ROUNDTABLE:
TRANS-OCEANIC FANTASIES AND IMPERIAL NIGHTMARES
Friday Oct. 12 2007, 12 noon - 1:45 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Room 414
"A Paradigm From Another Shore"
--Gretchen A. Adams, Texas Tech University
"The Revolutionary Pacific"
--Michelle Burnham, Santa Clara University
"Melville's Pisgah View"
--Rick Rodriguez, Loyola University Chicago
"White Monsters: Early American Nightmares in Color"
--Karen Nicole Salt, Purdue University
Chair: Dennis D. Moore, Florida State University
This roundtable follows logically from the one the ASA's EARLY AMERICAN MATTERS
CAUCUS sponsored at the Oakland conference, "Roundtable: Re-Imagining
‘early America’ From Inside Out.” We are excited about this session,
which has evolved from historian James Spady's suggesting a panel on
"Early AmericaS: Pacific and Atlantic," building on the recent increase
in scholarly attention to "the Americas" within various
trans-hemispheric, global, and post-national contexts. In early 2005,
for example, the special issue of the on-line journal Common-place
opened with an essay by two historians, “Toward a Pacific World”; for
Edward Gray and Alan Taylor, focusing upon the early modern Pacific
World offers historians an escape from “nations and states as the
defining subjects of historical understanding, turning instead to large
scale processes.”
These five panelists embody the range of participants in our 250+
member Caucus, and their brief opening comments will help spark a
discussion, with the audience and with each other, on ways of
re-thinking the expressions "early America," "colonialism,"
"trans-hemispheric," and, yes, "globalization." One is a historian, one
a scholar of early American print culture and of relations with Native
Americans, two are advanced graduate students, and the chair is the
organizer of the ASA's Early American Matters Caucus. Rather than
presenting standard-length papers, each participant will present a
5-minute opening statement, i.e., a brief paper spelling out a
particular way to approach the session’s broad topic.
CREDIT: Map showing the oceans listed as the North Sea
and the South Sea. "America with Those Known Parts in That Unknowne
Worlde,"1626. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.