Society of Early Americanists Conference 2017: Hyatt Regency Downtown–University of Tulsa Tulsa, March 2–4, 2017

Abstract

Society of Early Americanists Conference 2017Hyatt Regency Downtown–University of Tulsa Tulsa, March 2–4, 2017 Andrew Newman (bio) I was late in making arrangements. I missed out on the first hotel block, and the second. I ended up booking at the Fairfield Inn, across the tracks from the conference hotel. I finally registered for the conference only the day before, so when I arrived at the registration desk on Thursday afternoon I had to show the receipt on my phone. It was because of the election, of course. Like, I guess, millions of others, since November I had been having trouble thinking about my work, especially my research. My teaching had been reinvigorated actually—I felt more connected to my students—but my writing felt more trivial and self-indulgent than ever. And it had been months since I had touched the arcane project I was coming to Tulsa to present, and I suspected I was about to make a fantastic professional face plant. Only really. interventions I arrived in time for session 4. The panel title that spoke to the problem on my mind was "Early American Studies as Public and Political Interventions." [End Page 298] The paper titles informed me that the panel was not really about the Resistance, but it was impressive nonetheless. Roy Boney, Jr., and Jeff Edwards of the Cherokee Nation Education Services Group dropped some of the biggest names ever heard at an SEA conference—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook—the tech giants they worked with to bring Cherokee syllabary unicode fonts to the major platforms. The next two presenters themselves owned two of the biggest names in our field: Annette Kolodny and David Shields. Kolodny's presentation brought me, personally, to the very inception of my own career, when as a young MA student, newly enrolled in my first course in early American literature, I came upon her essay "Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity" in the New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1993. Now nearly twenty-five years later, I learned that the publication had been preceded by Kolodny's protracted, ultimately successful struggle to get the Times to accept her usage of the term "genocide"—as in the phrase "genocidal campaigns like Jackson's" (27). To that point, the "paper of record" had only applied the term to the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, so by bringing it to bear on the treatment of Native Americans Kolodny had accomplished an important intervention in the semantics of US public history. Kolodny had announced that, because of health concerns, this would be her final appearance at an SEA meeting, and the audience recognized her distinguished career with a stirring standing ovation. Finally, David Shields updated us on his astonishing archives-to-table work as chair of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. Shields helps track down and reintroduce southern heritage foods like red bearded upland rice, which remained in cultivation only among Merikins, the descendants of African African slaves who were recruited by the British during the War of 1812 and resettled in Trinidad. Shields concluded by exhorting those among us who enjoyed tenure to make the most of our freedom and job security by taking risks, to aim to do more with our careers than to fill up "six inches of shelf space." Actually, I'm not quite sure about the number of inches Shields specified; my memory may be influenced by some conversations I had afterward. Six inches would represent a pretty prolific career. I'm still completing my second inch myself. [End Page 299] creative responses The program had a surprising emphasis on creativity. I attended the second of two roundtables organized by Thomas Hallock on "Responding Creatively to Early American Texts," and I loved it. Heather Kopelson, Harry Brown, Luella D'Amico, and Lisa Logan have developed such exciting ways to add dimensions to their students' engagements with early American literature: respectively, through knitting, nature writing, compiling soundtracks, and composing commonplace books. The samples of student work they presented were brilliant. I was one of the participants in a roundtable organized by Thomas Doran, "Transforming Early American Research into Creative Writing"; I was reading an excerpt from...