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  • Editor's NoteThis and That (with credit to Michael Ditmore)
  • Marion Rust

With this first issue of the calendar year, thanks are due to the EAL editorial board members who concluded their service in December 2021: Kathleen Donegan (University of California, Berkeley); Laura Stevens (University of Tulsa); Edward Watts (Michigan State University); and Edward White (Tulane University). For half a decade, these individuals played a key role in shaping the journal through close attention to submissions in their fields of expertise. Their presence on the board will be missed, even as their scholarship continues to inform and inspire. On behalf of the journal and the MLA Forum on Early American Literature, I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to our stellar new appointees to the board: Yael Ben-zvi (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev); Patrick Erben (University of West Georgia); Greta LaFleur (Yale University); Cedrick May (University of Texas at Arlington); Rhondda Thomas (Clemson University); and Karen Weyler (University of North Carolina at Greensboro). It's an honor to work with you.

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The articles in EAL 57.1 attest to the increasing variegation of early American studies, along with its consistent critique of aesthetic normativity, state apparatus, and obfuscations of power. Proceeding chronologically, the issue begins with Carlos Prieto's "Preserving the History of Cemanahuac: Domingo Chimalpahin's Rewriting of Spanish Narratives in the Annals of His Time (ca. 1608–1615)." In a fascinating iteration of what Anna Brickhouse has called "motivated mistranslation," this essay shows how seventeenth-century Nahua author don Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin "revises the triumphalist narratives" in his translations into Nahuatl of the works of European-born, colonial New Spain administrators Henrico Martínez, Mateo Alemán, and Antonio [End Page 1] de Morga, thereby "creating a Nahua archive for future generations of Nahua readers to know the ancient history of their ancestors and understand how they had been dislocated with the conquest and continued to be marginalized at the turn of the seventeenth century." In "Early American Commercial Property Marks: Reading according to Code, and Beyond," Hannah Farber investigates colonial American shippers' marks used in Atlantic commerce, including those branded upon enslaved bodies. Marks were "durable and legible" within established legal and other codes pertinent to the expansion of empire, Farber demonstrates, but precisely for this reason they were unstable referents whose interpretation carried significant political charge. In "'The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven': Speaking and Discovering Infanticide in the Early American Northeast," Rebecca M. Rosen looks to infanticide literature for another nonalphanumeric sign, "cruentation"—"the spontaneous bleeding or flushing of a corpse at the approach of a suspected killer"—which she treats as a form of "recovered speech." "As a metonym for postmortem investigation," cruentation generally, though not always, served the interests of the accuser over the incriminated. But at least one such convict, the inimitable Patience Boston, "utilized her knowledge of cruentation conventions to direct her own narrative in the public eye," exerting a measure of agency in death that eluded her throughout her life.

With Valerie Sirenko's "Property's Narratives: 'Unreasonable and Unnatural Distributions of Human Will' in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Early American Contract Law," countervalent appropriations of legal dictum resurface in a self-consciously literary narrative. But where literature is often seen as the messy business that complicates law's linearity, here something like the opposite holds true: it is "property's contingency and instability" within legal discourse on the last will and testament that allows Brown to "foreground the ability of narrative to shape legal outcomes" and with them opportunities for autonomous self-instantiation. Matthew E. Suazo's "The "Impassable Morass" in Translation: Louisiana's Wetlands, Chateaubriand's Atala, and the Aesthetics of Colonial Ambivalence" returns to the matter of translation in a hemispheric context as introduced by Prieto earlier in the issue. Suazo argues that the "aesthetic appeal" of Chateaubriand's frequently translated and widely distributed novella Atala, ou les amours de deux savages dans le désert (1801) "cannot be uncoupled from the environmental and topographical specificity of its [End Page 2] source material" regarding Louisiana...

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