Recovering the Colonial, Beginning Again:
Among the many comments received about the early selections collected in The Heath Anthology of American Literature, the plaintive comment, even from early Americanists, about the number of so-called new writers represented there strikes me as most honest and forthright. Indeed, more than a few colleagues in the field have privately admitted that getting over the feeling of stupidity or ignorance is perhaps the biggest hurdle to preparing to teach these early writings. This is a feeling shared by the Heath editors. We feel insecure about seeing names of so many writers about whom we learned nothing when in graduate school and about whom we've learned little since. We remain constrained by our former experiences of success in an academic culture that accepted our white dominant texts, our discursive structures of proto-nationalism, our defensive insistence upon aesthetics and literariness. To some extent, it might be said that in attempting to reconstruct ourselves as teachers of multicultural early American materials we are metaphorically placed in the position of being others in our own land, of having to learn a language (and thus a way of thinking) that is different, new, and, for many faculty, alienating of our former selves.
6 I am aware that this exercise might sound a little naive as a teaching method with college students. 7 While Morrison is speaking specifically to the issue of what she calls American Africanism, her words could apply as well to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It might be useful if I mentioned briefly some of the issues that come up for us in class while showing how I address two key themes that arise throughout the semester: language use and aesthetics. This is an interesting exercise that I could explain here further, but it seems to me more useful, however, to work through the other matters I discuss below, especially given the fact that Andrew Wiget's essay on teaching Native literatures has appeared in The Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, No. Thus it is, in Jefferson's view, that Phillis Wheatley's poetry is below the dignity of criticism (1:904). It can be more difficult for students especially white students to acknowledge that publication (more frequent for Wheatley than for Occom) and/or speaking engagements provided both writers an emancipating vehicle in which they could, in veiled form, speak their minds. Their easy assessment that the Spanish were bad colonizers who were totally uncomprehending of the peoples whose lands and persons they dominated is likewise complicated by the selections from Cabeza de Vaca, for the Spanish empire and by those of Roger Williams and Samuel Sewall for the British empire. My students tend to want to discuss the alienation effect that oppression has on whites, too. The fulfillment of its prophecy is ascribed to the east . As the students and I begin to approach the materials Native American creation stories, Anglo-American discovery texts, and Villagra's History of New Mexico I like to take some time out for discussion of key conceptual issues that will continue to come up during the semester, the issues of language (simply, the way we say things) and aesthetics (the way we sometimes study texts). When we look at Jefferson's writings in the context of the effects on whites of slavery, students are interested to see Jefferson explicitly address the issues we have theorized. 15 It seems appropriate to me, then, that in this present era of recognition that the United States is multicultural we are examining the colonial past in terms of the heretofore unexamined cultures marginalized by white dominance. I'll discuss Jefferson here, for the complications which Jefferson's writings raise for students are most elucidating of the general point I've been making. I was both a School master and Minister to the Indians, yea I was their Ear, Eye & Hand, as Well as Mouth.
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Acceptance Essays
