Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature

Abstract

Birgit Brander Rasmussen's remarkable book, Queequeg's Coffin, opens with a scene from 1524: on the outskirts of a newly conquered Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), twelve Spanish friars, intent on converting the indigenous population to Christianity, introduce their Bible to a group of tlamatinime (Aztec scholar-priests), who in turn describe their own beliefs and texts. Rasmussen's recounting of this foundational exchange sets into motion an argument that re-constellates the colonial encounter in the Americas, reorienting the centre away from Puritan New England, and recasting the event as a struggle between two literate societies with different forms of record-keeping, writing, and literacy. In doing so, Rasmussen challenges taken-for-granted narratives of European conquest of the Americas as a triumph of those whose possession of the book marked them as evolutionarily and culturally superior to purportedly illiterate natives. The Tenochtitlan encounter, placing military and literary dominance adjunct to each other, brings the stakes of such narratives clearly into view. They were paired fronts in the battle to remake the continent and its peoples. Agents of colonialism not only physically destroyed indigenous textual archives, but perpetuated narratives of indigenous societies as lacking written texts and possibly devoid of the capacity for literacy. From the beginning, however, this fiction of an illiterate continent was repeatedly undone, as Rasmussen shows, even through the very texts that sought to construct it.