Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002

2019

Current and updated Early American Literature syllabus for Fall 2019.

Latin American Literature in Transition, 2022

The year 1492 invokes many instances of transition in a variety of ways that intersected, overlapped and shaped the emergence of Latin America. For the diverse Native inhabitants of the Americas as well as the people of Europe, Africa, and Asia who crossed the Atlantic and Pacific as part of the early-modern global movements, their lived experiences were defined by transitions. The Iberian territories from approximately 1492–1800 extended from what is now the US Southwest to Tierra del Fuego, and from the Iberian coasts to the Philippines and China. Built around six thematic areas that underline key processes that shaped the colonial period and its legacies – space, body, belief systems, literacies, languages, and identities – this innovative volume (introduction plus 24 essays) goes beyond the traditional European understanding of the lettered canon. It examines a range of texts including books published in Europe and the New World and manuscripts stored in repositories around the globe that represent poetry, prose, judicial proceedings, sermons, letters, grammars, and dictionaries.

Syllabus, 2013

What does literature do? How does it move the mind? Incite the imagination? In “The Mirror and the Mask,” Borges writes about a storyteller who tells three tales in three different literary modes. It is the argument of this course that form invites a certain manner of thinking. What does each form do? To contemplate this question further we will engage the historical, in particular the historical social circumstances that enable different forms. We will explore the transnational connections amongst different literatures, regions, and languages of the Americas, imagined collectively as the “New World.” We will study a range of fiction and nonfiction texts that explore issues of power, identity and history in colonial times and their effects in the postcolonial period. The comparatist perspective of the course invites attention to the historical contexts for the emergence of (trans)national New World identities and discussions of literary exchange and influence across the Americas. We will raise such questions as: How does literature play a role in constructing people’s visions of the world? In what traditions do the texts we read participate? How do those traditions overlap and differ? We will address these questions by reading several texts from the “New World,” situating the texts with respect to one another, as well as texts from the “Old World.” Our readings will explore themes such as discovery and conquest, “the discovery self makes of the other,” romance, revolution, slavery and dictatorships (Todorov 3). We will examine how particular literary texts and genres are shaped by and intervene in these histories.

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2008

Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact:

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2024

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2014

CUADERNOS DE INVESTIGACIÓN HISTÓRICA

The study of the History of Spanish America owes much to the western written culture, also today the legacy of the Amerindian oral tradition is recovered. The primary sources offer a spontaneous panorama in the testimonial, rich, diverse and abundant, not exempt from a necessary criticism and crossing of testimonies. The notorious american chronicles obey a specific time and place, and manifest an explicit interest in the knowledge and possession of the New World, its nature and its people. At the same time that the associated alterity and identity are analyzed, the alien gaze and the connection of cultures turned into biological miscegenation and cultural syncretism are not ignored.

2019

The Routledge handbook To The History and Society of the Americas The colonial heritage and its renewed aftermaths-expressed in the inter-American experiences of slavery, indigeneity, dependence, and freedom movements, to mention only a few aspects-form a common ground of experience in the Western Hemisphere. The flow of peoples, goods, knowledge, and finances have promoted interdependence and integration that cut across borders and link the countries of North and South America together. The nature of this transversally related and multiply interconnected region can only be captured through a transnational, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive approach. The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas explores the history and society of the Americas, placing particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences. Forty-four entries cover a range of concepts and dynamics in the Americas from the colonial period until the present century: • The shared histories and dynamics of inter-American relationships are considered through pre-Hispanic empires, colonization, European hegemony, migration, multiculturalism, and political and economic interdependences. • Key concepts are selected and explored from different geopolitical, disciplinary, and epistemo-logical perspectives. • Highlighting the contested character of key concepts that are usually defined in strict disciplinary terms, the Handbook provides the basis for a better and deeper understanding of inter-American entanglements. This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, political science, cultural, postcolonial, gender, literary, and globalization studies.

Choice Reviews Online, 2013

This volume has its origins in a in a 2009 symposium at the Society of American Archaeology meetings in Atlanta, where it that won the Amerind Conference award for best symposium that year. It's goal is to compare the different types of interactions between sixteenth-century Indigenous and Spanish peoples in the Southwestern and Southeastern United States, primarily as the result of the Spanish entradas in those two areas. In particular, the organizers sought to place these encounters in a broader context by examining the "social, economic, political, military, environmental, and demographic components" associated with Native and European interactions in the two regions. To facilitate comparisons between the Southwest and Southeast, the volume is organized into six thematic chapters-Native perspectives, historiography, climatic influences and impacts, disease, political organization, and conflict-usually with two to three papers presenting comparative data for the two regions in each thematic chapter. The single exception, unfortunately, is the chapter on native perspectives, which includes just a single paper examining the interaction that occurred between sixteenth century Zuni communities and Spanish entradas. There is much to like in this book. In my view, the standard to which a study of this type should be held is: Does it present significant new information that alters our perceptions, either archaeologically or historically, of a particular place or event in time? The Native and Spanish New Worlds volume aims to do just that, and I believe it succeeds admirably. In particular, I would draw attention to Robbie Ethridge's chapter on contact-period studies and the Southeastern Indians and the chapter by Ethridge and Jeffrey Mitchem on the interior South at the time of the first Spanish explorations (Chapters 4 and 10). Both studies do an excellent job of using archaeological and other data to bridge the conceptual divide between the prehistoric southeastern Mississippian chiefdoms and the Creek, Chickasaw, and other historic-period peoples who were their descendants. It is a mark of just how far southeastern studies have come-most notably as the result of the work done by Charles Hudson and his students-that we can now see how the lives of southeastern Native peoples were transformed during the sixteenth and later centuries. Ethridge and Mitchem thoroughly document how the encounters of late Mississippian peoples with the various entrada, introduced diseases, the fur trade, and slaving, led to the creation of the historic period groups of the same region.