Disappearing, Inc.: Glimpsing the sublime in the politics of access to endangered languages

The central themes of a popular and scholarly literature of language endangerment are connected broadly to European concepts of Wonder and the Sublime, and specifically to an American ambivalence about ‘progress’ and environmental despoliation (also expressed, e.g., in 19th century American landscape painting). The documentation of ‘vanishing’ American Indian languages by John Peabody Harrington (1884–1961)—carried out indefatigably, in secret, and always in ‘salvage’ mode—is considered next. Harrington’s vast Nachlass is today playing a central role in language revitalization and tribal recognition efforts of contemporary Native Californians, even as its contents, and its compiler, remain at least partly lodged in those same Romantic tropes of the Sublime (as was Harrington’s own self-image, perhaps): limitless, forbidding, impenetrable. Writing as a way of rendering languages accessible and rescuing them from ‘oblivion’ is the unifying theme, ironically enough.