Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Abstract
Where is the Pacific in colonial American literary studies? Nowhere, according to our anthologies, literary histories, syllabi, and scholarship, which all seem to agree that the Pacific enters American literary studies only well after the colonial period. This chapter provides an overview of scholarship on the colonial Pacific to suggest what it looks like, why it is important, and how we might begin to incorporate it into our literary histories. It insists on the inclusion of Indigenous literary and political histories from the Pacific and on recognizing the long and complicated intersection of these with Chinese and other Asian trade histories as well as with European empire and commerce. These contexts are crucial for shaping the recovery, integration, and understanding of Pacific texts into a global American literary history. Our literary anthologies and histories – and the narratives they implicitly or explicitly tell – need to reach into Indigenous, international, and multilingual colonial pasts. The story of America we currently tell and teach is a very different one than it would be if we included the colonial Pacific; this chapter provides some initial building blocks from which to construct a new, critical, transoceanic narrative for early American literary studies.
Chapter of
The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
Editor
Bryce Traister
Recommended Citation
Burnham, M. (2021). The Colonial Pacific. In B. Traister (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature (pp. 233–249). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878623.015
Comments
This material has been published in The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature edited by Bryce Traister https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108878623.015. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © Cambridge University Press.