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2009 OAH Exhibitor Information Request an advanced copy of Gary Gerstle's paper to be presented at the meeting
2009 TAH Symposium
Read the Call for Presentations for the meeting |
Creating Peoples: Publications and Power in the Atlantic World Thursday, March 26, 2009; 12:30 PM As Europeans initiated colonial projects across the early modern Atlantic rim, publications on the places explored and settled acted as cultural sinews, attempting to bind a fragile, imagined community of European mores and epistemologies within the larger Atlantic’s diverse array of peoples and geographies. Such publications, often a European reader’s first contact with elements of this new world, served as shock troops for those knowledge/power linkages so crucial to imperial expansion, circumscribing and classifying the Atlantic’s fluid assortment of flora, fauna, landscapes, and communities. While these texts analyzed a variety of objects, it is the topic of foreign peoples which attracted the most attention from European readers. Authors responded with a wealth of travelogues, captivity narratives, scientific and missionary reports, and proto-ethnographic treatises intended to provide specific descriptions of these novel foreign cultures. Yet despite authors’ efforts to couch the presentation of these Others within notions of empiric fact, such descriptions were nevertheless structured by a series of European cultural discourses which shaped their understandings of Atlantic peoples in particular ways and for particular purposes. Moreover these publications, received as fact throughout the Euro-Atlantic, subsequently served to create cultural expectations of Africans and Amerindians amongst the European readership. Within the colonies, when such expectations did not match the actions of those Others, discrepancies could serve as pretexts for war, displacement, or enslavement. Thus these publications provided more than an entertainment or edification function. They worked to disseminate ideas on Atlantic peoples that, through the text's technologies of taxonomy and explanation, created an Other that was easier to understand, control, and exploit. Many times this shaping of the Other involved molding a foreigner into a familiar likeness, one who could be imagined as a willing and complicit partner within a particular scheme of imperial of expansion, such as in the case of “Frenchified savages” in eighteenth-century Anglo-missionary accounts. On separate occasions this process worked in contrary directions, creating communities so utterly foreign so as to preclude any hope of cultural assimilation, cooperation, or co-inhabitance. Yet shaping the Other to fit European discourse did not always mean lengthy descriptions of foreign peoples within the text. Many times a similar result could be achieved by limiting the textual space given to Others. In some cases, such as in New England captivity narratives or Caribbean plantation descriptions, the presence and status of non-Europeans was effectively diminished by silencing many of the crucial functions these peoples performed within the colonial economy or society, instead regulating them to marginal roles within the text. Other times their presence could be muted altogether, effaced by the colonial narratives. This panel will explore these phenomena by examining various European publications on Atlantic peoples from three points along the early modern Atlantic rim: French Canada, New England, and the British Caribbean. Commentator: Kristen Foster, Marquette University Eric Otremba, University of Minnesota Andrea Cremer, Macalester College Laura Chmielewski, State University of New York/Purchase College |
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