Dr. Henigman 3 credits

In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the North American continent was a stage for contacts among many cultures and peoples – European, native American, African.  At the same time, print culture was evolving rapidly, producing new reading and writing practices and fundamentally altering the relationship between writer and reader and the meaning of textuality.  We will study a variety of works, mostly in unfamiliar, non-belletristic genres – commonplaces, imperial reports, non-fictional narratives of various kinds.  Our questions will include:  What are the multiple paradigms of contact (captivity, conquest, cooperative coexistence and interchange) that shape these texts?  How are national and racial identities represented in them?  What is the nature of the colonial relationship, and how do writers imagine their local communities and relationship to the imperial center?  What is the nature of literacy itself?  What technologies of power are related to print culture, and what impact do they have on the representation of those intercultural contacts?  For example, how is the Indian voice represented in these mostly European-authored books?   What works from the period are labeled “Indian-authored,” and how do we understand that print gesture?   Writers may include Cabeza de Vaca, Mary Rowlandson, Mary Jemison, Black Hawk, Thomas Jefferson, and others. 

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