Introduction

The four essays collected here began as a roundtable discussion at the 2010 American Studies Association meeting in Austin, Texas. The roundtable gave the authors an opportunity to share ideas about their experiences teaching Toni Morrison's short historical fiction A Mercy in the context of early American studies. The courses the papers discussed represent a variety of disciplines that include first year writing, literary studies, American studies, gender studies, and history. The decision to collect the four essays and to continue the conversation in print came from a common interest in sharing the pedagogical strategies used to introduce students to challenging histories and literary texts, and to the changing academic and intellectual practices of our field.

Set in colonial Virginia and Maryland, Morrison's Faulknerian novel recounts the experiences of a diverse array of early inhabitants of North America. At issue in the novel are the subjects of hybrid identity, as well as the roles of religion and colonialism as these relate to the early stages of the institution of slavery. As Sandra Gustafson and Gordon Hutner have recently argued (see esp. 246-47), Morrison's novel reveals a keen understanding of the most recent approaches to the study of the early colonial cultural and literary environments. The teaching experiences described here show how Morrison's fictional representation of the colonial period and our scholarly expertise generate productive and engaging pedagogical approaches that speak to students at all levels of their academic careers. In the first of the essays, Chiara Cillerai discusses how she used the novel in the context of a first-year writing course in order to help beginning students use Morrison's historical reconstructions as interpretive tools that connect early colonial American writings to the present. Kristina Bross shows how she used the novel as a capstone text for her "Living History" course, which explored the ways memory, memorialization, and historical reenactment anchor present-day American identities. A Mercy challenged students to consider how, or whether, historical fiction and other imaginative treatments of the past may help us recover voices silenced by traditional historiography. In the third essay, Susan Curtis talks about the way that having graduate students read a work of fiction alongside historical monographs gave the students an opportunity to explore the relationship between "history" and "fiction." Lisa Logan's reflection on the three essays and the discussion of her own experience teaching the novel in a graduate course concludes the conversation.