Les Sauvages Américains

Les Sauvages Américains PDF

Author: Gordon M. Sayre

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2000-11-09

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 080786434X

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Algonquian and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work of Pierre Franaois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Franaois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature. Sayre's interdisciplinary approach draws on anthropology, cultural studies, and literary methodologies. He cautions against dismissing these colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, asserting that they offer insights into Native American cultures. Furthermore, early accounts of American Indians reveal Europeans' serious examination of their own customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt garments, for example, forced colonists to question the nature of money, writing, and clothing; and how the Indians' techniques of warfare and practice of adopting prisoners led to new concepts of cultural identity and inspired key themes in the European enlightenment and American individualism.

An American Voltaire

An American Voltaire PDF

Author: E. Joe Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2012-11-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1443843679

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This collection of essays was assembled to honor the memory of the late, eminent Voltaire scholar J. Patrick Lee. It includes seventeen essays by prominent scholars from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France on a variety of topics in French eighteenth-century studies. Essay titles include: “A New Genre: l’Opéra moral / Moral Opera in Eighteenth-Century France,” “Voltaire and the Uses of Censorship: The Example of the Lettres Philosophiques,” “Enlightenment Intertextuality: The Case of Heraldry in the Encyclopédie méthodique,” “Sex as Satire in Voltaire's Fiction,” “Violence, Levity, and the Dictionary in Old Regime France: Chaudon’s Dictionnaire anti-philosophique,” “L’abbé, l’amazone, le bon roi et les frelons,” “Greuze’s Self-Portraits: Figures of Artistic Identity,” “From Forest to Field: Sylvan Elegists of Eighteenth-Century France,” “The Falsification of Voltaire's Letters and the Public Persona of the Author: From the Lettres secrettes (1765) to the Commentaire historique (1776),” “The Baron de Saint-Castin, Bricaire de la Dixmerie, and Azakia (1765),” “John Law and the Rhetoric of Calculation,” “‘Le Roi des Bulgares’: Was Voltaire's Satire on Frederick the Great just too Opaque?” “Voltaire and the Voyage to Rome,” “Textual liaisons: Voltaire, Paméla and Don Quixote,” “Les petits livres du grand homme: polémique et combat philosophique chez Voltaire,” “Sentimental Horror: Enlightenment Tragedy and the Rise of the Genre Terrible,” “Voltaire and the Comic Genre: Polemics and Rhetoric.”

Queequeg's Coffin

Queequeg's Coffin PDF

Author: Birgit Brander Rasmussen

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2012-01-06

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 082234954X

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Rather than seeing American literature as beginning with the writings of English or Spanish colonists, Brander Rasmussen points to the wide variety of indigenous writing in the Americas prior to colonization. The study looks at writing between 1524 and the mid-19th century work of Herman Melville.

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians

Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians PDF

Author: Sophie White

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2013-01-14

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 0812207173

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Based on a sweeping range of archival, visual, and material evidence, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians examines perceptions of Indians in French colonial Louisiana and demonstrates that material culture—especially dress—was central to the elaboration of discourses about race. At the heart of France's seventeenth-century plans for colonizing New France was a formal policy—Frenchification. Intended to turn Indians into Catholic subjects of the king, it also carried with it the belief that Indians could become French through religion, language, and culture. This fluid and mutable conception of identity carried a risk: while Indians had the potential to become French, the French could themselves be transformed into Indians. French officials had effectively admitted defeat of their policy by the time Louisiana became a province of New France in 1682. But it was here, in Upper Louisiana, that proponents of French-Indian intermarriage finally claimed some success with Frenchification. For supporters, proof of the policy's success lay in the appearance and material possessions of Indian wives and daughters of Frenchmen. Through a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the material sources, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians offers a distinctive and original reading of the contours and chronology of racialization in early America. While focused on Louisiana, the methodological model offered in this innovative book shows that dress can take center stage in the investigation of colonial societies—for the process of colonization was built on encounters mediated by appearance.

Modernity and Its Other

Modernity and Its Other PDF

Author: Robert W. Sayre

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2017-12

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1496204794

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In Modernity and Its Other Robert Woods Sayre examines eighteenth-century North America through discussion of texts drawn from the period. He focuses on this unique historical moment when early capitalist civilization (modernity) in colonial societies, especially the British, interacted closely with Indigenous communities (the “Other”) before the balance of power shifted definitively toward the colonizers. Sayre considers a variety of French perspectives as a counterpoint to the Anglo-American lens, including J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Philip Freneau, as well as both Anglo-American and French or French Canadian travelers in “Indian territory,” including William Bartram, Jonathan Carver, John Lawson, Alexander Mackenzie, Baron de Lahontan, Pierre Charlevoix, and Jean-Baptiste Trudeau. Modernity and Its Other is an important addition to any North American historian’s bookshelf, for it brings together the social history of the European colonies and the ethnohistory of the American Indian peoples who interacted with the colonizers.

Allegories of Encounter

Allegories of Encounter PDF

Author: Andrew Newman

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-11-05

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1469643464

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Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

Under the Skin

Under the Skin PDF

Author: Mairin Odle

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-11

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1512823171

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Under the Skin investigates the role of cross-cultural body modification in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century North America, revealing that the practices of tattooing and scalping were crucial to interactions between Natives and newcomers. These permanent and painful marks could act as signs of alliance or signs of conflict, producing a complex bodily archive of cross-cultural entanglement. Indigenous body modification practices were adopted and transformed by colonial powers, making tattooing and scalping key forms of cultural and political contestation in early America. Although these bodily practices were quite distinct—one a painful but generally voluntary sign of accomplishment and affiliation, the other a violent assault on life and identity—they were linked by growing colonial perceptions that both were crucial elements of “Nativeness.” Tracing the transformation of concepts of bodily integrity, personal and collective identities, and the sources of human difference, Under the Skin investigates both the lived physical experience and the contested metaphorical power of early American bodies. Struggling for power on battlefields, in diplomatic gatherings, and in intellectual exchanges, Native Americans and Anglo-Americans found their physical appearances dramatically altered by their interactions with one another. Contested ideas about the nature of human and societal difference translated into altered appearances for many early Americans. In turn, scars and symbols on skin prompted an outpouring of stories as people debated the meaning of such marks. Perhaps paradoxically, individuals with culturally ambiguous or hybrid appearances prompted increasing efforts to insist on permanent bodily identity. By the late eighteenth century, ideas about the body, phenotype, and culture were increasingly articulated in concepts of race. Yet even as the interpretations assigned to inscribed flesh shifted, fascination with marked bodies remained.