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Alison
games
Department
ofHistory, Georgetown
University
Atlantic World
out?in
{187
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188}
EARLY
AMERICAN
LITERATURE:
VOLUME
43,
NUMBER
history
by practitioners.
Slauter presented
work
that isAtlantic
Atlantic, whether
French Historical
locations
Likewise,
among different indigenous populations.
not
we
cannot
canonical
narrative
Rowlandsons
(if
put Mary
why
finally
dispense with it altogether in favor of less familiar texts) alongside other
captivity narratives, including accounts of redemption written by Euro
tales of Africans carried into captivity
pean captives in theMediterranean,
in all directions, or any number of others, that would take Rowlandsons
text out of its place within early American history and set it instead in a
tradition. In other words, the literary questions Slauter
will
ask of these teaching materials may indeed deepen our
hopes scholars
but casting these sources in a new geographic framework
understanding,
might transform it by putting together texts that have previously been con
different-narrative
new
then come
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Forum:
History
and Literature
in African
among historians
interest in an
history and the long-standing
of colonial Latin America are two obvious
examples.
Second,
if the Atlantic
plinary methods,
whether
literary studies might ultimately be one of the least satisfactory
for approaching the Atlantic. Focused as they are on the
methodologies
literary approaches could distract historians from the ex
vast majority of those who inhabited the region, even if
of
the
periences
scholars deploy all of their skills to read these texts sensitively and imagi
natively in search of the experiences of the powerless and illiterate. More
written
word,
over, given the linguistic limitations that many scholars, especially Ameri
canists, labor under, privileging
literary sources risks limiting us to the
experiences of a tiny fraction of people. In terms of making sense of the
Atlantic
as a whole,
and contestations,
of its asym
metrical power relations and its violent labor regimes, of the forced migra
tions that created and sustained it, any number of other approaches look
equally if not more fruitful: anthropology, archaeology, art history, demog
raphy, economic history, environmental history, material culture. Slauter's
that have been
essay brought to mind some of the works by nonhistorians
helpful to me, especially inmy teaching: art historian Barbara E. Mundy's
TheMapping of New Spain, for example, or anthropologist Laura A. Lewis's
Hall ofMirrors?
are interested in the Atlantic must pair a geographic per
that
spective
requires them to gain some familiarity with multiple fields of
to sample varied disciplinary approaches. Fortu
history with awillingness
nate towork within one of academias most integrative disciplines, histori
Scholars who
to a single methodology
instead of
sense of the problem under study. That
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190}
EARLY
AMERICAN
LITERATURE:
VOLUME
43,
NUMBER
might well be literary studies, and itmight well be something else. Slauter
has done a great service in reminding all of us how essential it is to reach
out to other disciplines,
to take all sorts of books off our libraries' new
shelves, to dip into new journals, to sample unfamiliar disciplines,
and to enjoy the pleasure of
to talk to colleagues in other departments,
discovering what we can see more clearly or entirely differently as a result.
book
NOTES
i. Nicholas
1500-1800
indicated
ing Peggy
Canny
and Anthony
(Princeton,
by Atlantic
N.J.,
studies
K. Liss, Atlantic
Pagden,
1987). That
eds., Colonial
social
that preceded
Empires:
history
and Pagdens
Canny
The Network
of Trade
collection,
and Revolution,
includ
1713
1826 (Baltimore, 1983); JohnRobert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain:
Louisbourg
and Havana,
1700-1763
(Chapel
Hill,
N.C.,
works
inAtlantic history, see Philip D. Curtin, TheAtlantic Slave Trade:A Census (Madi
son,Wis., 1969);D.W. Meinig, The Shaping ofAmerica: A Geographical Perspective
on 500 Years ofHistory (NewHaven, Conn., 1986);Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the
Plantation Complex: Essays inAtlantic History (Cambridge, 1990).
2. Barbara E. Mundy, TheMapping ofNew Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the
Maps of the Relaciones Geogr?ficas (Chicago, 1996); Laura A. Lewis, Hall ofMir
rors: Power,
Witchcraft,
and Caste
in Colonial
Mexico
(Durham,
N.C.,
2003).
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