ENGL 7057 Sisters & Brothers Speak Truth to Power in Colonial American Literature

This course explores the literary cultures of colonial America through a hemispheric lens, tracing how the colonial model took root across sites such as Massachusetts, Mexico City, San Domingue, Panama, and Surinam. Recent scholarship in early American studies has increasingly embraced hemispheric approaches, providing frameworks to follow the entangled histories of colonial conquest, slavery, religion, and gender that crossed imperial borders in the Americas. This course draws methodologies from settler colonial studies and indigenous studies, as well as Black Atlantic scholarship. These perspectives help us understand how early American colonial literature was entangled in hemispheric projects of conquest, slavery, religion, and gender formation. We examine how colonial outsider subjects--especially women writers--wrote back to empire, negotiating authority within the moral, theological, and epistemic frameworks of their time. Key texts include the extraordinary oeurves of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Aphra Behn, the Puritan poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and the archival land-deed-based account of the Sachem Queen of the Mysticke--whose textual remains interrogate the constraints of gender and the perils and possibilities of being proximate to emergent patriarchal power in colonial America. Alongside these colonial women writers, we read Jesuit missionary writings--the maps & journals of Jacques Marquette, S.J. from his Mississippi River voyage alongside the poetry, plays, & antislavery writings of Joseph of Anchieta, S.J. of Brazil--brothers who simultaneously imagined more just social orders while reproducing European worldviews, hierarchies, genders, violence, and extractive ideologies in the Americas.