Women in Early America: Recharting Hemispheric and Atlantic Desire Tamara Harvey The articles in this special issue of Legacy treat literary and nonliterary writers and texts, span the Americas from the Andes to the St. Lawrence River, and explore women’s engagements with economic, political, social, and religious discourses. Some explicitly address cultural encounters and global circulations, while others rethink cultural paradigms less directly concerned with the transnational. They expand the traditional archive of women writers’ works to include accounts of Indies (narrations of services rendered to the Crown in the Americas) sent to the king of Spain by encomenderas (women who held grants of Indian labor from the Spanish crown), letters and Lives of noteworthy Native Catholic women, portraits, court depositions, and even the hard-hearted silence of the accused in early New England execution sermons. All in some way embrace key moves in the study of early American women over the past twenty years: They refuse a simple victim/oppressor dichotomy, and their theoretical interventions push us to rethink the map of the Americas with a critical eye sharply focused on the limits of ideological paradigms that tacitly locate Woman in the place of Other without taking full account of women.1 In many ways, the study of women in the early Americas has never been more robust. Work on women throughout the Americas, including European, African, and Native women, both free and enslaved, has profited from decades of groundbreaking scholarly attention not only to those whose names appeared on the title pages of books but also to women whose texts were hidden in the works of others, stagnating in untapped manuscript archives, or awaiting interpretive methodologies that could address oral and material texts. And yet, in the metaphors of maps and routes that frequently dominate the fields of Atlantic, transnational, and hemispheric studies, women can seem to be pushed to the margins, left to lounge in the cartouches of mappae mundi [End Page 159] or to stand duty as figureheads on the bows of ships. Interrogating the maps and metaphors used to situate the colonial Americas globally is a (necessary) commonplace in theoretical considerations of this field, whether attention is given to an expansion beyond nationally defined cultural geographies or to a troubling or layering of multiple perspectives and encounters. Complicating the relationship between peripheries and centers and multiplying the perspectives and consequences of innumerable incidents of encounter are crucial gestures, as is thinking about the power and aporia of maps themselves.2 Still, it may be argued that the study of early American women, especially in comparative contexts, is particularly troubled by maps and the metaphors derived from them, in part because women themselves are so frequently deployed as their vehicles and ornaments. The fertile land, the emblematic Native woman (Malintzin and Pocahontas, for instance), the exceptional woman used to validate or impugn colonial projects in the metropole—these feminized metaphors point to the desires that shape colonialism and its subjects. Adding to the challenge of these metaphors are the many differences among women that shape and mobilize their sense of themselves, their relationships to others, including other women, and their engagement with a host of religious, legal, and political institutions and discourses, all of which render the usefulness of maps for understanding women’s experiences across geographical and social locations particularly vexed. For this very reason, attending to women may help us better to deal with the trouble with maps that drives so much contemporary scholarship. Important work is being done on women in Atlantic, transatlantic, and hemispheric studies, often framed by caveats much like my own: A great deal remains to be done, both because the enterprise is necessarily labor intensive and because the neglect of women within current discussions of global studies during the colonial period persists, except among specialists. Citing only collections and collaborations, how we might more fully incorporate women into work on the Americas after the transnational turn has been explored in Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf’s Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800); a recent issue of the bilingual journal Letras Femeninas edited by Amanda Powell and Stacey Schlau and organized as a festschrift for Electa Arenal...
Read full abstract
Dec 1, 2021
Chase Burton 
Open Access
