- Summit of Early Ibero- and Anglo Americanists, Tucson, Arizona May 2002
Mission Statement
The Society of Early Americanists with the aid of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities and the Colonial Latin American Review will host the first international summit of scholar/teachers of Ibero-American and Anglo-American colonial literature on May 16–19, 2002 at Tucson Arizona. This summit will gather 100 scholars from both fields to use the new research examining American literature from a hemispheric perspective to develop a collection of texts, model curricula, and teaching materials that embody a hemispheric approach to the study of the early Americas. A second task of the summit will be to select a seven-person steering group for the development of a curriculum and classroom materials.
Why American literature from a hemispheric perspective? Since 1985 a number of intellectual and cultural forces have moved scholars and teachers toward a more comprehensive, hemispheric understanding of American cultural legacies. The increasing number of Hispanic citizens in the United States inspired a search for Ibero-American artistic and cultural legacies. The tremendous archival recovery of British American literature during the last generation led to the recognition of an extensive British imperial tradition in the international context of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese imperial projects of that era than as an anticipation of the mentality of the United States. The rise of Atlantic studies among historians promoted a scholarship that was international in scope and concerned with cultural exchange. A growing fascination with borderlands as zones of cultural mixing, creolization, and creation has led scholars interested in the question of what is distinctively American about life, art, and [End Page 123] work in the New World to look beyond single national or cultural traditions. Furthermore, an awareness emerged of the anachronism of writing proto-nationalist literary and intellectual histories for a pre-national era. 2002 seems an appropriate moment for a summit of scholars looking into the larger patterns of American cultural origins and expression. Migration, decolonization, and multinational capitalism have all been dissolving the local, ethnic, demographic, and economic bases of modern national boundaries, traditions, and canons. Academic disciplines must necessarily confront their own limits to arrive at a more profound and comprehensive understanding of the roots of contemporary life in early modern motives and projects.
The interest of early writings in the Ibero-American and Anglo-American traditions is particularly intense. Many of the defining themes of life in the Americas were articulated in the colonial prospectuses, reports, epics, autobiographies, and lyrics penned by men and women. The crucial questions remain remarkably similar throughout the hemisphere: How cultivation of the land provokes environmental crisis. How religion impinges upon empire and nation. How commerce drives the civilizing process. How slavery informs racism. How differing schemes of land distribution promoted or inhibited political equality. How cultural improvisation and processes of transculturation throughout the hemisphere resulted in similar yet distinct cultural formations in the early Americas. How exchange between indigenous peoples and communities of European settlers gave rise in all cultures to creole American customs of extraordinary variety and local distinctiveness.
While the Hispanic American tradition of literary scholarship and pedagogy has managed to look beyond questions of national legacy to the larger Spanish and Portuguese imperial tradition, early American literature in English has until quite recently been taught as an anticipation of the literature of the United States. Until the 1990s there was no concerted effort among scholars to view Anglo-American colonial literature in the British imperial context, viewing it as being culturally and politically continuously with the literature of the 17th & 18th-century West Indies or Canada. The pressure of political and cultural scholarship and the critiques of theorists such as William Spengemann altered the situation in the 1990s giving rise to a new scholarship remarkably parallel in concerns and methods to that prevailing among students of early Ibero-American letters. Despite [End Page 124] this convergence in subject and style, there remained a disengagement between the two inquiries, brought about by disciplinary and institutional constraints. The two bodies of inquirers remain unfamiliar with each other and with each other's work. Their knowledge of...