Over the past twenty years, experts on early North America have increasingly turned to comparative and connected modes of study to explain the effects of colonialism on social, political, and aesthetic developments throughout the so-called New World, where English and Spanish empires appropriated and carved up the largest sections of Indigenous territories. Despite notable linguistic, religious, and chronological differences in Anglo and Iberian colonialisms, this critical hemispheric turn recognizes the interconnected nature of lived experience and writing in the region. As part of this volume’s reflection on the history and future of methods in early American studies, this chapter analyzes four major comparative paradigms in the study of the colonial Americas: generic, genetic, appositional, and mediative approaches. As I discuss each of these approaches, I provide examples from primary sources and critical studies published in the past ten years, outlining current modes of scholarship and future directions in the field.

If one of the most prominent features of early America was the collision of peoples from two hemispheres, much of this collision found expression through different expectations of how men and women should behave. Because participants in these encounters saw that what they thought of as natural attributes of men and women were not consistent across the lines of culture, and because printed descriptions of those encounters expanded the audience for those encounters, it is not an exaggeration to say that early America as a site of contact did much to provoke widespread contemplation of what in the twentieth century came to be known as the distinction between sex and gender. Texts such as John Marrant’s account of his captivity in a Cherokee town and Amerigo Vespucci’s letters illustrate how understanding early America in all its complexity requires accounting for the intricacies of gender as they were performed in intersection with other identity categories such as race. The history of colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade also shows how gender became an instrument of domination. Finally, the stories of figures like Catherine Tekakwitha demonstrate that occasionally individuals found new lives in early America in part by adopting foreign performances of gender.

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.

Although English settler colonialism was ascendant in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americas, its literature was often written as disaster. This chapter considers three modes of catastrophe – accident, disaster, and trauma – to argue that the violent forces and harsh conditions of life in the New World fragmented former identities and that coloniality emerged from that shattering. The story of accident is told through Jamaican creole Jonathan Dickinson who, along with his small crew of family, friends, shipmen, servants, and slaves, were shipwrecked en route from Port Royal to Philadelphia in 1696. They landed in Florida, where their accidental arrival led them to impersonate the Spanish, to provoke enmities with Indigenous people over both their feigned and their real identities, and to desperately improvise their way over 230 miles to rescue. The story of disaster is told through early Jamestown, a site where extreme suffering and violence compounded to guarantee dire outcomes. For the small number of settlers who survived, their Englishness did not survive within them. From the Starving Time to the First Anglo-Powhatan War, their coloniality took shape in a space of abjection and aggression, marking settlement as a theater of brutality and horror. Trauma is recounted through the narrative of the Pequot War and the life of Mary Prince. These stories of unbridled warfare against the Pequot of New England and the un/common trauma inflicted on enslaved people of the Caribbean bear testimony to the radical dispossession white colonials inflicted upon Native and enslaved people, and the struggle to maintain identities in this context. Together, attention to accident, disaster, and trauma ruptures any smooth accounting of colonial “development” and instead testifies to the tearing, sundering, and shattering that make this history remain uneven, unsteady, and unresolved.

Scholars used to view “early American literature” primarily as little more than a rustic precursor to what American literature would become in its maturity. For many years as well, it was the cradle of the “New England Mind,” that place where America’s religious origins might be found and established. In recent years, however, the study of early American literature has expanded in several intriguing directions. From the perspective of temporality or period, scholars now consider “early America” to extend back into the fifteenth century and as far forward as the 1830s. Linguistically, the archive “early America” now speaks and records in a number of languages other than English. Socially and culturally, we consider the literatures of enslaved persons, women, and Indigenous persons formerly forgotten by such histories. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a single book or perspective adequately capturing the proliferation of the field’s recognition, which is why this multivoice volume is so needed as this point.

The period of exploration of North America by various European nations manifested an intense moment of cultural, political, economic, and environmental change. Often marked by violence, Europeans failed to understand the gendered practices of the Indigenous population, which often liberated women from the confines of marriage and allowed for a spectrum of sexual identities and practices. European explorers, endowed with a sense of masculine dominance, given their role as captains or brave soldiers, confronted not only a vastly different gendered terrain and site of sexual fluidity but their own masculinity struggles with Indigenous men. As Europeans imposed religious mores and situated European customs as civilized and superior, explorers and settlers disrupted Native identities and power structures. This chapter asserts that the various conflicts and challenges encountered within the landscape of the New World can and should be considered through the lens of eroticization, sexuality, and gender. Often these contests of power disadvantaged women and sexualities that failed to conform to Christianity. These literal and psychological sites of struggle laid the foundation for future colonization and dramatically impacted and altered understandings of the colonial experiment.

Americans know the story of democracy: how the Framers built a government with branches that would check and balance, that would derive its authority from sovereign citizens, filtered and refined by their elected representatives. Americans may refer to our system as “democracy” but the representative republican framework provided by the Framers ensured the safe democratization of our country over time. This well-rehearsed story frames American democracy as a bequest from the Framers. Yet this powerful founding story is a victor’s tale, designed to erase from collective historical memory a very real battle with a robust alternative model of democratic theory and practice that was flourishing – much to the Framers’ consternation – in the early nation. This alternative democracy originated in the daily practices of ordinary colonists. Their vernacular democracy generated and motored revolution; and though the political elite embraced this participatory and equalitarian practice, they later pulled away, seeking in their words to “tame” the democratic enthusiasm and power of ordinary American citizens even as they drew on that power (renamed “sovereignty”) to authorize the representative federal republicanism they offered as a containment device. Knowing about vernacular democracy enables readers to see its record in the literature of the early United States.

What are the legacies of American Puritanism? The answers might surprise you. Somewhat paradoxically, these legacies are somehow both nearly invisible in the contemporary United States and also ubiquitous. On one hand, there is very little evidence of the theology or polity of seventeenth-century New England Puritans visible in today’s religious or political culture. It would be difficult to find an extant church offering a semblance of the services the Puritans attended, and even churches that claim a link to this time are quick to emphasize their evolution. At the same time, “puritan” persists in our culture as a byword for everything that is more repressive and less sexually evolved than we are. For instance, activists who want more freedom for nudity and sexual expression on social media often blame puritans for these restrictions. This differentiation between a contemporary Us and a puritan Them creates space for caricature that opens up space for what I call “settler kitsch,” an array of cartoonish, caricatured images of the settlers of New England, impossible to take seriously with their big hats and funny shoes. At the same time, these cartoons obscure an actual cognizance of Puritans by concealing the violence inherent in the settler colonial projects of Pilgrims and Puritans. As such, the principal legacies of Puritanism today are #freethenipple and settler kitsch.

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.

Racialized subjection in the English Atlantic continues to be associated overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, with Africans, in part because of the magnitude and colossal significance of African chattel slavery to the plantation complex in particular and to the institutions of capitalist modernity in general. To be sure, workforces in the Atlantic became increasingly Africanized in the eighteenth century. Yet laboring people in the early years of settlement were by no means monochromatic; rather, they were, in Gary Nash’s classic account, red, white, and black. In Barbados and other New World colonies, plantation societies were built on expropriated Native lands and the coerced labor of Indigenous and African peoples. This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extraliterary sources – plays, proto-ethnographic texts, the early novel, and pamphlets – to investigate the conjoined yet distinct histories of territorial dispossession and labor extraction. It argues that the continued expansion of plantation agriculture in the early Atlantic, supported by African chattel slavery, had, as its inevitable corollary, the diminution of Native American territorial sovereignty.

How might a close reading of the language of revolutionary-era anti-slavery petitions contribute to a broader understanding of the politics of the American founding? This chapter focuses on one of the earliest surviving examples of African American political writing, the petition submitted to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in January 1773, by an author named FELIX. Revolutionary republicans came to disparage the petitionary form, because it had failed to persuade King George to defend his colonial subjects. The petition’s conventional language of deference and its tendency to “pray” or plead rather than to demand or insist led many colonists to reject the form in favor of far more assertive declarations of individual and collective right. By reanimating the petition, however, African Americans like FELIX not only contributed to the work of anti-slavery agitation; they also, as this chapter suggests, registered resistance to some of the dominant political ideas of the republican revolution. Drawing on historical studies of the significance of the petition in the colonies as well as accounts of the petition’s key formal and rhetorical features, this chapter makes the case for a specifically African American contribution to the political discourse of the founding.

Most communications in early colonial America were not written down. Even if, following recent scholarly trends, we understand the Western notion of “writing” broadly – as including all forms of inscribed human communication – nonverbal exchanges still carry most of our human-to-human signals. How, then, do we study early American interactions between Natives and newcomers if so much of what we must rely upon as analysts goes unspoken? This chapter describes the methodological and ethical challenges of early colonial North American historiography based on other-than-linguistic evidence in three media domains: Indigenous media of the colonial era; human relations to and movement in landscape; and the environment as an agential force.