Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023

Abstract

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• Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023

Awarded jointly to: Kirsten Silva Gruesz and Kelly Wisecup

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of English, Northwestern University, have been selected to receive the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize. Gruesz's Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas was published by Harvard University Press in 2022. Wisecup's Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures was published by Yale University Press in 2021. The prize selection committee consisted of Early American Literature's Coeditors, Cassander Smith and Katy Chiles; the incoming Chair of the Modern Language Association's Early American Forum, Jeffrey Glover; and the prior President of the Society of Early Americanists, Patrick Erben. We thank our publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, for continuing to support the award, which carries a $2,000 cash prize.

Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons, as the selection committee determined, is an unparalleled study of a major American writer at the nexus of languages, cultures, and migrations. It is a culmination of decades of the author's work in the field of multilinguistic early American literature, and it offers a transformative portrayal of a region, tradition, and history at the center of the field. The book is at once intimate—taking us inside the Mather household and reconstructing the sounds and imprint of the languages spoken and studied there—and expansive, widening in scope to describe the very constitution of American racial identities through the medium of language. It's a deeply insightful portrait of a writer and his work and the world he helped to make. [End Page 263]

This book provides a truly new look at a familiar figure in early American literary studies. It is the kind of monograph that doesn't just tell scholars a great deal about Cotton Mather; it is the kind of monograph that can reformulate the field of early American literary studies. Written with a great deal of verve, it connects early American literature with today's very pressing issues of migration and immigration. This book is an enormous accomplishment, a landmark study of profound reach and relevance, and a powerful justification of the importance of early American literary studies to the broader world.

Assembled for Use presents a method that enables scholars to approach colonial archives from Native perspectives to understand the significance of lists, recipes, scrapbooks and other non-narrative texts as literacy practices in early Native American cultures. These compilations in many cases, Wisecup argues, were assembled for "particular uses within Indigenous communities, from recipes for medicinal treatments to scrapbooks" (3), but they were also understood as textual objects, so that "reading and using are interrelated rather than opposing actions" (9). Non-narrative Indigenous texts are significant testaments to early Native literary histories. What is more, Wisecup maintains, many of these compilations survive today in archives as a result of intentional Indigenous practices to preserve the material texts; these intentional practices shape and critique colonial archives. Ultimately, Wisecup argues, "Indigenous compilations are essential to understanding the formation of colonial archives and the knowledge they produce, for compilations reframe the questions colonists posed about Indigenous pasts and futures and scholarly assumptions about compilation forms" (21).

Immensely readable and consequential, Assembled for Use enables scholars to understand more fully the capaciousness of literacy practices among early Native American cultures. Wisecup makes clear what Native compilations are, what they do, and how we might approach them. The reader will walk away from the text with a new way of thinking about what is or isn't considered text and also how and why people assemble and compile. The book is extraordinarily lucid, concise, and powerful in the quality of its prose. Wisecup's reading of Indigenous compilations and assemblage practices helps scholars get an idea of Native American reading practices in the early American past—a huge feat to accomplish. Throughout her [End Page 264] book, Wisecup always affords us an idea of the potential for future work she is opening up, rather...