In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The "Hemispheric Turn" in Colonial American Studies
  • Susan Scott Parrish (bio)
The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Ralph Bauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
"In Comparable Americas: Colonial Studies after the Hemispheric Turn." University of Chicago/Newberry Library. April 2004.
"Beyond Colonial Studies: An Inter-American Encounter." Brown University/John Carter Brown Library. November 2004.
"Technologies of Memory: The Atlantic Axis in Early Modernity." University of Michigan/Atlantic Studies Initiative. March 2004.
"Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1660–1890)." Dartmouth University/Center for Transcultural Visual Studies. Fall 2004.

In Herman Melville's novella of 1855, Benito Cereno, an allegory of some of the recent changes in our field seems to call for our attention. These changes are exemplified by Ralph Bauer's excellent new book, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and by a number of recent large and small comparative conferences at the University of Chicago, Brown University, Dartmouth University, and the University of Michigan. You will recall that at the beginning of Melville's narrative, Captain Amasa Delano has in the year [End Page 545] 1799 left the oft-plied sureties of his New England waters to find himself at anchor in the Bay of Santa Maria off the southern Chilean coast, facing a bedraggled Spanish slaving ship. Delano, a typical Protestant Anglophone reader of his day, knows the Gothic genre well and has read John Ledyard's travel journals describing sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, he has been conditioned by his reading and his parochial upbringing to see Catholics as machinating direful inquisitors and to see Africans as docile children of Nature. What ensues, after days of Delano's excruciating misrecognition of the recent occurrence of a slave insurrection aboard the ship, is his abrupt experience of the violence of the Atlantic world. Though Delano only recognizes the violence of the insurrection without considering the precipitating violence of the slave trade, and so merely replaces his image of the docile slave with that of the diabolic African, Melville urged his Putnam's readers—through the indirection of irony—to perceive the Atlantic world as a pervasively violent place and to perceive the cause of this violence to be the self-interest common to all people rather than the malevolence of one nation or race. Inasmuch as this story is ultimately about a movement in the reader from parochial isolation to a multi-perspectival awareness of a number of Atlantic subject-positions through the acquisition of the subtle skills of comparative and critical reading, it offers an allegory for the growth of interpretation in colonial American studies over the last generation.

Moving from scholarship that studied pockets of colonial culture in isolation or as anticipations of the inevitable "character" of the United States, literary scholars over the last 20 years have come to see colonial Anglophone culture as part of the transatlantic British world; scholars have come to study the spaces of conflict and creolization wherein English, indigenous, and African peoples encountered one another; and scholars have geographically reached beyond New England and Virginia to study British culture in the middle Atlantic and the Caribbean. In Ibero-American scholarship, the same move occurred, albeit earlier, "from nationalist particularism to transatlantic cosmopolitanism" (to quote Ralph Bauer, EAL 38:2, 285). Most recently, individual scholars have begun to compare the various European colonial cultures in the New World, or scholars have joined together at conferences to perform the work of comparison collectively. In our fields of colonial literary studies, Ralph Bauer's work—as author, conference organizer, and online database creator of the [End Page 546] Early American Digital Archive (EADA)—has been the central driving force behind this shift.

Bauer's book traces in a comparative fashion the trajectories of Spanish and British colonial prose narratives from the first generations of contact through the Revolutionary periods. Although his analysis considers a wide array of authors, it focuses in depth on the writings of eight: Álvar Núñez Cabeza deVaca, Samuel Purchas, Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Mary Rowlandson, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora,William Byrd II, Alonso...

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