Abstract:
John Marrant was a Methodist missionary in Nova Scotia from 1785 to 1789, serving Black Loyalist refugees settled there by the British Empire after its North American defeat. His journal, published in 1790, records numerous occasions when he preached, as well as helping settlers petition the colonial government for supplies. Scholars have explored Marrant's theology as revealed in the Journal. I shift the focus toward communalism, examining the ways it incorporates traces of communities of displaced people in two genres: the extempore sermon and the petition. Each bridges the oral and the written and is grounded in a community or collectivity. Marrant noted his hearers' responses to his sermons in a shorthand, which I examine; I also draw from a published sermon he preached in Boston on his way back to England. Lacking the Nova Scotia petitions, I turn to surviving petitions by Black Loyalists who traveled to Sierra Leone, as well as Marrant's descriptions of his interactions with the petitioning Nova Scotia settlers.
We love being the bearers of good news! In this issue, we are thrilled to report that the Early American Literature Book Prize for 2023 has been awarded jointly to Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas (Harvard University Press, 2022) and Kelly Wisecup, Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor of English at Northwestern University, for Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilations and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale University Press, 2021). See page 263 for a more detailed statement about the awardees. Congratulations, Professor Gruesz and Professor Wisecup!
We are also excited to announce that Autumn Hall, EAL's Digital Media Editor and an undergraduate student at the University of Tennessee, has been selected for the National Humanities Leadership Council (NHLC) of the National Humanities Center. Chosen from universities across the United States, the NHLC undergraduate students "participate in a unique series of interactive experiences with leading humanities scholars and leaders," "explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society," and "focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions" (https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/national-humanities-leadershipcouncil/). Autumn does great work for us here at EAL, and we are excited to see her collaborating with her peers to demonstrate the value of the humanities to our lives. The future of the humanities is in good hands.
Finally, we are proud to present our second issue as editors. This issue's three essays all examine figures very much familiar to early American studies—John Winthrop, John Marrant, and J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. The essays attend to the subjects with great nuance that deepens our knowledge about the rhetorical, archival, and linguistic nature of early American cultures. Adam N. McKeown's essay, "Reconciliation in John Winthrop's [End Page 259] History of New England," offers a new take on Winthrop's History and colonial Massachusetts by examining the concept of reconciliation as a sociopolitical strategy and a rhetorical tool employed to cast the colony as tolerant. The essay centers on the textual representation of what McKeown calls "reconciliation events," those moments of conflict and resolution between colonial government and dissenters, figures such as Anne Hutchinson, John Wheelwright, and Roger Williams. He argues that Winthrop's History portrays such events as instances of a co
Simply leafing through the books reviewed here, I was immensely pleased to see the evidence that Maya scholarship has undergone radical transformations in the past few decades, thanks in large part to the discoveries made possible through LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, the decipherment of Maya glyphic writing, and the remarkable growth of ancient DNA research, such as the study evidencing how Chibcha migrants brought improved maize from the Andean region to Mesoamerica (Kenneth et al.). With these technologies, researchers have been able to locate structures and roads normally hidden away by the dense tropical rainforest canopy; to decipher Maya glyphs in their entirety, thus reconstructing their written history, mathematics, and astronomy, [End Page 443] which date back a few millennia; and to establish their genetic heritage, thus understanding better early migratory patterns throughout the Americas and interconnections between vast regions: Mesoamerica, the Andean highlands, and the Amazon. To make sense of connections between the archaeological past and present-day heritage within contemporary Maya communities, there is a need to understand the interconnectivity among hemispheric cultures previously considered isolated from each other in early Preclassical times (roughly 2,000–1,000 BCE), as well as—simplifying it somewhat in this claim to convey the sense of my argument—the extant continuity in Maya organization of sociopolitical territories, local communities, regions, and configuration of states.
The books included here exemplify the broad scope of these advancements in astronomy and the history of science (Aldana); linguistics (Fash and Tokovinine); archaeology, Maya art history, and the Late Postclassic period (Chinchilla, Doyle, and Pillsbury); and cultural history (O'Neil). Together, they undermine an old Eurocentric imposition whereby "Ancient Maya" were "good," while contemporary
As formal, occasional documents that attempt to contain acts of racialized legal violence, early American texts produced—and in a sense demanded—by carceral systems and their literary adherents present challenges to modern scholars. Whether created or distributed by ministers, jurists, newspaper editors, or printers, such documents often provide proof of resistance by their subjects to spoken and embodied co-option while they also, paradoxically, hold up these subjects as mouthpieces for salvific surrender. This essay examines two such texts, the broadsides produced in conjunction with the executions of two African American people, Mark and Phillis, for poisoning and killing their notoriously cruel enslaver, Captain John Codman, in September 1755: namely, a poem, A Few lines on occasion of the untimely end of Mark and Phillis, and an execution narrative, The Last & Dying Words of mark, Aged about 30 Years.1 While they take different forms—one, a work of memorial poetry that excoriates Mark and Phillis as representative symbols of African American revolt and punitive anatomy (the practice of anatomizing the bodies of the condemned as an extra layer of punishment); the other, a mediated autobiographical document that represents Mark's life as one of public utility and exemplarity—both broadsides attempt to reduce acts of self-liberation to punitive object lessons. In an effort to recover the voices of self-liberating subjects, how are we to approach such documents?
This essay applies two of Toni Morrison's key concepts from Playing in the Dark (1992) that distill the concomitant development of racial slavery and racialized tropes in American fiction—American Africanism and the Africanist presence—to grapple with that question. Morrison presents the two concepts as interlocking and overlapping. The first of these concepts provides a means of examining the ways that, as Morrison puts it, [End Page 419] "American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless" (7). That is, American Africanism is a way of presenting Black subjects that precludes their specificity and agency, rendering them background characters and yet essential to white plots, metaphorical and literal. Morrison goes on to define the "Africanist presence" as representing, for white writers, what is always there and never acknowledged. That is, "Africanist presence" is denoted by white writers' stunted and self-negating efforts to acknowledge the existence of Black subjects and interlocutors, an endeavor Morrison
Abstract:
The prominence of dissent and the reconciliation of dissent in John Winthrop's History of New England serves as a useful reminder that Massachusetts was not as monolithic as is often thought and that colony's ability to cope with differences of religious opinion was important to the way it represented itself. Instance of reconciliation in the History also have a face-saving effect in that they cast the colonial government as a reasonable and patient judge of permissible versus intolerable dissent while, at the same time, casting irreconcilable difference as unreasonable and self-interested, and therefore punishable. This essay studies how reconciliation events in the History work rhetorically to validate the colonial government's power both by displaying its capacity for tolerance and by defining the reasonable limits of what is tolerable.
Abstract:
One of the disputed elements of Crèvecoeur's biography is the question of whether or not he was ever adopted by the Oneida. In this article, I review the evidence in favor of his adoption and trace the history of this claim. I use a linguistically driven approach to argue that this evidence is unsuitable, and I provide previously unused evidence to suggest that, although he may have been granted an Indigenous name, he was never really adopted by, or even particularly familiar with, the Oneida. In this way, I aim to encourage the broader consideration of linguistics in interpreting historical texts and understanding the past, while highlighting the importance of Indigenous languages to the study of early American texts.
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