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.

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.