Notes on the Comparative Study of the Colonial Americas: Further Reflections on the Tucson Summit

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Inaugurating the Society of Early Americanists' initiative in Early Ibero-/Anglo-American Studies, the first early Ibero-/Anglo-Americanist Summit brought together approximately one hundred scholars in Tucson, Arizona, in May of 2002, in order to exchange ideas and questions about research and pedagogy in the study of the early Americas from various disciplinary angles. In the last issue of EAL four of the participants, Sandra Gustafson, Luis Millones-Figueroa, Dana Nelson, and Leonard Tennenhouse, offered their observations about the summit and valuable suggestions for a possible follow-up event. Dana Nelson proposed an innovative format in which the next summit might be conducted, while Luis Millones has made several recommendations as far as the location for the event. Leonard Tennenhouse has shared his ideas about how the program might be focused, while Sandra Gustafson has called for an expansion of the electronic anthology that might again serve as the archival base for the summit participants. Meanwhile, talks about a follow-up event are under way; and the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH) opened in March 2003 a new incarnation of the summit anthology. The "Early Americas Digital Archive" (EADA) consists of a data base of primary texts from early British, Spanish, Luso, and French America, which are encoded in .xml and browse/searchable via a search engine by subject, keyword, author, title, genre, period, and so on, as well as a "Gateway to Early American Authors on the Web." Furthermore, EADA provides detailed documentation and instructions for early Americanists from all fields, including graduate students, who would like to submit their editions of electronic texts for publication. The homepage of EADA can be found at http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada.

In light of the prospects for a second summit on the horizon, and in light of the comments offered by the four respondents, it seems like an appropriate moment to pause and consider some of the questions that the steering committee (Rolena Adorno, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Michael Clark, David Shields, and Ralph Bauer) encountered when conceptualizing the program of the first summit—questions that raise some larger institutional, methodological, epistemological, and philosophical issues with regard to the comparative study of the colonial Americas. To begin with, it is true, of course, that (as Sandra Gustafson notes) the recent initiative in colonial Americas studies must be seen in the context of a more general trend toward transnationalism and globalization in the humanities at large. At a time when transnational migration and decolonization, multinational capitalism and neocolonialism have steadily been challenging the ethnic, demographic, political, and economic bases of modern national borders, histories, and canons, the academic disciplines have had to rethink not only their conventional boundaries but also their very epistemological foundations. This has caused an epistemological crisis in the humanities and human sciences at large that has thrown into question many of the old certainties about what the subjects and objects of study in each discipline are or should be.¹ Early American studies has not been immune to these changes, as is evident to anyone who takes a look at recent anthologies in the field, such as Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer's The Literatures of Colonial America (Blackwell, 2001) or Carla Mulford's Early American Writings (Oxford, 2002). (As one colleague recently agonized, "Is there anything any more that we don't have to know?")

But these recent trends toward globalization notwithstanding, it should also be remembered that a transnational, and particularly hemispheric, approach to American studies is hardly new, though its history has often been fraught with the political complexities and paradoxes of inter-American relations. It has an especially strong tradition among historians of the early Americas, reaching back, in the twentieth century, to the work of Herbert Eugene Bolton² and his followers as well as his critics writing during the formative years of the Organization of American States (1948).³ Even in the nineteenth century, the (finally prevailing) U.S. nationalist and "exceptionalist" interpretation of American history continually competed against a transnationalist understanding of the history...