Society of Early Americanists Sixth Biennial Conference (review)

"Why has Bermuda been so absent in studies of the Atlantic World?" This was one of many provocative questions posed by audience members to the more than three hundred participants who constituted a set of unusually rich panels at the Sixth Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanists. Held this past March in Bermuda, the conference coincided with a year-long slate of activities commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the wreck of the Sea Venture, flagship of the Jamestown third supply voyage, which initiated the permanent settlement of Bermuda, the second permanent English colony in the Americas. Of course, Bermuda has been anything but inconspicuous as a tourist destination. In recent years, too, a significant finance industry, fueled by generous tax incentives to U.S.-based companies, has emerged, the mid-rise structures that house it dotting the cityscape of Hamilton, Bermuda's capital. Such an industry might be likened to a modern-day incarnation of pre-1800 Bermuda as a haven for smuggling and piracy, a focus of more than a few conference sessions. Truthfully, insofar as it can be considered a "genre," the conference review feels something like a tourist brochure or postcard ("Wish you were here!") and a smuggling operation ("Here's some of what you missed!"). Rather than write against this unlikely convergence of generic impulses, this review embraces them to examine their sway and to gauge their critical potential.

Bermuda has an elaborate, albeit vexed, relation to the Caribbean (and North America) on historic, political, economic, cultural, and other levels. Like many Caribbean islands, Bermuda's economy relies heavily on tourism, an industry that scholars have argued perpetuates rather than alleviates a given island's underdevelopment. Accordingly, the conference's program committee exchanged several charged e-mails about how to balance the anti-imperialist research agendas of many SEA members with a competing desire to internationalize the SEA's biennial conference by recognizing the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of English settlement in Bermuda. Certainly an SEA conference in Bermuda would signal the arrival of the West Indies as an important site of inquiry in early American studies—even as most Bermudians are quick to emphasize their country's non-Caribbean status. Yet issues of resistance and complicity are complicated, evidenced by the conference's desire to mark the centrality of the West Indies to an ongoing realignment of the field and the difficulty of extricating itself from the touristic and business industries to which Bermuda is so indebted (for example, Bacardi Limited hosted the closing reception at its company headquarters and the conference hotel, the historic Fairmont Princesse, is sister hotel to one of Bermuda's most exclusive tourist resorts, the Fairmont Southampton).

If Bermuda's prominent position in tourism and off-shore finance suggests linkages to the wider Caribbean region, the trend toward West Indies–centered scholarship in early American studies is conspicuous for Bermuda's absence from it. When Creole America: the West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006)—which doesn't mention Bermuda in its pages!—was awarded the MLA Prize for a First Book by a panel of five judges from fields other than early American studies, the award represented the emergence of not only "early American" as an urgent field in literary and cultural studies more broadly defined but also the West Indies as a prominent site of critique in scholarship across time periods and field designations. What the award citation said of the book might justly be said of early American and Caribbean studies respectively: namely, that they have "[set] the West Indies on the meridian of . . . an innovative inter-American and cultural cartography in which familiar and improbable places and players are in turmoil." Yet whither Bermuda in that cartography?

In order to try and answer that question, it is useful to consider the ways in which Bermuda's geographic and cultural cartography intersects with the conference's conceptual mappings. One of the features of this year's...