Performative Cultures of Early America

doi:10.1017/9781108699419.005

4 - Performative Cultures of Early America

from Part I - Traces and Removals (Pre-1870s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020

Laura L. Mielke

Edited by

Melanie Benson Taylor

Show author details

Melanie Benson Taylor: Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This chapter focuses on performance at the crossroads of Native and non-Native cultures in early America. It considers in particular the literary depictions of those performative cultures and the literary productions that arose from them. Sacred, militaristic, political, juridical, theatrical, and communicative performances appear throughout colonial and Indigenous archives. Their presence deeply informs Native American literary history and increasingly drives the evolution of North American literary history. The chapter considers the literary record of strategic performances of Indianness whereby Native Americans claim authority over their identity within colonialism. It then considers how this knowledge should necessarily impact the content of literary anthologies and the literary surveys they serve. Attending to the performative cultures of early America makes visible the formative and persistent influence of Indigenous culture on non-Native expression. But it should not encourage a disregard for cultural distinctions or, more specifically, for the sacred.

Keywords

performance colonialism embodiment syncretism non-alphabetic literacies media literary history literary anthologies

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Native American Literature , pp. 74 - 88

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108699419.005[Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Purchase

Buy Book

Buy print or eBook

References

Bellin, Joshua David. 2007. “John Eliot’s Playing Indian.” Early American Literature 42, 1: 1–30. DOI:10.1353/eal.2007.0001

Bellin, Joshua David. 2008. Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824–1932. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Brooks, Lisa. 2008. The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Champlain, Samuel de. 1936. The Works of Samuel de Champlain, ed. Biggar, Henry Percival. 2 vols., trans. John Squair. Toronto: Champlain Society.

Cohen, J. M., ed. and trans. 1969. The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. New York: Penguin.

Cohen, Matt. 2010. The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deloria, Philip Joseph. 1998. Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. 2014. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fitzgerald, Stephanie J. 2008. “The Cultural Work of a Mohegan Painted Basket.” In Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology, ed. Bross, Kristina and Hilary, E. Wyss, 52–56. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Fitzgerald, Stephanie J., and Wyss, Hilary E.. 2010. “Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies.” American Literary History 22, 2: 271–79. DOI:10.1093/alh/ajq003

Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. 2018. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 10th edn. Vol. C. New York: Norton.

Gunn, Robert Lawrence. 2015. Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands. America and the Long 19th Century. New York: New York University Press.

Gustafson, Sandra M. 2000. Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Levine, Robert, ed. 2016. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 9th edn. Vol. A. New York: Norton.

Lopenzina, Drew. 2012. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period. Native Traces. Albany: SUNY Press.

Lyons, Scott Richard. 2010. X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Marcus, Diveena S. 2016. “Indigenous Hermeneutics through Ceremony: Song, Language, and Dance.” In The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, ed. Madsen, Deborah L., 353–63. New York: Routledge.

Mattes, Mark. 2018. “Along the Apocrypha of ‘Real Indian’ Writing.” Paper presented at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Fifth Biennial Conference: Climate. Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 23.

Mielke, Laura L. 2011. “Introduction.” In Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, ed. Bellin, Joshua David and Mielke, Laura L., 1–26. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Newman, Andrew. 2014. “Early Americanist Grammatology: Definitions of Writing and Literacy.” In Colonial Mediascapes: Sensory Worlds of the Early Americas, ed. Cohen, Matt and Glover, Jeffrey, 76–98. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Occom, Samson. 2006. The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America, ed. Brooks, Joanna. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pollack, John H. 2011. “Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France.” In Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, ed. Bellin, Joshua David and Mielke, Laura L., 81–116. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Rasmussen, Birgit Brander. 2012. Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Round, Phillip H. 2010. Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tilton, Robert S. 1994. Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weaver, Jace. 2014. The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Wigginton, Caroline. 2011. “In a Red Petticoat: Coosaponakeesa’s Performance of Creek Sovereignty in Colonial Georgia.” In Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832, ed. Bellin, Joshua David and Mielke, Laura L., 169–93. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Wisecup, Kelly. 2018. “‘Meteors, Ships, Etc.’: Native American Histories of Colonialism and Early American Archives.” American Literary History 30, 1: 29–54. DOI:10.1093/alh/ajx046

Wyss, Hilary E. 2012. English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.