How, Why, and What: Teaching Students the Literatures of Early America

Abstract

One of the many significant points made in Teaching the Literatures of Early America is that students often resist the nuances of early American texts, and for similar psychological or ideological reasons they are reluctant to link the themes to our own time. I met this resistance early in an American survey, at a Florida university, when attempting to direct the class’s examination of sixteenthand seventeenth-century colonialism to the World Conference on Racism, then unraveling in Durban, South Africa. I had photocopied and distributed to the class a newspaper article about the United States and Israel’s abandonment of the U.N. meeting. The article explained why Israel had rejected the label of a “colonialist” state, and it suggested through the Palestinian ambassador, Salman el Herfi, that the American delegation had left because it wanted to avoid discussing slavery and the injustices done to native peoples. The thematic interests and chronological structure of the course invited this brief digression. We were moving forward through time and addressing the same questions: What is a colonialist state, and what are the traits of colonial culture? What are the aesthetics of denial, when power is asserted and contested on an international stage? My strategy to this point had been to complicate the “colonialist” label by offering different versions of the encounter it implies. A comparison of Spanish, French, English, and indigenous texts was to foreground how “new worlds” were imagined and understood. The newspaper article, I thought, would cap off the week’s reading and use current events to suggest how the legacies of empire were with us still. For the Tuesday meeting I had assigned selections from the Puritan captive Mary Rowlandson, a staple of American survey courses. The students divided into small groups and, with little supervision, identified where a woman’s experiences on the frontier potentially challenged ecclesiastical authority. The reading assigned for the following Thursday was an English translation of the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl account of the Virgin of Guadalupe written about the time of the Puritan narrative. To my mind, the two works yielded a striking contrast. Both defined religious experience through gender and the meeting of cultures, but where