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  • Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association
  • Ana Schwartz (bio)
Annual Meeting of the Modern Language AssociationChicago, 01 3–6, 2019

Two years ago, at one of three panels sponsored by the Society of Early Americanists at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia—the panel that anticipated American [End Page 879] Literature'srecent "Post Exceptionalist Puritans" special issue—a senior scholar asked the three participants to reflect on how our field might ensure that early American texts remain relevant to our students, the scholars and researchers of the future. At its most basic, the question expressed a desire to engage productively with fellow early Americanists, particularly the relatively junior panel participants, regarding the question of relevance. Most everyone in the room seemed to believe that at least some of the value of studying early America is the opportunity to reveal continuities between the social and political contestations preserved in the texts of the past and the social and political contestations taking place in the present. Yet a meaningful and somewhat dissonant concern remains latent in the original question, a concern that expresses itself in the question's implicitly jeremiad tone. That is, in addition to expressing an avowed commitment to future generations of young scholars, the question seems also to express an anxiety—an anxiety unusually dynamic within early American texts themselves—regarding the possible loss of certain priorities and presumptions that earlier generations of scholars understood as foundational, so much so that the field seems unimaginable without them. 1

Put otherwise, for many students, both formal and informal, both within and beyond our classrooms, early American themes such as the legal and scientific institutionalization of race as an instrument of domination, the systematic undermining of sovereignty and self-determination beyond the borders of the nation-state, and the dispossession from ancestral territories are and have long been intimately relevant concerns. Though the study of these topics and the recognition of this infelicitous relevance is not unique to junior researchers, 2the task of articulating this relevance and, perhaps, making these themes lessoppressively relevant has in recent years precipitated a turn in larger numbers from newer members of early American literary studies to archives and methods from beyond the received boundaries of the field, an expansiveness that, given the material structures of the academic institutions within which our scholarship takes place, might feel threatening to the security of the discipline. Researchers from beyond the field of early American studies, as the 2019 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association made evident, have drawn richly from early American texts and contexts, and are, in turn, offering methods and approaches that might dynamically answer the troubling appearance of a gap between our students' interests and our canonical objects. [End Page 880]

The Society of Early Americanists sponsored four panels at the 2019 MLA meeting. Two took place back-to-back on the first day; two back-to-back on the third. At the first panel, "Disavowed Roots," organized by Jordan Stein, R. J. Boutelle, Jared Hickman, and Jerome McGann shared new work that variously approached the task of extricating early Americanist scholarship from the racist premises on which it was inaugurated. Boutelle discussed immanent critiques of the nation's founding documents authored by participants in the early Colored Conventions in the nineteenth century; Hickman reassessed the endorsement of American exceptionalism conventionally attributed to that phrase's coiner, Louis Hartz, in texts like The Liberal Tradition; and McGann outlined the distorting remediations produced by conventional literary-historical approaches to texts like Indian treaties, which, he observed, were experienced differently between participating parties.

Such distorting remediation was one of the shared preoccupations of the second society-sponsored panel, Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats's "Beyond Recovery," anticipating the forthcoming Early American Literaturespecial issue of the same name. Tacitly engaging recent work in adjacent fields, six panelists lingered over various overlapping questions about the ethics of engaging with compromised archives, questions already being taken up beyond our field. 3The breadth of these object lessons was impressive. John Pollack began with identifying the first—and frustratingly indecipherable—Indigenous American words recorded in European texts...

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