American Literary Traditions: Archives and Ecologies of the Early Americas

In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, how did Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans experience the land and Atlantic littoral from Barbados to Boston? The course disrupts assumed connections between writing and empire to foreground the embodied experience of Europeans and Africans in an unprecedented Atlantic migration. Alongside these arrivals, we examine how Indigenous people adapted to and survived this cataclysmic change. Considering people, non-human animals, plants, earth, and water relationally, we form a critical practice of unsettlement that reimagines the colonial archive as a contingent set of historical futures.