This wide-ranging comparative study argues for a fundamental reassessment of the literary history of the nineteenth-century United States within the transamerican and multilingual contexts that shaped it. Drawing on an array of texts in English, French and Spanish by both canonical and neglected writers and activists, Anna Brickhouse investigates interactions between US, Latin American and Caribbean literatures. Her many examples and case studies include the Mexican genealogies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the rewriting of Uncle Tom's Cabin by a Haitian dramatist, and a French Caribbean translation of the poetry of Phillis Wheatley. Brickhouse uncovers lines of literary influence and descent linking Philadelphia and Havana, Port-au-Prince and Boston, Paris and New Orleans. She argues for a new understanding of this most formative period of literary production in the United States as a 'transamerican renaissance', a rich era of literary border-crossing and transcontinental cultural exchange.
On 14 october 1492, on the island that he had just named San Salvador, Christopher Columbus Seized Seven TaÍno indians to serve as translators. The abduction was clearly an act of significant forethought, registering Columbus's intention that these interpreters “inquire and inform … about things in these parts” (Columbus, “Tetter” 118)—a first step toward the subjugation of all the inhabitants of San Salvador, who might one day be “taken to Castile or held captive” on the island (Columbus, Diario 75). The taking of these indigenous translators has been no less momentous for contemporary scholarship, perhaps especially in early modern English and American literary studies: in the year of the Columbian quincentenary, Stephen Greenblatt memorably called it “the primal crime in the New World … committed in the interest of language” (24); Eric Cheyfitz concurs that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (104). Yet the concept of translation as a wholly imperial instrument, as commonplace in Columbus's day as in our own, has limited our thinking in important ways (Adorno, “Polemics” 20). As ethnohistorians and literary critics alike have suggested, the interpretive sway of the “linguistic colonialism” model can obscure as much about its Native objects as it reveals about the purported discursive complexity of its European subjects.
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