishing high-quality journalism on a weekly basis is time consuming and expensive. Daignault had no prior experience, little money and few people on his staff, and he was working to change nothing less than the global system of governance of the Universal Catholic Church.
When the NCWC refused to grant him a subscription to its Catholic news wire service, he seemed to have taken it upon himself to single-handedly create the news and report on it at the same time. He committed himself to doing a newspaper, even if that meant doing it badly.
Still, he seemed to have more success in reaching les nôtres than did the national societies. This support was widespread but was not deeply committed. In December 1926, 1500 people attended a Sentinellist rally in Woonsocket featuring the French-Canadian speaker Samuel Genest, who had been engaged in the struggle to protect French language instruction in Ontario (Chartier 156). In February 1927, Daignault spoke to 3000 at an assembly in Woonsocket. In March 1927 Daignault, Gaspard Boucher and Phydime Hémond began a speaking tour of New England, attracting enormous crowds. That month, they spoke to 1200 people in Pawtucket ("Audience"), and to 3000 at a rally in Arctic RI ("Daignault Sera"). Another 3000 attended a rally in Worcester in April ("Trois Milles") and 3000-5000 attended a rally at Woonsocket's Joyland Hall in 1928 (Sorrell Sentinelle 223). Meanwhile, the USJB ! 100 membership shrank from 52,000 in 1926 (Chartier 157,Quintal 58) to 50,000 in 1927 (Chartier 157) and then to 49,600 in 1928 (Quintal 59).

The linguistic and material economies of Woonsocket show up not only in
Daignault's use of basilectal varieties of Canadian French but also in the language attitudes taken in response to his style choices. In La Tribune, for example, a French journalist challenged Daignault: "When one claims to be the savior of the race and the faith, one uses less vulgar expressions, Mr. Daignault; when one proclaims himself a 'practicing Catholic, faithful and loyal,' one writes without swearing like a trooper (comme un charretier); we do not use the language of the slaughterhouse (langage d'abbatoir) in a newspaper" ("Nous Vous"). This response to his stylistic choices refuses them the legitimacy of rhetorical resistance, and instead reflects the attitudes inherent in a language ideology that privileged standardized written forms of Parisian and Canadian French over the spoken varieties associated with the working class.
We can also see the local linguistic economy reflected in the attitudes of the English language press toward the burgeoning francophone public sphere of the time.
Echoing the warnings of Dr. Charles Carroll, an English journalist warned of "a foreign colony within this State which has its own tradesmen, schools, banks, churches and Chamber of Commerce. Among its members…there are those who are unable either to speak or understand the English language, and find no necessity for its use" ("Fausses"). Here we see English and French measured by their relative use values in a local material economy. The writer is complaining of the degraded use value of English and the ascendant value of French in the state. We can thus ! 101 understand the demand for French as a language of instruction not as a misguided and retrograde attempt to hold on to ancestral tradition and to avoid modernization, but instead as a politically savvy move by a linguistic minority to protect their material interests by simultaneously resisting subjection to an Anglo-dominant public sphere and constructing an alternate francophone public sphere. Sentinelle Affair are part of the uneasy settlement of English in North America, and that we must recover these histories as part of the linguistic memory of literacy instruction on this continent. Attempts to account for language differences must actively work against inherited ideological stances lest we find ourselves practicing the very discourses we intend to analyze. language not as a neutral and transparent system of signs capable of objectively referring to a reality that existed somewhere "outside" language; rather, language was understood as a differential system of arbitrary signs with no positive terms, made meaningful only through its system of differences. Thus, language meant only by virtue of its self-referential nature-the differences could be understood only in relation to each other within a linguistic system. Such a reformulation of linguistic ! 113 structure challenged traditional ways of establishing evidence and objectivity in the social sciences. From the perspective of linguistic turn historiography, for example, the past could not be merely reflected in the language of an historical artifact; rather, past realities were understood to be constituted in language. From this perspective, the past was understood to have been produced through the discursive structures in which social actors were enmeshed.
This perspective gave rise to histories that viewed the past as the product of discourse. Instead of describing individual agents as acting with intentionality to produce desired consequences, linguistic turn historians interpreted historical actors as discursive subjects, whose historical actions were determined by the discursive regime that had produced their subjectivities. Gabrielle Spiegel notes that the appeal of the linguistic turn was its "de-essentializing agenda " (25). This agenda sought to make cultural identity historically contingent-a result of the interaction between knowledge and power in discourse-rather than assuming identity to be biologically or naturally assigned. This critical approach to studying the pressures of discursive structure on social action made it possible, for example, for historians to understand oppression and disability as socially constructed exclusions rather than as natural and justified by the deficient bodies of actual people.
It is exactly this direct move from identity construction to discursive structure, however, that has led Pennycook to argue that there never has been a linguistic turn in the social sciences; rather, the structuralist emphasis on discourse was always a cultural turn that bypassed language (Language 123). Pennycook's move is to ! 114 complicate the study of discursive regimes by viewing language not as a structure but as a local practice. This view rehabilitates the rhetorical agency of language users in their choices of what, when and how to speak (or to remain silent). A bilingual speaker's self-representations-the choice of how or whether to suppress evidence of their bilingualism-is a strategic choice based on everyday experience of communicative situations. At the same time, viewing language as a local practice challenges social scientists to reconcile the need to use language as data with an understanding that language is always socially situated. In the same way that Miller argues for a view of genre as a typification of individual responses to recurrent social situations (151), so Pennycook argues that linguistic grammar is a sedimentation of individual performances, a kind of genre theory of grammar. In his study of language as performance, he argues that "grammar" is "simply the name for certain categories of observed repetitions in discourse" (Global 72) and that languages "are the sedimented products of repeated acts of identity" (73). From this view, it is impossible to extract language from its performative context and make it mean in the ways that our research methodologies demand.
The turn toward practice is not new in historical writing. Studying the historical contingency of identity-in-discourse may have enabled historians to take a critical stance towards the historical workings of race, class and gender, viewing them as discursive structures that determined past realities. But recent historiographical theory has complicated the structuralist model, seeking to challenge the overly deterministic role attributed to discourse/culture. In historical writings after Foucault, ! 115 discourse was conceptualized as a totalizing structure, a conceptualization that-as post-linguistic turn historians argue-fails to account for the capacity of experience "to exceed and to escape discursive construction" (Spiegel 18) or to account for the fact that life often "outruns the capacity of culture to account for it" (Spiegel 21).
Instead of arguing that "life" or "experience" has the capacity to exceed and outrun discursive models, Pennycook might argue that language has the capacity to outrun and exceed discursive models. Language outruns its own ability to account for itself.
In response to a growing dissatisfaction with conceptual frameworks that rely too heavily on discursive structure, historical writing after the linguistic turn has sought to rehabilitate rhetorical agency in its accounts of how discourse operates. But in order for this agency to be detected by the historian, it still must be enacted through semiotic practices, and here is how we get to the possibilities for studying past language practices. Post-linguistic turn historiography still views individuals as subjects within discourse, whose actions often reproduce the structures which produced their subjectivity, but individuals also have the capacity to use discursive structures strategically through the deployment of tactics and critical practices, to use language to outrun language. This conceptual framework thus shifts emphasis away from the totalizing effects of the structures of discourse on individual experience and towards individual capacities to operate within and against discursive structures by practicing language. To follow Horner and Lu, we might say that individuals respond to discursive structure by "languaging," by "fashion[ing] and refashion [ing] ! 116 standardized conventions, subjectivity, the world, and their relations to others and the world" ("Translingual" 591).
In both rhetoric/composition and in post-linguistic-turn historiography, then, individual practice is understood as at once an individual's perception of some social categorization(s)-discursive structure-in which she is enmeshed; her perception of how such categorization both enables and constrains her ability to pursue some material interest; and her subsequent strategic use of that categorization(s) according to her interests. In order to turn action into a tactic, the individual perceives discursive structure not as objective reality, but as a linguistic regime that attempts to turn language categories and linguistic procedures into objective reality. This In focusing on language attitudes as one of the cultural tactics that strategically respond to discursive structure, I am tangling up a thread of twentieth century structuralist social theory that attempted to describe the way individuals incorporate ideology into their own thoughts and behaviors, adopting ideological positions as though they are one's own. Kenneth Burke's formulation of attitude as an "incipient act" (235) is a useful point at which to pick up this thread in composition and rhetoric.
! 117 In A Grammar of Motives, Burke argues that "the formation of appropriate attitudes" is required to induce an audience to action ( stimulus," while the behaviorist theory "views an attitude as the response to a stimulus" (Fasold 147). ! ! While positioning herself as a behaviorist in her research, Kristiansen still recognizes that "language attitudes are complex psychological entities which involve knowledge and feeling as well as behaviour":! Can we be sure that what we are measuring are really people's attitudes? One might suspect, for instance, that a standard procedure in which a researcher asks for some kind of evaluative reaction (in an interview, in a questionnaire, or in a matched-guise experiment) will prompt subjects to reproduce generallyheld opinions rather than display their particular 'real' attitudes (Kristiansen 291).! Structuralist approaches to social science would see the distinction between a reproduced "generally-held opinion" and a "real attitude" as a false distinction. Social scientists might instead locate the production of an attitude not in individual cognition nor in observable behavior, but in discursive activity. The discourse which constitutes languages as high prestige or low prestige, public or private, native or foreign, formal or informal, also makes a finite range of subject positions available to those individuals enmeshed in it. To each individual subject position adheres a range of attitudes toward the cultural objects through which we interact and form relationships.
One such cultural object is language. Thus, rather than attempt to locate a "real" attitude in a matched-guise experiment, Kristiansen might interpret language attitudes in terms of the discourse out of which those attitudes are produced and in which they circulate.! not extend beyond the first preceding generation. Some respondents only had a vague knowledge of ancestral migration. One respondent said his father came "because he was tired of working a 480-acre farm for no pay. Word was coming back to them in Canada of how well they were being treated and what good pay they were receiving.
They migrated and tried to carry on customs as they did in Canada, but believed that to get ahead their children should know English." But such lucid descriptions are rare.
Most often what emerges from the interviews is the fact of discontinuity in Franco-American family histories, an intergenerational rupture centered around language loss. This rupture is recognized by one respondent as the inability of Franco youth to acquire "certain historical knowledge of their family because of the language barrier."! ! 2. Effects of discontinuity on parent-child relationships: One fifty-eight year old woman (born in 1922) felt that Franco-American youth had grown alienated from their parents because they couldn't speak French. Another observed "a trend" among the younger generation of "getting away from most of their traditions." Despite these observations, and despite the aforementioned effects of the language barrier and the loss of tradition on intergenerational continuity, almost all the interview subjects agreed that the parent-child relationship was closer than it had ever been, or at least they agreed that whatever alienation existed could be applied to all young people in general, not to any specific ethnicity. The insistence on closeness despite language barriers and a loss of tradition seems to parallel the insistence that Franco-American youth had "blended" into the American mainstream and are no different from any other American youth. These tensions are especially striking when considering, first, ! 123 that many of the younger generation self-reported being comfortable with and proud of their Franco-American heritage; and, second, that many of the younger generation had attended French parochial schools, spoke French occasionally in the home with their families, consumed French radio and print, and were technically members of the same linguistic minority as were their parents. ! The excerpts present the English instilling freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the right of self-government to in America, but they neglect to describe the English's historical curtailment of these freedoms and rights from the ! 125 French colonies that were subjected to British rule. The history book also identifies the reader with the English in their interactions with the French by describing the English as "us" and the French as "them," as "savages" and as "immoral" and "unscrupulous." ! ! Almost one-fourth of the interviewers dealt with this question by not even reporting on it in the seminar paper. Of those interviewers that did address the question, slightly more respondents found the portrayals disparaging than those who didn't find them so. But by far the largest portion of responses refused to take a position on the excerpts, offered no comment, or pled too little knowledge or familiarity with the subject to respond. One respondent insisted that the portrayals "must be true or the history books wouldn't print it." The indication from such strategic silence is that the perceived role of education is not to stress ethnic differences or to point out discriminatory practices, but rather to erase them in favor of an imagined national unity.!  largely Anglo cultural milieu. Franco-American French was at best a family heirloom, "Abandoning a minority language is easier than expending the effort to speak it…a manifestation of 3 American common sense and efficiency; any use of energy must lead to a tangible goal" (115).
"They continue to speak French by choice, according to their tastes, out of a desire to carry the Other middle-aged speakers spoke the language with friends. In all, 63% (fifty-six of the eighty-nine respondents) still spoke French at home with relatives and friends, a staggering percentage considering that these were mostly third and fourth generation speakers of a minority language that had been subject to restrictions since the 1920s. On one hand, the interview respondents convey an attitude that embraces assimilation. "supposedly more or less automatic language shift that takes place in immigrant families" by which the third generation has completed "the break with ancestral languages in order to become fully assimilated, monolingual, native speakers of English" (Trimbur,"Dartmouth" 165 reaction to perceived threats to the national identity and economy posed by the twins of outsourcing and immigration" (141). This regimentation is called for and justified out of either a concern for national unity or out of a concern for the liberal ideals of One of the ironies of this mission to empower and unify is that it produces alienation and division and turns political borders into instruments of identification.  Trimbur identify a largely unexamined conceptual framework for language learning and for the design of teacher training programs in languages in the United States. This framework requires that all language acquisition be oriented towards the development of competence in English, and that levels of competence in English in and of themselves account "for the socioeconomic status of ethnic groups" (617). This framework holds the acquisition of English to be "natural, neutral and beneficial" for all language learners (Pennycook,Cultural Politics 9). The framework assumes that monolingual English language instruction is the result of an inevitable spread of Anglo Western culture, that it possesses ideological neutrality, and that language learning is simply a question of providing access to socioeconomic advancement. Horner and ! 146 Trimbur show that this framework undergirds the arrangement of the modern languages curriculum in American higher education (597).
L2 writing and composition studies developed out of two different historical trajectories, but both in the context of twentieth century English monolingual institutions of higher education (see Fig. 13). Each of these trajectories developed its own specialized tracks for language teaching and language learning. In L2 writing, Matsuda notes that "the first English class for international students was taught in 1911" at the University of Michigan ( Matsuda "Composition" 701)  Matsuda has written on the consequences of these two separate trajectories for both teachers and students. For students, he has critiqued the "policy of linguistic containment" that separates language differences from mainstream composition through instruments like proficiency tests and placement procedures ("Myth" 642).  In "Resisting Monolingualism in 'English'," Horner and Lu develop the notion of a "multilingual approach" to teaching writing that accounts for "the increasing heterogeneity of students' language practices" (143) as evidence of the shifting and fracturing of English into "Englishes" in a global economy (142) rather than as poor or deficient language performances that need to be eradicated or accommodated to the demands of Standard Written English (SWE) or Edited American English (EAE).
They critique approaches to language difference that assume language to be fixed and unchanging (145). This formulation of a "multilingual approach" represented a convergence of L2 writing and mainstream composition, moving the disciplinary division from policies of linguistic containment to strategies of multilingualism (see ! 150 Fig. 14). In terms of pedagogical strategy, teaching multilingual writing entails turning our attention towards the rhetorical work students do between languages rather than within one or another language, what Canagarajah terms "shuttling" between languages. In Canagarajah's formulation, students and teachers should focus on developing "versatility" in response to the "changing contexts of communication" that demand writers "switch their languages, discourses, and identities in response to this contextual change," re-conceiving of "textual difference" not as error but as "a strategic and creative choice by the author to attain his or her rhetorical objectives" ("Toward" 591). Canagarajah notes that in the "vast, diffuse, virtual community of global English, one always has to learn a lot-and rapidly-as one decides which receptive and productive resources to adopt for a context" ("Multilingual" 20). The development of linguistic and rhetorical versatility in response to shifting contexts encourages us to rethink language teaching and learning not as emphasizing correctness or even appropriateness to the situation, but that instead emphasizes creativity and innovation, as every language performance is an act of rhetorical invention and identity constitution.
In terms of assessing such rhetorical work, Jay Jordan offers an array of multilingual competencies through which writing teachers can more effectively detect and evaluate students' multilingual language performances. For example, Jordan identifies the deployment of 1) "lexical and syntactic innovation;" 2) rhetorical and linguistic accommodation and resistance; and 3) meta-discursive sensitivity as areas where students can develop sophisticated rhetorical knowledge as they move between ! 151 languages and discourses for different communicative contexts (105). We can see the deployment of linguistic innovation, rhetorical accommodation, and meta-discursive sensitivity in Canagarajah's example of "a typical interaction among multilinguals" ("Multilingual" 20). He describes a telephone conversation between a cheese supplier in Europe and a cheese importer in Egypt in which both must use English as a lingua franca to negotiate the return of a shipment of spoiled cheese. In the exchange, the Egyptian customer complains that the cheese is "blowing" (21), after which they must work to negotiate the meaning of "blowing" in this context in order for both "to achieve their social purpose [i.e., a business transaction] through English" (22). Canagarajah observes that both are appropriating English for their purposes, "without regard to what native speakers may use in these contexts" (21).
The exchange represents what composition teachers like Jordan might be looking for in assessing competencies in innovation, accommodation/resistance, and metadiscursive sensitivity. It's important to emphasize that this work leads to a more nuanced understanding of language difference not only in already-designated L2 writing sections, but also in writing spaces that up to this point have been thought of as monolingual. Students in such classrooms may already be putting into practice many of the above multilingual rhetorical competencies, but our pedagogical approaches do not know how to detect them, assess them, and value them. Our pedagogies might move from the development of rhetorical competencies in monolingual situations to the development of rhetorical competencies in lingua franca spaces.

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As Canagarajah notes, the multilingual writing research he conducts requires that the researcher also be multilingual ("Toward" 591). The challenge, then, for writing instructors who identify as monolingual native English speakers is to position ourselves as teachers, scholars and researchers in relation to this disciplinary convergence, when many of us may not be multilingual. We need to develop a strategic awareness of how we, too, are always already shuttling between languages even when our language practices seem to represent a purified version of English.
Without this strategic awareness, composition teachers and researchers tacitly take up the ideologies of linguistic modernity in the way we position ourselves as language experts in relation to students and their language differences; in our attitudes towards language difference in the classroom; and in our pedagogical strategies for (de)valuing it and assessing difference as error. To begin addressing this challenge, the field of composition and rhetoric must first acknowledge the suppressed historical presence of multilingual writing in US systems of higher education and the suppressed historical presence of alternate systems of education, like the collège classique system, as US systems of education. If we consider francophone education part of the history of writing instruction in the United States, we must acknowledge that our institutional structures and pedagogical practices emerged out of the suppression of multilingual complexity and out of the political need to purify English from multilingual contamination. To the extent that we take those institutional structures and pedagogical practices for granted, we are continually enacting that suppression and purification on ourselves and our students.

Writing Translingual Histories
We can formulate alternate structures and alternate practices, however, if we bring the francophone presence to consciousness and revise our conceptualization of what is possible in writing instruction and literacy acquisition out of that consciousness (see Fig. 15). The rehabilitation of a suppressed francophone presence forces us to problematize certain disciplinary assumptions which even scholars of multilingual writing work take for granted. Matsuda's historical framework, for example, is limited to the trajectory of ESL and L2 writing within the context of Figure 15. Re-imagining institutional structures and pedagogical practices for writing instruction.
! 154 English monolingual institutions. However, rather than recognizing this limitation in his work, he instead writes as though his history applies broadly to "US higher education" ("Second" 17), implying that his history is inclusive of language difference across all institutions of higher education in this country. Similarly, Horner and Trimbur's historical framework is limited to the modernization of language curriculums at English monolingual institutions. Yet they write in terms of "US college composition" (594), implying that their history is inclusive of language curriculums at all institutions of higher education in this country.
This unacknowledged limitation restricts the archival materials they can access as evidence. Matsuda's evidence, for example, is restricted to the University of Michigan ("Second" 17), the CCCC (18), and the City University of New York (23).
Within this restricted framework, language difference appears to be an emergent issue in the twentieth century history of US writing instruction, rather than as an issue integral to the development of such instruction. We might instead contextualize such institutional histories within overt political struggles to regulate cross-language relations in ways that favored English and devalued other languages. As late as 1932, for example-nine years before the founding of the ELI at Michigan-a writer in the French newspapers pointed to the 1883 founding of the MLA as evidence of the ascendancy of French as one of many languages taught in the United States, arguing that the association "did much to increase the influence of French" and that by 1896 French had "become mandatory in almost all universities in the country" ("La Langue"). The writer was apparently unaware of the English-language publication in ! 155 PMLA of James Morgan Hart's "English as a Living Language," in which Hart argued for the centrality of English fluency to all other language work. Hart asks PMLA readers, "Are you prepared to assert that a student is adequately trained in German, let us say, when he is unable to express in English the grammatical logic of a German sentence" (qtd. in Horner and Trimbur 606)? The institutions and organizations that Matsuda studies assume the primacy of English to all other language instruction-and to all academic training-and ignore the presence of, let us say, French language schools in which students were asked to explain the "grammatical logic" of French in

French.
Similarly, Horner and Trimbur restrict their archival materials to institutions like Yale (597), Harvard (598), and Williams College (606). Within this restricted framework, monolingual English instruction appears to be the result of a modernizing shift in American education away from the study of the classical languages (Latin, Greek and Hebrew), rather than as a political shift that suppressed the increasing influence of Latinate language speakers from the U.S. public sphere. Daignault complained of exactly this shift away from French and toward English as a language of instruction for teaching Latin in French schools, not because he was against modernization, but because French-speaking students could learn Latin better in French than in English. After the implementation of the NCWC's English Only policy, Daignault asks readers of La Sentinelle to "consider the monumental pedagogical error that is the teaching of Latin and Greek using English as the language of instruction" (Juillet " Programme"). He argues that teaching French-language students ! 156 Latin using English as the language of instruction alienates them from their own cultural identity, disabling students from situating their language and culture in relation to Greco-Roman civilization and de-historicizing their sense of being French in North America. "For a French speaker," Daignault concludes, "these classical studies in English would be like studying French literature through French works translated into English." As Horner suggests, we should view this linguistic alienation as the transformation of multilingual writers into basic writers, mapping the "frontier" of basic writing in imperialist terms of "conversion or deracination" (35).
As the Sentinelle Affair suggests, the boundaries drawn around "US higher education" and "US college composition" have historically required the suppression of alternate versions of the US. This suppression yields an exclusion of actual multilingual bodies-US citizens and their children-from participation in a public sphere purified in English. If we are to avoid reproducing this process of exclusion and purification, we must accommodate multiple histories and multiple languages into our understanding of what it means to teach and write in a college/collège in the United States (see Figure 3). We must attend to the multisitedness of the history of US composition itself, seeing its history as constituted by overlapping ideologies, public spheres, languages, and discourses in the making of writing classrooms. The multisitedness of US college composition allows us to reframe monolingual institutional structures and practices in the context of suppressed histories of multilingual language instruction.

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Horner and Lu point out that the "multilingual approach" to accounting for language difference shifts the framing of writing and language performance from a national and monolingual perspective to a multilingual and global perspective ("Resisting" 148 In terms of broad movements in the social sciences, writers of translingual histories of language difference contribute to the restoration of rhetorical agency to social and historical actors who operated within and against the discursive structures of history. The conceptual binaries of modernity arrange languages spatially and temporally-as Richard Rodriguez's memoir attests. The discursive structures that regulate this arrangement consist of terms like public/private; native/foreign; past/ future; and modern/traditional. In order to develop the multilingual and global perspective called for by Horner and Lu's multilingual approach, our histories must finally account for themselves in the context of one more conceptual binary: center and periphery. As Phillipson shows us, English is one of the exported commodities of the imperial center, packaged into English Language Teaching (ELT) curriculum materials, attached to sociopolitical agreements between developed and developing countries, and adopted in global niche markets out of the belief that English will be one of the technologies of modernization through which people will gain access to global flows of capital and goods. Horner and Lu see English Only arguments ! 160 anticipat[ing] a linguistically homogeneous global future in which, instead of the presence of a plethora of shifting and interacting world Englishes as well as other languages, it is imagined that everyone will speak and write something termed 'standard English' to insure efficiency in the worldwide conduct of economic transactions (142).
Rather than trying to bring people into the global traffic of goods, capital and labor, Pennycook suggests that ELT might do better to bring students into "the global traffic of meaning," so that linguistic competence is measured by critical engagement with the discursive structures which impose meaning on us all in the form of "social, cultural and historical meanings conveyed by the grammar and lexicon" of English ("English" 34).
In short, the rehabilitation of rhetorical agency is brought about by shifting our analyses from the categories of discursive structure (e.g., center and periphery) to the practices of individuals operating within and against those structures. A neat parsing of the relationship between discursive structure and individual practice in multilingual studies of English can be seen by comparing the approaches in Robert Phillipson's Linguistic Imperialism and Suresh Canagarajah's Resisting Linguistic Imperialism.
Phillipson's book is a study of the discourses that make English Language Teaching (ELT) into a global industry that values languages as market commodities in relation to English. He traces the historical development of ELT during the period when Britain was divesting itself of its imperial territories. He looks specifically at policies for promoting English internationally as they were established by official state is an ethnographic study of ELT classrooms in Jaffna, an approach based on his belief that "to really study how linguistic imperialism is carried out in the periphery . . . one must undertake work in the periphery" (Resisting 43). Where Phillipson's study is concerned with the totalizing effects of ideological state apparatuses like agencies of the British Council and the US State Department, Canagarajah's study is a practiceoriented response that looks at how individual teachers and students use imperialist policies to enact their own agendas through resistance. Together, they represent two views of language ideologies in practice, one from the imperial center and the other from the imperial periphery.
My project, however, seeks to collapse the binary between periphery and center by showing how the center has historically constructed itself as such. By studying the discursive structures designed to suppress language difference, and the ! 162 language practices of a prominent linguistic minority located in an imperial center and subjected to those structures, I expose the imperial center as itself an interstitial space, composed between differences. Francophone New England represents a periphery-inthe-center, as francophone cultural agents developed tactics for living in the midst of anglophone domination. We can see the later sublimation of these tactics into white ethnic identifications of being "same as everyone else" while maintaining distinct language practices as a French people, a tactical authenticity designed to shift one's language and identity to suit the needs of potentially treacherous and ever-shifting communicative contexts. Writing translingual histories of language difference will enable us to acknowledge and incorporate multilingual complexities into our identities as erstwhile monolingual language teachers and researchers; into our language attitudes as we struggle to account for the perplexity of language difference in student writing; and into a multisited conceptualization of both our writing classrooms and our histories of US college/collège composition and US higher education/hautes études.