*****
Introduction:
In a session called What is an Early Americanist? sponsored by the Society
of Early Americanists at the 1993 American Literature Association conference,
the ongoing conversation turned to the inevitable question, What is early
American literature? While some in the room proposed the early Americanist
model provided by Anglo-American history, others insisted that to be
comprehensive, early American studies should also, given the multicultural
historical circumstances of the Americas, include Spanish, Dutch, French, and
Native American materials. The question and heated debate was temporarily
resolved when someone proposed that the Society of Early Americanists sponsor a
forum in 1994 on teaching early American materials. The Society did so. Tom
Shields’s comments below, along with his highly useful course outlines and
selected bibliography, were part of that 1994 teaching forum. Other
participants’ commentaries and materials, we are hoping, will appear in
subsequent issues of The Heath Anthology Newsletter.
Before turning to Shields’s selection, though, I’d like to return to
the question about what constitutes the study of early American writings. My
concern is with one 1993 participant’s discomfiting question, echoed by
many in the room, about teaching materials which don’t exist originally in
English. The comment specifically related to historical Spanish materials,
which our colleague considered outside the province of early American studies.
It is a concern many colleagues express. As my essay in the last Newsletter
(no. 11, spring 1994) might have suggested, I do myself teach early Spanish
materials, and not without some awareness of the problems of teaching
translated materials. For me, the answer to my troubled colleague’s
question about teaching Spanish materials has become a different question, one
having to do with the assumptions behind my own training: Why was it that we
rarely questioned, when I was an undergraduate, the validity of teaching Homer,
or Ovid, or Boccaccio, or Petrarch, or Dante in translation in United States
classrooms, but we question the teaching of Spanish materials in translation
especially with regard to issues in early American studies in classrooms
today? To extend this question, I wonder if my own uneasiness with the
question of teaching Spanish materials lies less in the issue of teaching
translated materials than in issues of what constitutes nationhood and
cultural identity, then and now. These are important indeed, crucial
questions, it seems to me, questions which early Americanists seem peculiarly
advantaged, if they are willing to entertain the challenge, to begin to try to
reckon with.
Tom Shields’s offering of a commentary and materials can provide just the
beginning we might need. Two graduate students currently enrolled in my
graduate seminar, Colonialism and Discontents (on colonial and Native
American writings), have already found Shields’s lists of primary sources
in translation especially helpful for their projects, independently chosen, in
colonial Spanish writings. Shields’s approaches are somewhat comparative
and delightfully non-prescriptive. His bibliographies provide reliable
information about primary readings that will be useful for anyone interested in
attempting to answer some of the questions early Americanists now seem to be
posing.
With the publication of Tom Shields’s materials, we are continuing a
thread, in effect inaugurated in the last newsletter issue, on teaching early
American materials from a multicultural perspective. For those who are still
searching for general readings which would help place some of the issues in
cultural context, let me suggest just a few more sources. For an especially
informative account of the eleventh- and twelfth-century Reconquest of Hispania
and the Reconquest mentality of Hispania’s leaders who engaged in
colonization efforts in the Americas, see Lyle N. McAlister’s Spain and
Portugal in the New World, 1492-1700 (Minnesota, 1984). But read as well,
as something of a corrective to the commentaries about missions of Reconquest,
the wonderfully evocative When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away:
Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 by Ramón
Gutiérrez (Stanford, 1991), which treats in measured ways the cultures
of Pueblo peoples as they were encountered by Spanish conquistadors and
missionaries. More narrowly, I have recently found useful, especially with
regard to the complicated colonialist situation of translation, Vicente L.
Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion
in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Duke, 1993), and more broadly,
I have enjoyed the essays in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial
Writing, ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minnesota, 1989).
Finally, I have found invaluably insightful the "Teaching Innovations Forum
published in recent issues of Perspectives, the American Historical
Association Newsletter. In particular, let me recommend Vince Noble’s
White Professors, Black History: Forays into the Multicultural Classroom
(Vol. 31, no. 6, Sept. 1993); Donald A. Grinde’s Teaching American Indian
History: A Native American Voice (Vol. 32, No. 6, Sept. 1994); and Ronald
Takaki’s Teaching American History through a Different Mirror (Vol. 32,
No. 7, Oct. 1994). These last are essays designed for the historian, but they
address the questions many of us seem to be wondering about: What is American
about American writings, and to what extent should we be engaging students in
these questions.
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