The Tucson Summit and the Promise of Comparative Colonial Studies

Responding to the globalization vogue, a recent issue of PMLA explored the possibilities and problems of "globalized" literary scholarship that would recuperate the dwindling terrain of comparative literature by infusing the field with some of the economic and historical savvy that globalization implies. In this climate of energized transnationalism the organizers of the First Early Ibero-/Anglo-Americanist Summit, led by the University of Maryland's Ralph Bauer, set out to transform two well-established but almost entirely discrete and conceptually distinct fields of scholarly endeavor.

Students of colonial literatures from the Western hemisphere claim, with some justification, that our current postnationalist moment has important analogues and precursors in the colonial era that preceded the rise of nationalism. The mass migration (and accompanying devastation) of peoples in Europe and the Americas after 1492 fueled the emergence of competing expansionist empires whose subjects were highly aware of their competitors and, often, well-versed in their languages and literatures. The Romantic nationalist conception of literary culture that has dominated the study of colonial British North American literature misrepresents the historical moment that produced that literature by seeing it only in relation to subsequent U.S. literature. The field of colonial Latin American literature, at least as practiced in the United States, is closer to the imperial origins that produced the works studied insofar as it is organized along linguistic lines rather than according to national identities. Still, Latin Americanists seem almost equally ignorant of the literature of the English-speaking colonists as are Anglo-Americanists of Spanish and Portugese productions, despite the important rivalry between England and Spain that deeply informed colonial writings.

Designed to address this mutual ignorance, the summit held in May 2002 brought together around 90 scholars of Britain's North American and Caribbean colonies and students of colonial Spanish and Portugese America in the borderlands city of Tucson. In the stunning desert setting of the Westward Look Resort, panels composed of roughly equal mixes of Anglo- and Ibero-Americanists assembled to offer presentations on major texts in their respective fields. The opening plenary session presented the thoughts of four leading scholars—Teresa Toulouse, Annette Kolodny, Rolena Adorno (in absentia), and David Boruchoff—on the opportunities and problems of comparative colonialist study. Subsequent sessions ran in tandem on topics ranging from "Film and Visual Materials in Teaching the Early Americas" to "Conquests and Invasions" to "Conversion, Mission, and Millennium" to "European Poetic Traditions in the Colonial Americas." After some initial confusion about the nature of the presentations—original research? overview of the text and scholarship?—the panelists settled into the graduate seminar style that the occasion demanded, and lively discussions among panelists and audiences ensued.

Anticipated by a magnificent web site of primary materials, a syllabus archive, and panel information (http://www.mith2.umd.edu/summit/Ibero_Anglo.html), the summit dazzled like the mythic cities of Cíbolla, promising its participants a wealth of resources to facilitate comparative scholarship. All of the participants with whom I spoke left the meeting far more satisfied than the conquistadors who returned from the pueblos disappointed in their modest wealth. There was widespread sentiment that the summit was imaginatively conceived and well executed, and that the web archive will be invaluable for facilitating future comparative work.

Yet there was general agreement as well that much intellectual ground remains to be covered before the potential of such comparative study can be realized. Like other participants, I found myself longing for someone to outline a basic framework, for example to provide brief institutional and intellectual histories of the two fields. One recurring phenomenon across the panels that I attended was a chronological disjunction: the Spanish and Portugese texts overwhelmingly predated 1700, while eighteenth-century English texts were well represented. (Indeed, the panel "Revolution, Nation, and the Novel" was exclusively devoted to English-language selections.) This difference in archive partly reflects the different histories of Spanish and Portugese colonialism compared to English colonialism, and partly, I am told, the relative lack of scholarly interest in eighteenth-century Latin American texts. Such disjunctions sometimes made synthesis, or even...