Early American Borderlands

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Flagler College
St. Augustine, Florida, 13-16 May 2010

Open Panels

Instructions:

Send proposals for papers by 31 AUGUST, 2009, directly to the individual panel organizers and copied to Ralph Bauer (bauerr@umd.edu). All paper proposals must be accompanied by a CV.

Index

  1. The Trans-Atlantic Paradigm: Rethinking the Cultural History of Spanish Borderlands in the United States
  2. Slave Narratives in the Early Americas before 1845: Beyond Equiano and Douglass
  3. The Nature of Mixture
  4. Borderlands and Centers
  5. Grave New World: The Corpse as a Contact Zone
  6. Early American Transhemispheric performances
  7. Historicist Frames and Culturalist Borders of the Americas: Whose? Whence? Whither? Wither? What for?
  8. Trading and Writing
  9. The Figure of the Translator/Interpreter
  10. Writing the Americas in the Age of Humboldt
  11. Interior Frontiers: Race and Sexuality across the Early Americas
  12. The Afro-Native
  13. Narrating the Borderlands: A Call to Teach the New Frontier History
  14. Sexual Borderlands: Queer Subjects/Queer Readings
  15. Female Conquistadores: Women as Agents of Colonization
  16. Cultural Transmissions in the Revolutionary Caribbean
  17. Trans-Hemispheric Theater
  18. Cultural Boundaries in Early American Visual Arts
  19. Theorizing Trans-Atlantic Study
  20. Spanish Religious and the Nahuas: Forms of Indigenous Language and Culture in the Convents of New Spain
  21. Smuggling Across the Archipelago
  22. Exceptional Women in the Americas: Challenging Comparisons
  23. Before Oñate: Reports, Histories and Itineraries to New Mexico, 1536-1592
  24. Exceptionalist Identities in the Early Americas

  1. The Trans-Atlantic Paradigm: Rethinking the Cultural History of Spanish Borderlands in the United States

    Panel organizers: Mónica Díaz (University of Texas Pan American) and Raúl Marrero-Fente (University of Minnesota). mdiaz9@utpa.edu and rmarrero@umn.edu

    Participants: Gustavo Verdesio (University of Michigan)

    We invite papers that examine the connections between Early American studies, Colonial Latin American studies, and the transatlantic context from which both emerged. We are interested in papers that address how the Spanish expeditions to the United States transcends the barriers that separate the cultural production of Spain in North and South America, which until now have marked the approach of Colonial Latin American studies. We welcome papers that explore how the Spanish borderlands of North America are the direct result of these transatlantic exchanges, bringing into play a truly hemispheric approach. The expeditions to conquest new territories were part of the colonial expansion of the Spanish Empire, since they were previously authorized by a royal grant. Therefore, large sections of present day Unites States' territory were part of the Spanish Empire during colonial times. We are also interested in the study of the full array of colonial discourses that were put to work in the frontier in order to advance imperial expansion.

    This panel seeks to place the Spanish Atlantic in dialogue with U.S. colonial studies. The panel's aim is to provide a more complete picture of the process of colonization in the United States by incorporating the achievements of different disciplines; while also reflecting on the complexities of the Spanish colonial enterprise in North America. Scholars of the colonial period of British North America have written studies from the perspective of different disciplines such as History, Archeology, Geography, Linguistics, Anthropology, Demography, Sociology, Ecology and Literature, among others. However, for the most part, there have not been a sustained exchange of ideas between these scholars, and even in many cases they do not share the results of their respective studies outside their own field of study (Elliot, Bauer). In addition with few exceptions, Early American studies do not take into account the context and background of the Spanish Empire in South America and the Caribbean (Bauer, Elliot). As a result, there is an urgent need to promote a continued dialogue among scholars of Early American and Colonial Latin American studies, following the call toward a "Pan-American" Atlantic (Cañizares-Esguerra).

    The panel proposes not only a transatlantic approach by juxtaposing texts from various places of the colonial Americas (such as Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the United States) and Spain; but also proposes a comparative analysis across cultural borders (North and South America) that will modify and enrich our understanding of the colonial experiences. Such urgent renewal in our literary history is based on a perspective that looks beyond single national or cultural traditions by adopting "the recognition of transnational perspectives" (Gould 307). A comparative and hemispheric approach to colonial Latin American studies provides a broader frame of reference in which to begin to examine the complexities, and ambiguities of colonial situations in the Americas.

  2. Slave Narratives in the Early Americas before 1845: Beyond Equiano and Douglass

    Panel organizer: Nicole N. Aljoe (Northeastern University) N.Aljoe@neu.edu

    This panel seeks to continue the work begun in the recent edited collection, Beyond Douglass, by exploring slave narratives other than the iconic and ubiquitous narratives of Equiano and Douglass. Furthermore, by drawing on narratives from North America and the Caribbean, as well as South and Latin America, this panel hopes to illuminate the global nature and circulation of the slave narrative, frequently construed as a genre peculiar to the Southern United States. Papers are sought that engage with self-written and dictated narratives as well as biographies and novels based on historical facts published and circulating before 1845 such as those by or about Mary Prince, Ashton Warner, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Cugoano, Ignatius Sancho, Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, Juan Francisco Manzano, Ourika, Oroonoko, and narratives that appeared in the archives of various religious organizations such as the Catholic and Moravian churches, as well as trial and newspaper records. Questions we might consider include: How exactly do we define the slave narrative, especially in regards to these frequently fragmentary texts written before 1845? How does attention to the global or diasporic dimensions of the slave narrative affect our understanding of the genre as a whole? Why are so many early narratives not self-written?

  3. The Nature of Mixture

    Panel Organizer: Allison Bigelow (UNC, Chapel Hill) abigelow@email.unc.edu

    The language of mixture permeates the natural histories and nature writing-sections of the accounts, relaciones, and memorias of the early literatures of the Americas (1500-1800). The celebration of or resistance to the idea of a mixture that is either naturally-occurring or engineered by early modern men of letters informs encounters both real and imagined. We see this attention to mixture, separation, and order in passages as diverse as the Portuguese scribe Pêro Vaz de Caminha's call for the king to "lançar semente" (cast his seed) to Catholicize the indigenous population of Brazil (Carta, 1500), the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser's river scene (Faerie Queene, Book IV, 1596 ed.), the Spanish doctor Juan de Cardenas's invocation of the language of friendship and desire to describe the "buena convivencia" among minerals that "se aman" and "se abrazan" (Problemas y secretos, 1643) and the Jesuit priest Andre João Andreoni's classification of the Brazilian mining towns (Cultura ê opulencia, 1693). From the representations of peopling the contact zones with European, African and Mestizo/a bodies to descriptions of and suggested improvements for foundational material practices like planting, husbandry, and mining, the language and imagery of mixture is writ large upon the histories and natural histories of the early Americas.

    But what is the relationship between the material condition of mixture in the natural world-be it seed and land, sprig and root, river and ocean, azogue and silver-and the ways in which early modern writers understood their own cultural exchanges and demographic mixtures in the Americas? How might the material practices of combination inform the imaginative or textual representations of mixture? How might such a representation in turn shape material practices like metallurgy, husbandry, or botany or the period's developments in areas of study like oceanography or cosmology?

    This panel welcomes papers that explore the uses, understandings, and imaginings of mixture in physical and human natures from a comparative hemispheric and/or multi-disciplinary position.

  4. Borderlands and Centers

    Panel organizer: Ivonne del Valle (University of California, Berkeley) idelvalle@berkeley.edu

    From very early in the process of colonization, urban centers had a strong and changing connection with territories that were ambiguously seen as part of their jurisdiction, yet outside of it. Several well known literary works exemplified this important theme of a center that needed to either establish or strengthen the hold of its institutions in frontier areas. In the case of Mexico City, for example, one can think of the way Florida is posited as a problem in the work of Cervantes de Salazar, Culiacán in Bernardo de Balbuena's, and the Sierra Gorda and Tarahumara regions for Sigüenza y Góngora.

    This panel seeks papers that address how different colonial powers approached borderlands across time, in order to foster a comparative understanding of the topic. We encourage presentations that explore the issues (cultural hegemony, territorial and economic expansion, a specific place in the Enlightenment's pan-European project, etc.) being negotiated through a particular relationship with the borderlands as seen in a variety of genres, such as literary works, cartography, missionary accounts, reports from war campaigns, or ethnographic descriptions of frontier region inhabitants. Theoretical submissions exploring the relationship between centers and peripheries in general are also welcome.

  5. Grave New World: The Corpse as a Contact Zone

    Panel organizer: Kathleen Donegan (University of California, Berkeley) kdonegan@berkeley.edu

    According to Maurice Blanchot, "the cadaverous presence establishes a relation between here and nowhere." This is because although the deceased is no longer "of this world," his corpse is "not of the world either, even though it is here." If the corpse, in its deep uncanniness, always and everywhere troubles the relationship between place and no-place, between familiarity and strangeness, between living being and gross matter, then the ubiquitous presence of corpses in the borderlands of the colonial world was especially complicated. This panel seeks papers that analyze corpses as signifying systems in the contested spaces of colonial settlement. Did corpses have a special function in or as contact zones? How were bodily remains deployed to create meaning for the living? How did cultural forms for tending the dead transform in the face of massive mortality? How were corpses displayed as standards or symbols, and how were they read or misread by antagonists? When people battled over corpses, what were they fighting for? What happens when we think of the dead as a population that emerged from colonial encounters? Given the persistent attention paid to graves, burial, spectacles, piked heads and scattered remains across a wide variety of colonial texts, comparative and cross-disciplinary approaches are especially encouraged.

  6. Early American Transhemispheric performances

    Panel organizer: Astrid M. Fellner (University of Vienna) astrid.fellner@univie.ac.at

    This panel focuses on performance as a model of cultural contact and intercultural encounter. Such a model, as Joseph Roach puts it, "requires a performance genealogy in which the borderlands, the perimeters of reciprocity, become the center" (Cities of the Dead 189). The complexity and multivocality of colonial literary history suggests that a paradigm of analysis predicated on the confines of the development of a national tradition is limiting. As Diana Taylor has argued, a shift in methodological approach to performance studies brings about a rethinking of literary canons, as it allows other forms of practices to emerge in a text (cf. Archive and Repertoire 16-17). This panel then seeks to determine what can be gained from a turn to performance studies in early American Studies.

    Rather than treat "early America borderlands" as a place or an object of study, I want to invite papers that view the early Americas as a practice that creates itself through hemispheric performative acts. America, as Taylor has stressed, is a highly contested practice, "an act of passion and belief conjured into existence through verbal and visual performatives" (Taylor, "Remapping Genre" 1421). To the extent that texts produced this "New World," they also spoke the language of the old. Repetition and reiteration, the key principles of performance, are therefore also foundational practices upon which "America" was created. A performance genealogy that locates itself in the borderlands can, however, also pay attention to the palimpsestic character of the literatures of the Americas. I therefore welcome a wide range of papers, but I also want to encourage papers on the following suggested topics:
    • performative practices in Early American borderlands
    • Colonial texts that produce "America" as hemispheric performance
    • performative acts of memory/forgetting early Transhemispheric performances of the body and sexuality


  7. Historicist Frames and Culturalist Borders of the Americas: Whose? Whence? Whither? Wither? What for?

    Panel organizer: Fernando Gómez Herrero (Hofstra U/ Oberlin College) Fgomezherrero@aol.com.

    How to put together the object of study of the big unit of the Americas circa 2010? (the monocontinentality of "America" in the Spanish language is still US-centered bicontinentality in English). What are the frames and the borders, the most inspiring historical models and cultural tendencies out there? To historicize means what? To culturalize means what? This panel wants to address some of the difficulties in the sustained construction of meaningfulness in an immediate global society built upon the thinning out of memory and desire, also inside academia. How do "humanists" justify the knowledge they put out there and engage with other disciplines (sociology, foreign affairs, anthropology for example) in making sense of large continental units? This panel invites paper proposals to the core issue of how to go about c onstructing a cognitive mapping of historical intelligibility of the timespaces that have come to be called "American," inevitably in relationship with other localities or continents. It appears that the interrelational or network approach (trans-Atlantic, trans-Pacific perspectives) is gaining momentum: what does this perspective allow? Proposals for limits or borders and mixtures abound, the provocation is to see into the compare-and-contrast of these tendencies in relation to the questions included in this proposal. Individual papers should try to provide a synthesis in relation to larger frames.

  8. Trading and Writing

    Panel organizer: Bruce Greenfield (Dalhousie University) Bruce.Greenfield@Dal.Ca

    This session will examine writing that emerged from the trading companies and cultures of the Americas. As Miles Ogborn has observed in relation to the East India company (chartered in 1600), the world it helped form "was one made on paper as well as on land and sea" (Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company, U of Chicago P, 2007: xvii). In addition to performing the routine kinds of record keeping and communication that enabled modern, long-distance trade, some traders -- officers and servants of the great chartered companies, as well as independent entrepreneurs -- made forays into the genres of travel reportage and natural science, sometimes writing their own accounts of exceptional journeys, natural history, ethnography, and history in their region, along with letters to family and friends, and personal journals. How did the requirements of trade - accounting, report-writing, promoting - engender written documents, including those that sought an audience beyond the company hierarchy and the commercial nexus? What is particular to the point of view of written accounts formed in trading relationships? How are the non-writing partners in trade present in the written record?

  9. The Figure of the Translator/Interpreter

    Panel organizers: Joy A. J. Howard (Purdue U) and Cassander Smith (Purdue U) jahoward@purdue.edu, smith491@purdue.edu

    This panel will explore the use of figures who translate, interpret, and go between languages and cultures on the early American borderlands. Translation and interpretation have often been conceived of as "in between" acts and their performers were crucial to exploration and colonization, and to the survival and endurance of indigenous communities and borderlands settler communities. This panel builds on recent work that has sought to understand the complicated intercultural work accomplished by the translator/interpreter. Papers should explore images, descriptions, or representations of the experiences, performative acts, identity/[ies], and community/[ies] of translators and interpreters before 1800. Of particular interest are papers that investigate figures who challenge conventional notions of who translators were, what roles they played, what choices they made, how they conveyed ambiguity, and how those for whom they translated perceived their words. Please submit 300-word proposals with a brief CV by email attachment (PDF files only).

  10. Writing the Americas in the Age of Humboldt

    Panel organizers: Vera M. Kutzinski (Vanderbilt U) and Christopher Iannini (Rutgers U) vera.kutzinski@Vanderbilt.Edu, ciannini@rci.rutgers.edu

    The popular images of Alexander von Humboldt, the father of early American studies, are mainly those of a traveling adventurer and a collector of all sorts of scientific data, ranging from astronomical measurements and archeological data to plant and animal specimens. Clearly, he was both-but he was also much more than that. Humboldt's writings in general and his work on the Americas in particular show that he was an empirical scientist and an imaginative thinker of the first order, someone who was, above all, concerned with the global interrelatedness of absolutely everything. Scores of natural and social scientists, from anthropologists and geographers to political scientists, have followed in Humboldt's footsteps. In his own day, moreover, Humboldt's varied experiments within the rich traditions of travel writing and natural history writing influenced important novelists, essayists, natural philosophers and poets throughout the hemisphere. While Humboldt's extensive opus has long been an indispensible compendium for historians of science, the aspects of his writings that are of interest to humanists have largely remained underappreciated. It is some of these features of Humboldtian writing and its hemispheric cultural contexts that this panel will address: among them are his multi-disciplinary scholarly-scientific practice (as we would now call it), his comparative approach to cultural history, his dynamic narrative strategies, his obsessive revisions, his aesthetics of "total impressions" (Gesamteindruck). We would like to invite papers that focus on the literary qualities of Humboldt's writings on the New World, the colonial cultural traditions from which they emerge, and the subsequent influence of Humboldt's oeuvre on literary history in the Americas. Topics might include analyses of narrative and discursive strategies, and the interplay of different media, such as writing, maps, and drawings in Humboldt's texts and those of his contemporaries and descendants.

  11. Interior Frontiers: Race and Sexuality across the Early Americas

    12. Panel organizer: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel (Rutgers) yolamsm@rci.rutgers.edu

    Participants: Greta Lynn (University of Pennsylvania) and Raquel Albarrán (University of Pennsylvania)

    In Race and the Education of Desire (1995), and Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002), Ann Stoler explores the intersections of race and sexuality to reach a deeper understanding of the colonial/imperial logic. Adding sexuality, desire and intimacy to the study of colonial formations, Stoler focuses on the embodiments of social classifications to deconstruct imperial politics. This panel proposal invites papers that explore and compare experiences of imperial/colonial contact to theorize the configuration of racial imaginaries using sexuality as an extension of colonial discourse in the early Americas. Some of the topics of possible interest are: mulataje mestizaje and miscegenation as different paradigms of racialization in the Americas, the racialization and sexualization of crime and the criminalization of race and sexuality in the early Americas, the limits of miscegenation and mestizaje to conceive colonial and early modern subjectivities, and comparative studies about the problematic embodiments of race in the early Americas. We invite proposals for papers exploring the 'productive' and problematic metaphors produced by the intersections of race and sexuality, as well as papers exploring the limits of these intersections for the comparative study of early modernity in the Americas.

  12. The Afro-Native

    Panel organizer: Mark Miller (Hunter College) markjosephmiller@gmail.com

    This panel seeks to develop relationships between Native/indígena and African diasporic communities by considering the diversity of Afro-Native identities and their developments (and antecedents) in literary, scientific, visual and other texts. Beginning with immediate post-conquest Afro-Yucatecans, Afro-Native communities have variously included Central American Garífuna, Columbian Palenque, Haitian Marabou, Brazilian cafuzo, Floridian, Bahamanian and Estelusti Seminole, Dismal Swamp Maroon, African Choctaw, Creek and Cherokee, and New England Wampanoag and Montauk. Afro-Native identities deserve more sustained attention they complicate both oppositional narratives of white-other difference and optimistic readings of metissage/mestizaje that neglect the categories' historical development through tropes of whitening/blanqueamiento. In addition to the more substantial Latin American Afro-Native studies, US scholars including James Brooks, Jack Forbes, Sharon Holland, and Tiya Miles have recently begun to examine the way in which modern racial and cultural categories subsume complimentary or intertwined constructions of Native and African American identity. This panel hopes to extend these studies by considering the Afro-Native in local, transnational and hemispheric contexts. Topics might include, but are not limited to:
    • Gender and the shaping or experience of Afro-Native identity
    • The development of Native, African and "colored" identities
    • The Afro-Native prior to/outside of modern notions of "race"
    • Shared Native and African experiences of enslavement, removal and/or disposession
    • The Afro-Native and inclusive notions of blackness, raça/raza negra, etc.
    • Afro-Native and zamba/o identities
    • European/Creole representations of Afro-Native cultural, racial, or other mixing
    • Afro-Native communities and the concept of racial "degradation"
    • Performative elements of the Afro-Native
    • Postcolonial or other theoretical approaches to the Afro-Native
    • The Afro-Native and tribal dispossession
    • Afro-Native religious practices
    • Early Native and African meetings in the European metropole
    • Native Americans in Africa
    • Hierarchies (of caste, race, family, etc.) within Afro-Native communities
    • Comparative regional, tribal, or national studies
    Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome.

  13. Narrating the Borderlands: A Call to Teach the New Frontier History

    Panel organizer: Paul Moyer (SUNY Brockport) pmoyer@brockport.edu

    Premise & Problem
    The field of frontier/borderlands history has been revitalized in the last few decades. However, the quality and quantity of this scholarship has not been matched by a resurgence in teaching borderlands history to undergraduates. This lack of classroom activity is reflected in the dearth of teaching-focused textbooks, anthologies, and document collections on frontier history. For example, the expansive Major Problems Series (it now embraces about 30 titles) includes topics ranging from the history of sexuality and Asian American history to sports history and the history of the Atlantic World, but contains no entry devoted to frontier history. There is a volume on the American West, but this only covers a part of the borderlands experience and reduces an expansive field to a regional study. Part of the reason why frontier history remains on the margins of university curriculums might lie in the lack of strong, expansive, and meaningful borderlands narratives.
    Proposal
    The goal of this panel is to make a start at brining the field of frontier/borderlands history back to the classroom and the historical mainstream by considering how to construct a narrative of the borderlands experience in the Americas. Submitted papers could address what the New Frontier History should look like in the classroom. What main themes should such a class focus on and what discrete topics should be included? What geographical and temporal frames could be applied? Put another way, if you were to author a hypothetical Major Problems in Borderlands History, what topics would you include and why? In addition, papers that reflect upon the experience of those who already teach courses on the frontier/borderlands would be welcome. What challenges have you encountered in building a narrative on this topic and what approaches have you taken to meeting them? Finally, papers could focus on the relationship between frontier/borderlands history and broader narratives of American history. For example, how might building a borderlands narrative provide opportunities to meaningfully draw together the histories of North, South, and Central America? Alternatively, how could the classroom serve as an instrument to integrate frontier/borderlands history into the mainstream of United States history?

  14. Sexual Borderlands: Queer Subjects/Queer Readings

    Panel organizer: Anne Myles (University of Northern Iowa) anne.myles@uni.edu

    As recent scholarship has explored, the regulation and definition of sexuality and/or intimacy is a significant issue within the contact zones and liminal spaces of early American borderlands. For this panel I seek papers that explore how the concept of the queer is relevant to the study of borderlands or vice versa; appropriate work might focus on "queer subjects" in the form of incidents or representations of sexual deviance, and/or might constitute "queer reading" of any relevant material by investigating key intersections of sexuality, identity, normativity and power. Possible areas include but are not limited to the policed borders of sexual normalcy; the existence of practices or identities that go "out of bounds" or exist in an indeterminate zone; cultural encounter and the politics of defining differently constructed sexualities; queer mestizaje; how as scholars we might negotiate the definitional borders of queerness/sexuality in remote historical contexts. In keeping with the focus of the conference, work that is in some way comparativist or cross-disciplinary in its approach is especially encouraged, but proposals with a narrower focus are welcome as well, so long as the paper also attempts to theorize the larger issues. Proposals should be 1-2 pages in length, include a short CV, and should have 'Sexual Borderlands' in your subject line.

  15. Female Conquistadores: Women as Agents of Colonization

    Panel organizers: Rocio Quispe-Agnoli (Michigan State University) and John G. McCurdy (Eastern Michigan University) quispeag@msu.edu, jmccurdy@emich.edu

    In colonizers' chronicles and modern monographs, exploration and conquest are typically depicted as a man's business. From Hernán Cortés in Mexico to John Smith in Virginia, men are the agents of change who defeat indigenous peoples, exploit natural resources, and transform colonies into nations. Conversely, the role of women in these same accounts is largely ancillary. Native women fall passively to sexual exploitation while European women are either silent victims or appear only after the initial stages of colonization have concluded. This panel seeks to focus on differential approaches to colonization according to gender. It asks us to reconsider the role that women played in exploration and conquest, and ponder how we might see them as agents of change. In what ways did women act as agents of domestication of the new space thus transforming unknown into known spaces, serve as carriers of knowledge into new places, and colonize the unknown through its domestication, adaptation and negotiation? This panel invites papers on either Native American or European women from colonies throughout the Western Hemisphere.

  16. Cultural Transmissions in the Revolutionary Caribbean

    Panel organizer: Peter Reed (University of Mississippi) preed@olemiss.edu

    From eighteenth-century revolutions through the later postcolonial nation building and imperialism, the Caribbean saw numerous movements of bodies and cultural expressions. Those movements carried stories and acts across cultural boundaries-mercenaries, for example, published accounts of Surinam's Maroon warfare; sailors and slaves reported on Haiti's successful revolution; French exiles performed island dramas before audiences of English and German descent in Philadelphia; later, black New Yorkers celebrated Carib revolt. Cities passed among contending empires-New Orleans, for example, became a cultural entrepôt for Spanish, French, Native American, and other influences. Into the nineteenth century, as Benedict Anderson has described, Spanish postcolonial struggles pioneered creole nationhood, generating new cultural forms in the interplay across Caribbean and Atlantic borderlands.

    Radically new and heterogeneous cultural expressions emerged from this setting. Cultural forms-literary, dramatic, visual, musical, material, and more-moved through and mediated geographical, linguistic, and cultural borderlands. This panel seeks to engage such cultural productions and impacts, paying interdisciplinary and comparative attention to the ways in which the revolutionary Caribbean's mobile populations performed their own and their relationships to other cultures. This panel encourages submissions considering different aspects of Caribbean and Atlantic cultural transmissions; it aims for interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives on the various European, indigenous, and black diasporic cultures of the revolutionary Caribbean.

  17. Trans-Hemispheric Theater

    Panel organizer: Jeffrey Richards (Old Dominion University) jhrichar@odu.edu

    Curiously, Central and South American history and settings were rarely staged in early North American theaters. My paper and the panel, I hope, that will build around it will explore the respective views of British or Spanish and Portuguese America from the point of view of the other. Why in Pizarro was it necessary for Peru to be performed from a German-British script and not something more direct? What references, if any, did Latin American theaters make to life in the north? Were they, too, influenced first by the European metropolis? Is the trans-hemispheric also transatlantic? That is, did American theaters in both hemispheres require the touchstone of Europe to make anything of each other?

  18. Cultural Boundaries in Early American Visual Arts

    Panel organizer: Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (University of Florida) mstanfield@arts.ufl.edu

    In the colonial Americas cultural boundaries were clearly evident to artists and patrons. Culturally specific architectural forms and styles were used to define European, Christian space as opposed to native, non-Christian space. The language of dress was especially expressive of social and racial boundaries. Nevertheless, boundaries were often crossed, and may have been more fluid than we expect. This panel aims to investigate the cultural boundaries that were perceived by artists, patrons, and wider audiences during the colonial period in the Americas. It aims to test the limits of those boundaries and discover the settings and consequences, whether social or geographical, of crossing them. Beyond the traditional European/Amerindian dichotomy, perhaps other, finer boundaries, whether regional or intracultural, can be traced and tested. Papers that critically examine scholarship on these issues are welcome. Papers that take a comparative or multidisciplinary perspective are especially welcome, and the panel as a whole aims to be comparative.

  19. Theorizing Trans-Atlantic Study

    Panel organizer: Steven Thomas (St. John's University) swt116@gmail.com

    This panel aims to bring together scholars doing transatlantic, circum-Atlantic, cis-Atlantic, and trans-Atlantic study who may be considering some of the same conceptual problems but work in different disciplines separated and defined by language and/or traditional geographic areas. The goal of the panel will be to reevaluate such path-breaking works as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's Puritan Conquistadores: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700, and a list of many others too long to be included in this panel proposal. I am looking for proposals for papers that deliberately interrogate theoretical paradigms and take stock of the field.

  20. Spanish Religious and the Nahuas: Forms of Indigenous Language and Culture in the Convents of New Spain

    Panel organizers: Camilla Townsend (Rutgers University) and Frederick Luciani (Colgate University) ctownsend@history.rutgers.edu, Fluciani@mail.colgate.edu

    Although in the convents of New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, only women of Spanish blood (criollas) were allowed to profess as nuns, indigenous language and culture were present in many forms. Many Creole nuns acquired an everyday knowledge of indigenous culture during their lives before entering the nunnery. Within the convent, although cloistered, Creole nuns came into occasional contact with people of indigenous and mixed race in everyday dealings of various sorts. Creole nuns lived in close physical and affective proximity to the indigenous serving women who shared the nuns' confinement, and whose forms of spiritual existence sometimes approximated those of the nuns themselves. At least one prominent seventeenth-century nun of Mexico City, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, had a keen intellectual interest in pre-Hispanic indigenous culture, an interest which finds expression in her villancicos and loas through references to pre-Hispanic religious rites and even the occasional use of the Nahuatl language. Sor Juana shared this interest with her erudite, polymath friend Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, who in his Paraíso occidental (1684), a chronicle of the convent of Jesús María in Mexico City, deployed his vast knowledge of Mexican antiquities to make direct comparisons between the pre-Conquest Aztec 'temple maidens' and the Creole nuns of that convent. Other Creoles used such forms of syncretism to help bolster the argument in favor of convents intended for the indigenous elite, which finally bore fruit in the eighteenth century when several convents for indigenous women were established in New Spain. While adhering to the same norms of convent life long established for Creole women, the indigenous nuns in these convents perhaps brought their own forms of indigenous language and culture to their everyday lives within the convent walls. This panel will present papers that explore these and other ways in which indigenous language and culture were present in the convents of New Spain. The work of Frederick Luciani will approach the subject from the perspective of the criollas, and that of Camilla Townsend from that of the indigenous. We welcome other contributors.

  21. Smuggling Across the Archipelago

    Panel organizer: Gretchen J. Woertendyke (University of South Carolina) woertend@mailbox.sc.edu

    "No country in the world has coasts so well calculated for smuggling as the island of Cuba," wrote Robert Francis Jameson in his Letters From The Havana (1820). This panel takes as its focus smuggling across the channels linking Cuba, Hispaniola, and the US. As Jameson's letters suggest, Cuba was, as it remains, geographically pivotal to trafficking in the Caribbean, from Spanish conquest forward. While I am interested in the ways in which Spain's imperial policies produced an environment which fostered, even necessitated, smuggling, this panel also welcomes papers that understand 'smuggling' across various, often coterminous, forms: slaves, goods such as tobacco, sugar, and coffee, but also "versification", travel narratives, rumors, and natural histories. Smuggling in the colonies was motivated by economic survival more often than not; but as Spanish, French, and British colonies in the West Indies became increasingly aware of their collective plight in the latter half of the eighteenth-century, language and custom became equally important and ideologically powerful motivations. Thus, papers might also consider the ways in which slave insurrections and libratory rhetoric born out of the American Revolution were smuggled into and across the New World, to the epochal revolts in Saint-Domingue, returning to the early republic in creolized forms. Please submit a 250-500 word abstract and a cv.

  22. Exceptional Women in the Americas: Challenging Comparisons

    Panel organizers: Tamara Harvey (George Mason University) and Andrew Newman (SUNY Stony Brook) tharvey2@gmu.edu, andnewman@notes.cc.sunysb.edu.

    Participants: Joan Bristol (George Mason University), Allyson Poska (University of Mary Washington)

    When women in the early Americas, especially poor and non-European women, were recognized at all, they were almost always considered as exceptions (if their activities and achievements made them stand out as something other than "types"). Comparative work on women in early America serves an important function in moving beyond these discourses of exceptionalism. In a recent PMLA article discussing approaches to and critiques of hemispheric studies, Ralph Bauer outlines a host of disciplinary and methodological tendencies that often have unintended consequences or limitations. Arguably, the benefits and limitations of comparative studies shift somewhat when the focus is women in the Americas. We seek papers that use interamerican comparisons to explore both how notable women were framed as exceptions and engaged these discourses of exceptionalism. In subtitling this panel "Challenging Comparisons," we hope to indicate that the comparisons made in these papers will challenge familiar narratives and nuance our understanding of these women while also signaling our critical attention to the problem of comparison given both the vast differences of culture and situation that separate the women we study as well as the marked disciplinary differences and political investments that shape scholarship on the Americas today.

  23. Before Oñate: Reports, Histories and Itineraries to New Mexico, 1536-1592

    Panel organizer: Maureen Ahern (Ohio State University) ahern1@humanities.osu.edu

    Participants: Rebecca Carte (Georgia College & State University), Daniel Reff (Ohio State University)

    The narrative reports that recorded the first sixty years of initial contact between Amerindian and Hispanic peoples beyond the northern frontiers of New Spain from 1536 to 1592 - Sinaloa and Sonora in northwestern Mexico all the way to Hopi, Zuni and Tewa territories in present day Arizona, New Mexico and north into Kansas - provided some of the earliest geographical knowledge about western North America and its indigenous peoples. With the exception of the Cabeza de Vaca narrative (Adorno and Pautz,) and more recently, the reports of the Coronado expedition (Flint and Flint) these relaciones, historias and memorias, their intertextual readings and their representations of first contacts have been largely ignored by literary and cultural studies scholars. Yet they played a key role in the formation of the images and identities of the human geography of the Spanish frontier in North America - - the humanscapes of a new continent. This panel proposes a fresh comparative look at these discourses as an intertextual and interdisciplinary corpus, asking how they relate to and contrast with one another and how they address the wider questions of cultural memory and epistemological change as seen from the vantage of their unique windows onto the earliest interaction with the native peoples and formidable terrains of the northern borderlands.

  24. Exceptionalist Identities in the Early Americas

    Panel organizer: Elise Bartosik-Velez (Dickinson College) bartosie@dickinson.edu

    The prominence of comparative methods and the Atlantic paradigm in the scholarship of the last two decades in the field of early modern studies has emphasized the extent to which the early Americas were part of a wider, polyglot world. Within the Americas, we know that porous imperial, 'national, racial, and cultural borders allowed for a large variety of encounters among peoples, cultures, and economies. This panel seeks to explore how American identities are constructed, negotiated, and articulated in this protean environment where subjects maintained multiple loyalties. In particular, we are interested in how people of the Americas, both North and South, thought of themselves as exceptional-- relative to the Old World and to others in the New World. In articulating identities of difference, what did American subjects claim to have in common with other Americans? How did claims of difference conflict with or underwrite regional identities? Did exclusionary thinking work alongside as well as against the process of forging a 'middle ground' that, as Richard White has argued, is in some cases promoted by the multiple border crossings common to life in the early Americas? We are particularly interested in papers that employ inter-american comparisons and multi-disciplinary perspectives. Papers addressing the colonial through the early national periods are welcome.