Richard Beale Davis Prize for 2017: Monique Allewaert and Mary Caton Lingold

Among the many outstanding essays published in Early American Literature in 2017, we are pleased to recognize two of the most innovative as co-winners of this year's Richard Beale Davis Prize for best essay. The committee commends both Monique Allewaert and Mary Caton Lingold for their deep research, superb writing, and immense creativity.

Allewaert's "Insect Poetics: James Grainger, Personification, and Enlightenments Not Taken" begins with the underanalyzed second part of Grainger's four-part poem The Sugar-Cane (1764). Unlike the fourth section, which discusses enslaved labor in the Caribbean and has received the lion's share of critical attention, the second section focuses on the comparatively prosaic topic of insects that threaten the cane crop. Attending to this section of the poem, Allewaert demonstrates how Grainger "intensified the georgic mode's formal challenge of exploiting the tension between the high and the low so as to reveal the high in the low," and in so doing inadvertently found the dominant metropolitan aesthetics of eighteenth- century Britain inadequate to West Indian phenomena.

Careful close readings enable Allewaert to abstract book 2's oscillation between insectophilia and insecticide into two irreconcilable modes of conceiving personification and, with it, the relation of poetic content (descriptions of tropical bugs, hurricanes, earthquakes, and so on) to figural and formal processes. The first, the dominant form of personification in Grainger's poem and in eighteenth-century neogeorgics more generally, which Allewaert calls "metropolitan personification," casts personification's animating power as an affective operation, and it uses this operation to join the diversity that it collocates into a single system. The second, which she calls "colonial personification," casts personification's animating power as a disaffecting operation of the small and the particulate and, instead of working toward connection, it tends toward division.

The implications that follows from these close reading of this understudied section of this lately reexamined poem reach stunningly far. At her essay's conclusion, elaborating terms long ago put forth by Michel Foucault, Allewaert argues that the colonial personification that emerges in Grainger's poem indicates the emergence within the metropolitan Enlightenment of a colonial aesthetic, in which knowledge turns toward nonepistemic ends, without yet forging a new episteme. Focusing on this emergent, epiphenomenal space—an Enlightenment not taken—she concludes that "its nearly eclipsed potential for an alter enlightenment" demands our attention as "the necessary prelude and condition for achieving any alternative modernity."

New texts deserve attention for all kinds of reasons, but rarely does an essay spin such bold implications out of a series of meticulous and finely practiced close readings. Formally rigorous and theoretically wideranging, Allewaert's "Insect Poetics" offers an exemplary instance of the ways that formal literary analysis can open up theoretical and historical problems with nuance and sophistication. The argumentative precision of the essay, furthermore, was matched with a writerly grace that makes Allewaert's argument as pleasurable to read as it is exciting to follow.

It is with a similar expressive clarity that Lingold's "Peculiar Animations: Listening to Afro-Atlantic Music in Caribbean Travel Narratives" makes its own distinct and compelling argument. This essay reconsiders the wellworn metaphor of "archival silence" to advance the surprising claim that "in order to experience silence, one must actively not listen to intruding noises." Sound, Lingold argues, could not be stolen from enslaved people, and it was one among several knowledge traditions that flourished outside manuscript and print in the Atlantic world. The essay contests the premise that historical sounds are elusive and irrecoverable by showing how literary texts—including those by Richard Ligon, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and, especially, Sir Hans Sloane and John Gabriel Stedman—encode musical performance by means of notation. Lingold's argument then turns to an examination of musical notation as a genre, a culturally specific practice that excludes nearly as much sonic information as it communicates, convincingly showing how notation actively translates the epiphenomenal performances of enslaved artists into a historical record of significant but finite legibility.

Appearing in printed books, but also representing expression beyond the...