The Uncanny Valley of America’s British Language
1.
Maybe director Robert Zymeckis’ 2007 motion capture version of Beowulf wasn’t the greatest thing to happen to the landscape of English Literature. It was, after all, the height of the uncanny valley animation era, when, hopped up on the possibilities of computer-aided modeling, Zymeckis’ Imagemovers produced film after film full of dead-eyed humans brought to life by actors jumping around a Hollywood studio in those golf ball-covered suits. Still, I’ve found, as a secondary school teacher of Seamus Heaney’s 1999 landmark Beowulf translation, Zymeckis’ movie at least makes for a wild ride for high school students hoping to skip out on their reading. Neil Gaiman’s script, straying from the original narrative, aims for Freud with a windswept volley of arrows: the titular hero, instead of vanquishing Grendel’s mother, is seduced by her emasculating charms, which are played by the computer-enhanced, serpentine sexiness of Angelina Jolie. Their unholy union produces a dragon-offspring that returns for revenge on its father in the final act. The hero and monster, Gaiman’s plot asserts, are of the same lineage—to his credit it does hint at the self-same monikers in the Old English for hero and monster, “aglæca.” Each needs the other; two sides of the same otherworldly lineage.
While the film might not help reluctant students reading Heaney’s Beowulf—itself responsible for the story’s renaissance in English Literature classes, and for Zymeckis’ film even being greenlit—it does offer something different: a bit of instruction on, of all things, the politics of language. Because while the visuals can seem dated, or downright bizarre, Zymeckis’ linguistic choices retain literary relevance. According to the on-set language consultant, the goal was to contrast the language of the Geats (West Country English accent) and the Danes (a Welsh-English accent guided by their king’s (played by Anthony Hopkins), own native language) against each other, while still keeping their accents, vocabulary, and diction in a somewhat modern, if marginally British, English. Only Grendel spoke a version of the Old English used in the original Beowulf, a language usually incomprehensible to modern English speakers, but fudged just enough to become semi-intelligible on-screen.
For most of the other characters, Zymeckis chose country-fied languages because he didn’t want them speaking “proper” English—what Americans might call a British accent, but what language scholars call Received Pronunciation (RP), essentially the BBC standardized language of the English middle and upper classes. Zymeckis wanted the language more rough, more ancient sounding. So he chose accents equally modern, but less familiar to his largely American audience.
Talking about the politics of language in adaptations of stories historically originating in long-dead languages can feel like trying to piece back the images cut by a kaleidoscope. But if we were going to take a straightforward lesson from Zymeckis’ choices in his Beowulf, it might be that the social-imperial project that was RP worked remarkably well on Americans. For Americans, RP is proper English, and modern English, all at once. In this reading of the role of RP in Beowulf’s Viking Age, it can be argued that Zimeckis set his characters’ language implicitly in contrast to the hoity-toity pretentiousness of RP no doubt intuited by his American audience. In this roundabout way, the influence of American impressions of Britishness shapes the use of languages (and accents) from England. With RP’s sheen of officiality comes a set of associations heaped by Americans onto the British public at large: sophistication, nobility, intellectualism, and politeness. These are all the things Beowulf is not, Zymeckis wants his American audience to know. He’s a little rougher. All other forms of English, then, even if they don’t do it explicitly, can be read as referencing the central characteristics of RP in the same way that, say, the periphery of an empire reflects back on the central metropole.
This might be the same with Britishness, and white America’s own image of Britishness: two colonial empires staring at each other in the fun-house mirror of a shared language and the white-supremacy of their complimentary settler-colonial projects.
2.
This association is, like that British Empire, not unassailable.
In my British Literature class for high school sophomores, we start each year with a survey of accents. I cannily ask my students: what’s your impression of a British accent? I’m doing a sort of ongoing experiment, year after year, to see how they respond. Do these students from the American suburbs have some idea of what it might mean to speak “British” specifically? We go around the room and everyone has to read the first line of Heaney’s Beowulf in their best go at an accent.
Most approximate the Queen’s English, sometimes as filtered through Harry Potter. To someone more familiar with contemporary British languages, it sounds like a southern-inflected RP that’s as foreign to Beowulf as my students’ own modern American English is. But what’s surprised me in the time since I started this course four years ago is the slow creep of other English languages from Great Britain into their impressions of British English.
What I hear every so often is Stormzy, perhaps British Grime’s biggest rap export, if you go by streams alone. Specifically, in my students’ recitations I hear Stormzy’s Black British English, what linguists now call MLE (Multicultural London English), with its melange of influences from Cockney to West-Indian to Bengali and everything in between. To one student, Beowulf would sound more British if it opened more like he imagined Stormzy might say it: “The Spear-Danes, bruv, we know deh heroism.”
I’ve tried to get to the bottom of this influence. FIFA, the soccer video game, is the gateway drug to a British English that’s not the standard RP, I’ve concluded. It’s where American students are likely to run into British rap, Grime, and its downbeat cousin, Drill. But it’s not just FIFA. Stormzy’s song “Bronze” appears on NBA 2k21’s soundtrack among the usual mix of American rap and the odd pop song. “Bronze” was an important little earworm of a background track for 2k21. Its repetitive “this year” refrain digs in with the force of a strange familiarity to the American ear. When it’s set beside American rap, Stormzy’s Grime is distinct from other British music imports: we can hear his everyday Black British language like we can’t in, say, Mick Jagger’s imitated Southern-American singing accent.
Stormzy’s sense of his own place in English language discourse animates his 2019 album Heavy is the Head. In the album, Stormzy, at the top of his game in the UK (the album charted #1 on the official UK charts) contemplates not only the burden of his power within Grime, as the title’s Henry IV reference suggests, but also asserts his place within the UK’s larger racial discourse. At one point, in his song “Big Michael,” Stormzy calls himself Henry the 8th, and says of his rivals, “behead em, head em, head em.” It feels important that Stormzy doesn’t just compare himself to these two king Henry’s (IV and VIII), but takes on their mantle—as he says, “heavy is the crown, I still wear it.”
It’s not just Stormzy who sees himself as something of a Shakesperean king. The National Theatre, who in its publicity blitz around this spring’s production of Othello, had their cast play a round of “Shakespeare or Stormzy”. Up pops a line: “When they put me in my grave, don’t make a sound.” Is that Hamlet? Or Stormzy? (At times the cast was rightfully confused, though thankfully not when it came to the lines in their own production.) The show’s publicity materials point out that Othello in the production should be considered a “refugee from slavery” who finds that “even love still exists on racial lines.” I’ve always found that this type of publicity material offers paratextual connections in ways that even public polling cannot: they offer an insight into the discourse about the historical place of a character and artist like Stormzy. And Stormzy is well aware that he sits at the edge of something larger happening in the relationship between Black British art and British representation around the world. He’s spent at least part of the last five years working on his Penguin Publishing imprint Merky Books in the hopes of elevating Black British literature—and language—to what he’s said is its deserved place in World Literature. In 2022, Merky Books published Noughts & Crosses writer and UK Children’s Laureate Malorie Blackman’s memoir Just Sayin, its biggest release yet.
But for as many articles as there are about Stormzy’s ascendency, an equal amount focus on the inability of Grime and the larger UK rap scene to gain a proper foothold in the American rap market—because of America’s impression of Britain’s properness, it might be that we can’t quite comprehend a musical tradition outside our impression of the UK being a very white, and very proper-sounding, place. Compounding this conflict is the growing impression from some African American artists—including Samuel L. Jackson in a 2017 interview—that Black British ascendance in American popular media threatens Black representation by African Americans.
What is clear, however, is that high-profile introductions of Black British artists to American listeners (Stormzy and his protege Dave not the least among them) has begun to challenge the certain popular conceptions Americans have about Britishness. These artists directly confront Shakespeare, British tropes, and offer their own interpretations of British language and culture. Admittedly my sample size is small, my question to my students at the beginning of my own course misleading. But in these scattered impressions we might see cracks in the facade of white Britain’s (and by extension white America’s) sense of its own language’s prominence.
It hints, I think, at a larger question about British identity that not only has to do with language, but with how white Britishness projects itself abroad, the role Americans play in that projection, and the role we might play in creating our own paratext to a new sense of Britishness.
3.
In the summer of 2022, I set out to walk along the coast of Southeast England from Folkestone to Whitstable along the county of Kent’s eastern edge, about 50 miles of path cresting white chalk cliffs and skirting wide, seaweed strewn beaches facing the French coast, its own white cliffs often on the horizon. Kent offers something of a conundrum for the country: it’s both uniquely English, the “bread basket” and spiritual heart of the country, and a borderland choked with traffic that winds its way through villages and the remnants of two thousand years of coastal defense from the Romans to the RAF. I wanted, I told myself, to feel the ground of a place that was both essential to British identity with its Albion white shoreline dominating the approach to that impregnable island nation, and the border where so many had come ashore from Cesar, to Augustine, to the countless millions through the Ports of Dover and the Channel Tunnel.
Maybe it’s an American thing to put yourself physically into the argument in your head—present yourself as an adventurer among the metaphors, so to speak. Or maybe it was a teacher thing, and I wanted to wander among the symbolic geography that animated my questioning, to reify the metaphorical paths of the story into the mundanity of a walk. At any rate, I wasn’t the only one who sought out the coast.
That summer, like every summer since the Covid pandemic, many who came to those shores were part of what Britain’s right wing press called the “invasion flotilla.” For years, hundreds of asylum seekers have braved the treacherous waters of the English Channel in order to declare themself refugees in the United Kingdom. They arrive mostly by the so-called Libyan route through North Africa to Europe from countries often within Anglophone Africa and states destabilized by America’s turn of the century war on terror.
I didn’t come to walk that stretch of beach to witness the refugee crisis, nor to report on it. But I knew people were out there crossing the channel in desperately constructed vessels somewhere in the gray waters. I walked on the protected cliffs, and the feeling lingered just outside of conscious thought, like all of us know from the relative state of our privilege that the great grinding violence of the world churns somewhere else. It haunted me. I looked out across the water as I walked: blue sky dominated, its heat a distant echo of the famines and chaos abroad shaping others’ movements. And although every morning I saw out across the channel the gray and orange figures of the RLNI and UK Border Force cutters, I never once saw the speck of an improvised craft. Maybe I wasn’t looking close enough.
There were other signs. On one long walk to Margate, as I approached the ruin of Margate’s Lido pool rising above the seafront—a sand-filled memory of the town’s once prominent seaside resort—I saw the familiar signs of graffiti along the cliffs. It wasn’t an uncommon sight. Embedded in the chalk were hard lumps of flint—the remnants of ancient sea sponges—that could easily be used to cut into the cliffside. There, along that lonely stretch of promenade with the abandoned resort’s sign looming above, someone had etched the words “wogs go home” in big capitals into the cliff. This wasn’t even the first racist graffiti I’d seen: one artist who frequented the very far end of the Ramsgate promenade had a thing for swastikas, and carved dicks were ubiquitous. But the piece near the approach to Margate struck me as odd because in its form it became clear that what was going on was a conversation. “Wogs,” that very British catch-all racial slur was written over and over again, each time crossed off by some other hand. Five times someone had come back to reassert the slur, and five times someone else had scrawled it out.
It was entirely possible that it’d been a different person each time. Or any number of permutations. Three people returning at different intervals, some writing “Wogs,” some scratching out the slur. One hoped for the best case: a single writer of “Wogs” and a new eraser every time. As it stood, the final iteration of the slur was half-heartedly scribbled out. I picked up one of those ancient sea sponge-shaped flints that littered the beach, came back, and finished the job. (Two weeks later, when I returned, I found that someone had come to the spot and cheekily written “Romans Go Home.”)
The conversation made an uncanny kind of historical sense. After all, as David Olusoga suggests in Black and British: A Forgotten History, it was likely somewhere along the chalk-cliffed shore of Kent that the first Black soldier of the Roman Legions stepped foot on the island, then at the very edge of that sprawling empire. A wholly different invasion flotilla, I guess.
Olusoga’s claim has a bit of anachronistic strangeness to it. He starts a book about Black Britishness at a historical moment when Blackness and Britishness wouldn’t show up as cultural phenomena for at least eleven hundred years. Olusoga knows this, of course, and part of his point is to track the converse anachronisms of British whiteness—the myriad cultural and social efforts which aimed to project backward in time the white picture of Britishness. It’s ironic, he argues, that this picture formed as the small kingdom that had come to dominate the island of Great Britain began to look outward, and began to project its power and its language out into the world. “Imperialism,” Olusoga says, “was the force that brought the first Africans to Britain, just as those centuries later it would take thousands of Britons to Africa.”
4.
As the profession of high school English teaching has evolved in its short 150-year American history, a lot of the efforts put into it have been toward codifying and developing pedagogical approaches. How do we teach? we ask ourselves and our colleagues in faculty meetings and graduate seminars. Understanding secondary English education as an ideological and critical project—how it is used to project into the future a set of cultural values—has been less safe territory, and certainly not the territory of secondary educators.
Often the substance of what is taught gets boiled down to a desire for variety in representation: we want many voices, as if the classroom were a marketplace of ideas that we want to fill with so many different types of product. In our most self-flattering imaginings, we envision our students encountering the variety of literature we offer as versions of those apocryphal stories of immigrants breaking down at the abundance of American supermarket shelves. If only we were able to get our students to read all sorts of texts, then they would understand. But understand what?
It’s a convenient lie, I think, that in high school English we teach a set of critical skills devoid of ideology. This politically neutral set of useful skills (critical thinking, composition, etc.) is how English education is often marketed to a general public skeptical of literature as a practical use of time, and an American Right convinced that the murky political project of American Liberalism (rebranded as Woke-ism of late) runs directly through the English classroom. If you listen to what’s actually taught in most English classes, you’d be hard pressed to believe this claim of neutrality. Not because there’s so much propagandizing going on, but because at the core of literature teaching is the tenet that all representation contains a set of values either explicitly, or implicitly, held by its creator.
Our American sense of British Literature, and of Britishness generally, contains the ideological traces of what for the first fifty years of the profession was described as “The Anglo-Saxon Civilization.” That civilization, so argued popular secondary school anthologies like 1919’s The Great Tradition, stretched from its formation as part of the murky period of Beowulf, formed its set of gender values in Medieval Romance, developed and codified its language in The King James Bible, questioned authority and fate in Shakespeare, and along the way developed what The Great Tradition described as “the value of dissent and democracy.”
It’s a story that tries to make democracy a “heritage.” It attempts, honestly, to de-universalize democracy, and to claim it as a privilege of a set of people in possession of a set of traditions and features that make them uniquely able to sustain a democratic state. The authors of The Great Tradition, Edwin Greenlaw and James Hanford, describe this Anglo-Saxon tradition in their introduction as that which is “most vital in English literature, especially in the later periods, [and] has connected itself more or less closely with the special problem and the great practical achievement of the Anglo-Saxon race, the working out of self-government.”
If it’s a story that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a story that still gets told quite often, and one that has begun to emerge again in America’s Far Right, with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s America First caucus touting recently its deference to these Anglo-Saxon political traditions. We might call her dumb, or bigoted, or uneducated on the historical realities of British history, but she’s not concerned with British history. It’s an American tradition she’s engaging with.
It’s this deference to the Anglo-Saxon, baked into our discourse and for so long animating much of white America’s sense of its own cultural heritage, that drives our desire for an elevated Britishness and in the end a deference to the accent that became RP. It can be reflected in the strangest places: when maybe the best-known 19th-century American Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth (brother of assassin John Wilkes Booth) played Othello, he spoke with the non-rhotic Received Pronunciation picked up from his English father and honed in his own theatrical tours of England. That Shakespearean voice very much shaped the prestige of what came to be called classical theater in the States.
But it wasn’t just in the U.S. that RP became synonymous with stage prestige. This spring, 150 years after Booth, some audience members in York, England, asked for their money back when York Theatre Royal’s production of As You Like It featured the broad Northern accents of that region. The episode was treated by the press as an anomaly—a throwback to an older sense of language prestige, even foolish in light of what we know about Shakespearean language in a historical sense. RP is no more Shakeperean than Zymeckis’ Beowulf is Old English. But as an American it struck me as an almost too-familiar regionalist version of complaints about Black actors playing Shakespearean roles in the United States. Tellingly, the New York Times called a now-famous 1936 all-Black cast version of Macbeth “not Shakespeare at all.” Despite the critics, the show was one of the most successful productions of the Federal Theater Project.
This question haunts my own work and my profession as a whole: will Americans forge a new sense of Britishness, and a new sense of British language and literature? Or will we drown again in the rising tide of white supremacist reaction? It is a question we can ask of Americans, just as we can of the British.
5.
When I walked the coast of Kent last summer, I tried not to read it as an old book. When an American looks at British Literature, we see what we are not. But we also see what we are. There’s a reason Shakespeare, with his corrupt kings and upstart heroes, is so often presented as integral to the American spirit in these 19th-century textbooks. When we see the British press stoke the fires of white replacement theory in response to desperate refugees landing on their most sacred shore, don’t we see the language of America’s Far Right talking of the sanctity of borders?
One day late in the summer I started off a walk in Margate. I hoped to make my destination a crumbling Roman ruin ten miles down the coast in a nothing town called Reculver.
Margate, like nearby Ramsgate, is a town in flux—caught somewhere between a long hard post-sixties fall from prosperity, and a late-aughts resurgence as an arts destination. The Turner Contemporary Gallery perches like a glass barnacle on the armpit of the town’s harbor. The shops become less abandoned the closer you get to the Gallery.
Still, on the Saturday I showed up at the train station, the tide along the main sands ebbed out into the harbor, and beachgoers down from London streamed from the train platforms out onto the flats dragging coolers and chairs and children. It’d been so hot all summer (the hottest on record until, probably, this summer), that the normally reserved English beach crowds actually got up from their chairs and started to splash about.
I wandered the promenade that morning waiting for the gallery to open, and found myself drawn out to the sea, where amongst the slowly turning blades of the London Array windfarm the familiar sight of a Border Patrol cutter hummed insistently. Closer in, near the Turner Gallery, on the tidal flat beyond the harbor’s breakwater, I saw a figure standing on a rock below the tideline. For a second, its uncanny stillness caught me off guard, until I recognized it for what it was: a statue. Antony Gormley had installed it in 2017, one of the haunting iron statues that populate many of his recent installations. On that hot summer day it stood there, a rusted iron ingot shaped in Gormley’s stout image, waiting to be swallowed by the sea.
I’d seen his similar installation in Liverpool, at Crosby Beach, some years before, and been struck by it in a way I still couldn’t shake. The day before I’d been in a meeting with some of the curators at the city’s International Slavery Museum, and one of the local historians there was telling the group about a historical plaque that they’d been involved with on the research side. Soon, she explained, would be the upcoming 100-year anniversary of the lynching of a Black sailor, the Bermudian-born Charles Wotton.
On the evening of June 5th, 1919, Wotton was chased down toward the harbor by a violent white mob, and when he got to the edge of the water, pushed in. The mob stood along the quayside throwing stones as Wotton bobbed in the dark waters of the Queen’s dock, until a rock hit him and he slipped under.
I’d seen the Gormley piece on Crosby Beach the next morning, on an incoming tide. The dark figures cemented out in the tidal flat slip under the waves had sent my heart into a panic. I could feel the water, I thought, climbing my chest. It was a memory that triggered me—a memory that I placed alongside the story of Charles Wotton. Some years earlier, I’d been working on a dock and fell into the water with rubber waders on. I was pulled underneath as the legs filled with water. Something else, something less personal, tugged at me as well.
And it tugged again that day in Margate, as I stood looking at the statue on the tideline. The year before, in November of 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying thirty migrants capsized. French and English vessels nearby ignored the distress call; the French authorities blamed the English, the English, the French. When, forty-five minutes later the English cutter from Ramsgate finally arrived, twenty-seven people had died. From the ships nearby, they’d watched.
I waited all afternoon, just to see if the statue drowned. I tried to convince myself that the man standing there on the edge of the tide wasn’t real, that it was just an uncanny reflection. But as the same haunting feeling from my walk crept up on me like the tide, I thought, maybe I was wrong.