American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (review)

American Curiosity is the rare dual achievement, both pathbreaking and fully realized. Susan Scott Parrish leads us through the cabinets and collections of natural history produced during the British colonization of the Americas, drawing attention to the myriad forms of knowledge that were codified into institutional science. As the winner of the 2005 Jamestown Prize, offered by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the book is as valuable for its subject matter as for its approach. The topic is "curiosity," or how American curiosity intervened upon European knowledge, which opens the compass of study to classical, early modern, and Enlightenment sources on one side of the Atlantic and to the full range of British America on the other—from Cotton Mather's Boston to Surinam. Anticipating recent calls in ecocriticism to move beyond writings specifically about nature, Parrish incorporates into the expected sources drama, poetry, political cartoons, portraiture, fiction, correspondence, and oral traditions. Current scholarship on early America often appears in new or unexpected ways, and Parrish's prose style renders abstraction concrete while taking delight in the sensual beauty of the natural world. Simply put, American Curiosity is a superb book.

And it appears at an opportune time. Since the emergence of ecocriticism in the 1990s, scholars have dealt primarily with nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, with studies of pre-romantic periods, before Thoreau, built upon one-dimensional historical matrices. Pamela Regis started the conversation by applying Michel Foucault's Linnaeus to canonical early national texts. Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes offered a postcolonial orientation and compelling moral vocabulary. Landmark works in American studies by Richard Slotkin, Annette Kolodny, and Leo Marx established nature as a central theme; David Scofield Wilson and Wayne Franklin suggested paths for reading; the ecocritic Michael P. Branch has issued several trail maps; and monographs by Robert Lawson-Peebles, John Seelye, Christoph Irmscher, Timothy Sweet, Beth Tobin, Bruce Greenfield, me, and others have examined the natural against the rhetorics of science, agriculture, the exotic, and frontiers. What still needed unpacking, however, was the Linnaean tableau. Parrish offers that: a messy group portrait of the Enlightenment, in which colonial "testifiers" stake their claim against shifting and competing forms of knowledge.

The story begins with Kwasímukámba, a native of Guinea brought to South America as a slave around 1700, who guided whites up the Surinam River (angering the native Saramakas) and who introduced to European science a root that Linnaeus named Quassia amara. Piecing together eighteenth-century print sources and contemporary oral traditions, Parrish uses Kwasi's story to suggest a counternarrative of Enlightenment science, one that "is decipherable only if we look beyond Europe to understand these traces within the published metropolitan record" (10). Two framing questions emerge from this example, the second being more difficult to document than the first: "how subjects of the British Atlantic made knowledge of the natural world," particularly in the cultural traffic with London; and "what overlapping and conflicting facts and representations they made" (15). One of the challenges, indeed, will be to hold these potentially competing concerns in suspension, for as texts crossed the Atlantic, their histories tug in opposite directions.

The book's two lead chapters are cultural histories. The first, "British Metropolis and Its 'America,' " ranges from Pietro Martire's Decades of the Newe World to the Philadelphia Quaker William Bartram to raise several key themes: an epistemological shift from "wonder" to "curiosity" that accompanied the rise of New Science and the presence of America; spiritual investment in scientific study through physico-theology; and a feminized, secreted Nature that was explored through the transparent language of empiricism. The importance of objects in this fetishized Nature (which was embedded within religious discourse) gave an inroad to colonial subjects who otherwise found themselves on the periphery. Colonials could participate as collectors and send "curiosities" to Europe; they also acquired a rhetoric...