How, Why, and What: Teaching Students the Literatures of Early America

One of the many significant points made in Teaching the Literatures of Early America is that students often resist the nuances of early American texts, and for similar psychological or ideological reasons they are reluctant to link the themes to our own time. I met this resistance early in an American survey, at a Florida university, when attempting to direct the class's examination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonialism to the World Conference on Racism, then unraveling in Durban, South Africa. I had photocopied and distributed to the class a newspaper article about the United States and Israel's abandonment of the U.N. meeting. The article explained why Israel had rejected the label of a "colonialist" state, and it suggested through the Palestinian ambassador, Salman el Herfi, that the American delegation had left because it wanted to avoid discussing slavery and the injustices done to native peoples. The thematic interests and chronological structure of the course invited this brief digression. We were moving forward through time and addressing the same questions: What is a colonialist state, and what are the traits of colonial culture? What are the aesthetics of denial, when power is asserted and contested on an international stage?

My strategy to this point had been to complicate the "colonialist" label by offering different versions of the encounter it implies. A comparison of Spanish, French, English, and indigenous texts was to foreground how "new worlds" were imagined and understood. The newspaper article, I thought, would cap off the week's reading and use current events to suggest how the legacies of empire were with us still. For the Tuesday meeting I had assigned selections from the Puritan captive Mary Rowlandson, a staple of American survey courses. The students divided into small groups and, with little supervision, identified where a woman's experiences on the frontier potentially challenged ecclesiastical authority. The reading assigned for the following Thursday was an English translation of the Nican mopohua, a Nahuatl account of the Virgin of Guadalupe written about the time of the Puritan narrative. To my mind, the two works yielded a striking contrast. Both defined religious experience through gender and the meeting of cultures, but where the Puritans had drawn boundaries, the Virgin of Guadalupe—the fusion of a Catholic figure and a native fertility goddess—became a national icon.

My students struggled with the juxtaposition, for several reasons. First, they lacked a background in the genre and aesthetics that were referenced in the Nican mopohua. The text required knowledge of Catholic hagiography (which even students from parochial schools only occasionally have) as well as familiarity with Nahuatl religion and symbolism. Second, the work's knotty translation history (which our textbook overlooked) did not interest them as much as it did me. Finally, few students could be made to feel the historical and cultural context: the brutal encomienda system, which enslaved the Nahua people; the Spanish tradition of consecrating churches over existing religious sites; and a Mexican history of class struggle that incorporates the Virgin's image to this day.

The necessary preparation left little room for aesthetics or connections to the present. Pressed for time on Thursday, I lectured for ten minutes, but the students' eyes glazed over as I rushed through unfamiliar names like Tonantzin and Quetzalcoatl. The fast pace led to a scant appreciation for the less familiar culture. Students described the Nican mopohua as "straightforward," "simple," and (alarmingly) "happy." Because we held different ideas about colonialism, moreover, few of them saw the need to cross boundaries. I had assigned readings that were meant to illustrate the possibilities for cultures coming together, the new social forms that emerged when different groups met, but as one student put it, "I don't see the point of the comparison." Anxious for them to make associations, I turned to the newspaper article. I asked students to define colonialism based on their reading of the Puritan and Nahuatl...