In Search of Colonial Americas

Immigrants to the New World failed to find the Fountain of Youth, but they were thrilled with the qualities of the land and wrote letters home encouraging their family and friends to join their adventurous lives. Likewise, scholars at the Early Ibero-/Anglo-Americanist Summit left their Tucson meeting wondering if the field of Colonial Americas would ever be more than a dream, but happy with what they listened to and discussed—and are inviting colleagues to join their intellectual pursuits.

The summit presumed little knowledge of each specialty and no previous interactions between the scholars of Ibero America and Anglo America. As opposed to traditional papers, a website, mixed panels, and presentations of texts from each literary canon were used to facilitate this "first contact." Text presentations proved to be tricky: how do you address an audience where half the people are being introduced to your text for the first time and the other half are presumably well acquainted with the work and expecting a more sophisticated commentary? Luckily, particularly for those who stayed for the entire event, there was plenty of time to engage in one-on-one discussions that solved such problems.

My own expectation for the summit was that the more scholars recognize the complex realities within both the North and the South, the easier it becomes to try comparative approaches to common historical and cultural processes: for instance, the way Europeans responded to similar natural environments whether in the North or South; textual strategies to depict and locate native populations within the authors' historical imaginations and records; and, of course, evangelization techniques. Some topics have benefited from a good deal of previous comparative study, particularly from historians on topics such as slavery and immigration, for example, but other fields, like natural history, still lack a continental approach.

In my view, the next summit ought to keep to its premise of being a first point of contact between Ibero and Anglo Americanists. Yet it should also promote presentations with a specifically comparative approach. Ideally, these presentations will reflect the new dialogue and collaboration between scholars of both areas. Plenary sessions could focus on assessing what has been accomplished by previous comparative studies of the Colonial Americas within traditional areas and disciplines and point to the challenges ahead. It would also be worthwhile considering how a Colonial Americas field can distinguish itself from related comparative and interdisciplinary research, such as the growing field of Transatlantic Studies.

I suggest the John Carter Brown Library as an ideal site for a follow up summit. For a long time, the library has been a place where the Americas are seen as one, both because of its wonderful collection of materials and because of its role as a space where scholars from Ibero and Anglo Colonial Studies meet and share their research. Other important collections where material pertinent to the Americas exists, such as the Newberry Library in Chicago and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, may also be good locations.

In my opinion, a publication that seeks to take advantage of the present interest of scholars in the Colonial Americas ought to wait at least for a second summit. Such a volume will be best if it demonstrates a good sense of what Colonial Americas Studies has included up to now (even before we start thinking in interdisciplinary terms) and also presents examples of new and inviting comparatives studies on the Americas. On the other hand, I encourage keeping and improving the existing website. Meanwhile, journals such as Early American Literature and the Colonial Latin American Review perhaps could be persuaded to offer a special issue on the Colonial Americas as a discrete field. In addition to papers that reflect collaborative work, this issue could provide people in either field with a guide for navigating the Anglo or Ibero corpus of sources and scholarly literature. In short, a special issue could be our "letter home," enticing other scholars in our fields to the rich lands of the Colonial Americas.