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Book Review: Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580-1680 by Christopher N. Warren
It is a most intriguing business for an American Studies scholar to review a book that hardly mentions America at all. Continue reading
Tag: C17
The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization (Part Three)
The tricky challenge that the Indentured Atlantic presents to scholars is to recover, as far as is possible, the reality of bound servitude while navigating and comprehending the multiple ways in which this reality was articulated, ignored, appropriated, and imagined as part of a diverse range of social, political, economic and racial agendas. The eight dialectical categories and concepts I have broadly sketched out in these posts – singing, ventriloquizing, captivities, slaveries, falling, rising, life-writing, and forgetting – offer one chart for my ongoing research, and perhaps for that of others. But they can surely be joined by others. The Indentured Atlantic, hopefully, will flow on. Continue reading
The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization (Part Two)
In concluding the first post in this three-part series I asked how scholars can begin to address the challenge of recovering the transient and elusive oral culture of colonial-era indentured servants. One answer, perhaps, lies in dedicating greater attention to the conceptual rubric of singing, as a mode of communal vocalization that can be connected to the distinctively cohesive and mobile culture of circum-Atlantic performance delineated by theatre scholars such as Joseph Roach, Peter Reed and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Continue reading
The Indentured Atlantic: Bound Servitude and the Literature of American Colonization (Part One)
“There was some sleeping, some spewing, some pishing [sic], some shitting, some farting, … some darning, some Blasting their legs and thighs, some their Liver, lungs, lights and eyes. And for to make the shene [sic] the odder, some curs’d Father Mother, Sister, and Brother.”1 As accounts of transatlantic shipboard crossings during the eighteenth century go, this one stands out for its vivid corporeality. But what is truly unusual about it is that it was written by an indentured servant. Continue reading
The Praying Indians of King Philip’s War
Throughout November 2015, U.S. Studies Online will be publishing a series of posts to mark Native American Heritage Month. In the second post, Edward Mair (University of Hull) discusses the “forgotten casualties” of King Philip’s War (1675-1676): the ‘Praying Indians.’ Continue reading