Tocqueville
Schedule of Lectures and Seminars
University of Richmond
June 6-10, 2011
All afternoon lectures and opening session on Monday June 6th will take place in the International Commons in the Carole Weinstein International Center.
All morning seminars and the concluding session on Friday June 11 will meet in the International Conference Room (103L) in the Carole Weinstein International Center.
Return to the Tocqueville Seminars site.
Opening session
Lunch (Heilman Dining Hall, or D-Hall)
Lecture
Cotton Mather's Spanish Lessons
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
What do we make of the fact that Cotton Mather, arguably the inaugural figure in the 'American' literary tradition, taught himself Spanish in the late 1690s and wrote two tracts in that language? The story behind these first Spanish-language publications in colonial English America involves West Indian piracy, the enslavement of Indians in Spanish Florida, corn riots in Mexico City, and the etymology of creole. It also invites us to consider language ideologies as an integral part of cultural history. Might such scenes of language instruction show how social attitudes toward a given language and its speakers are formed and disseminated? This talk engages current debates in transnational American studies, Latino studies, the history of books and print culture, and sociolinguistics to explore ways of reading pedagogical texts such as grammars, conversation and phrase books. Drawn from my book manuscript, Bad Lengua: A Cultural History of Spanish in the US, it traces the deep roots of our contemporary 'Spanish Paradox': Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language of the US and by far the most widely taught, yet remains a repeated target of monolingual legislation.
Dinner (D-Hall)
Seminar
The Question of Hemispheric Literature
Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Professor of Literature
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
The seminar will focus on the promises and perils of thinking transnationally about US literary and cultural forms, with an emphasis on the imagined space of the Americas. A review essay on recent scholarship in hemispheric studies, and a skeptical manifesto from a Latin Americanist, will help frame these developments in the field. Finally, departing from a new collaborative essay, we will reconsider Melville's Benito Cereno in its Haitian context-a case study that has become iconic to hemispheric American studies.
Lunch (Heilman Dining Hall, or D-Hall)
Lecture
Tacky's Revolt and the Coromantee Archipelago
Vincent Brown, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies
African-American Studies, Duke University, USA
The Jamaican slave uprising of 1760, commonly known as Tacky's Revolt, was among the largest and most consequential in a series of insurrections between 1675 and 1775 staged by enslaved Africans commonly called "Coromantees" or "Koromantyns" from the Gold Coast, a West African region stretching between the Komoe and Volta rivers. Historians of colonial slavery have been careful to show the impact of events and decisions made in Europe on patterns of New World development, but, with a few notable exceptions, we have a much weaker understanding of how African social, political, and military history has shaped the Atlantic world. This lecture suggests that a new cartography is needed before we may ask how events in Africa reverberated through the Atlantic, thereby joining African, European, and American history.
Dinner (D-Hall)
Seminar
African Revolt in the Atlantic World
Vincent Brown, Professor of History and African and African-American Studies
African-American Studies, Duke University, USA
This seminar will focus on the nature of African revolt in the Americas and its implications for the political geography of the Atlantic world by considering the following questions: What is a slave revolt? What is resistance?; Why did the enslaved rebel?; What were the goals of enslaved rebels?; Were there connections between revolts in different places?; What are the implications of slave revolt for the way we think about politics and history?
Lunch (Heilman Dining Hall, or D-Hall)
Lecture
The Predicament of Memory: Discarded Projects and Contesting Discourses in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Sonia Torres, Professor of Literature and American Studies
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
Within the scope of a collective project being developed at the moment, titled "Inhabiting Modernities: (Crisis of) memory, oppressive hierarchies and possible utopias" (UFF/CNPq), this lecture proposes a discussion of the growing tendency, in contemporary novels, to oscillate between multiple genres that are anchored, on the one hand, to narrations of either historic or subjective memory and, on the other, to "genre literature," featuring what we might term the posthuman. I argue that these works represent arenas of ontological or epistemological contest, or tension - through the re-presentation of a repertoire of discarded projects and 'lost' modernities, or through the oscillation between disciplinary fields - that are important to our understanding of the difficulty in separating knowledge and experience into self-contained units as discourses fluctuate and memory "flashes in a moment of danger" (Benjamin).
Dinner (D-Hall)
Screening of Bruno Barreto's Four Days in September (1997) (Boatwright Library, Second Floor, Room #4)
Seminar
Reading American Spaces: The Lettered City and the City on a Hill
Sonia Torres, Professor of Literature and American Studies
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
In this session textual representations of American cities will be explored: the relationship between walking in the city and writing about the city; and the association between urban space and the nation. The discussion will focus on Julio Cortazar's "The Other Heaven" (1966) and Rubem Fonseca's "The Art of Walking in the Streets of Rio de Janeiro" (1992), engaging a debate about the Latin American metropolis as a promise of modernity, as well as the limitations of the 'center/periphery' paradigm. As a counterpoint, we will look at Paul Auster's "City of Glass" (1985).
In order to articulate this comparative reading with current debates on inter-American studies, I have selected a position paper by Earl E. Fitz, in which he argues for the potential of this developing field as a way "to change the ways traditional units, such as Anthropology, English and American Literature, African American Studies, History, French, Economics, Law, Spanish and Portuguese, and Comparative Literature, envision their missions, their subject matter, and their relationships with each other," while, at the same time, problematizing its limits.
Lunch (Heilman Dining Hall, or D-Hall)
Lecture
Scenographia Americana: Transatlantic Utopianism and the Iconography of a Wilderness Farm
Wil Verhoeven, Professor of American Studies
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Former Royal Governor of Massachusetts Bay and lifelong friend of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Pownall was one of the more astute observers of the expanding British Empire in North America. But he was by no means a "British Defender of American Liberty," as one historian has characterized him. Even before the imperial crisis had become just that, Pownall began to create textual and visual images of America that promoted imperialist ideology. Drawing particularly on the methodologies of the transatlantic history of the book, print culture and Atlantic history, this paper will argue that Pownall's Americana offers a tissue of meanings, perceptions and responses, which can be identified as "the imaginary production of the real"-that is, images designed to strengthen Britain's ideological control over her colonies.
This case study prompts a number of important questions. To what extent have (American) historians of the British colonies and the early Republic been looking through the wrong end of a transatlantic telescope? In an emerging public sphere that was predominantly conditioned by the medium of print, did not published accounts of the New World de facto constitute the known or perceived "facts" about America? If so, was the medium of print an illuminating prism or a distorting mirror? If we assume that even during the imperial crisis, Britain and her colonies were joined, not divided by the ideology of a "capitalist Atlantic," to what extent would this require us to re-engage with such entrenched concepts as "independence," "liberty" and "exceptionalism"?
Dinner (D-Hall)
Seminar
Printing Errors: Textual Fault Lines in Transatlantic Print Culture
Wil Verhoeven, Professor of American Studies
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
This seminar will introduce the participants to three different avenues of inquiry. First, using Hinderaker and Horn's essay on "Territorial Crossings," we will look at a range of theoretical issues relating to histories and historiographies of early America. Next, using the interdisciplinary methodology of transatlantic book history, we will engage with local and specific textual histories in early America. Finally, we will look at pedagogical strategies that will allow students of early American (textual) history to engage in practical ways with forms of material print culture within the framework of the wider theoretical and methodological issues mentioned above.
Lunch (Heilman Dining Hall, or D-Hall)
Concluding session
Dinner (D-Hall)
Return to the Tocqueville Seminars site.