From Text/Context to "Situatedness" in Atlantic History and Literature

Abstract

TWO anecdotes from the recent Society of Early Americanists– Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture joint conference in Williamsburg frame my response to Eric Slauter’s provocative survey of the Atlantic studies disciplinary trade gap. First, my experience as a panel co-organizer for that conference: Christopher Looby and I proposed a session called “Representations, Sexualities, and the Politics of Seduction.” We received ten paper proposals, five each from historians and literary scholars. Two proposals in each discipline came from graduate students. In selecting our final panel, we aimed to preserve this symmetry. The final lineup included two historians and two literary critics; two were recent Ph.D.’s and two were associate professors. We wanted the panel to aim for the same cross-disciplinary dialogue that the conference hoped to foster, and I think our expectations were borne out. I, for one, found the audience participation following the papers to be stimulating, and my own historical thinking was refined by listening to historians talk about texts (courtroom narratives and diaries) that bore key similarities to texts I had been writing about (poems, newspaper notices, and novels). In turn, though the historians on the panel employed a broader range of methodologies than a typical literary historian (this observation was especially true of the paper on women’s self-defensive use of seduction narratives in legal situations), they could also be said to engage in some form of close reading of the texts they examined. The second anecdote involves a former graduate student from New York University’s doctoral program in Atlantic history, a brilliant member of the first graduate seminar I taught some six years ago. It had been some time since I had seen her, and she looked genuinely surprised when we passed in the hall. “What are you doing here?” she said, then caught herself and added, “Oh, I forgot this was a joint conference with SEA.” If the first anecdote stands as an interdisciplinary success story, the second anecdote stings for two reasons. It suggests that some conference participants were apparently able to spend four days in the company of their counterparts from another discipline without realizing we shared the same