Thinking across Cultures in Early America

FAIN: FA-251900-17

Matt Cohen
University of Texas, Austin (Austin, TX 78712-0100)

A book-length study of the language of early American cross-cultural interactions.

This book's goal is to revitalize the discussion of inter-cultural relations in early American studies. Much of the most influential scholarship in interdisciplinary colonial studies tries not just to illuminate the past but to provide a new imagination of a shared future among all the descendants of the colonial world. Yet an outdated vocabulary of cultural interchange hinders the field, which has struggled to attract Native American and African American scholars in significant numbers. This lexicon has also kept its work from being taken up in other fields. In five short chapters drawing on both major texts and archival sources, this book traces where terms like "reciprocity," "understanding," "piety," and others came from and how they have evolved from the ways they were used in early colonial contexts. It also looks forward, showing how re-assessing such terms can help students of early America speak to broader questions and bring more diverse voices into the field.

Associated Products

The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized (Book)
Title: The Silence of the Miskito Prince: How Cultural Dialogue Was Colonized
Author: Matt Cohen
Abstract: How can we tell colonial histories in ways that invite intercultural conversation within humanistic fields that are themselves products of colonial domination? Beginning with a famous episode of failed communication from the narrative of the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, The Silence of the Miskito Prince explores this question by looking critically at five concepts frequently used to imagine solutions to the challenges of cross-cultural communication: understanding, cosmopolitanism, piety, reciprocity, and patience.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-silence-of-the-miskito-prince
Primary URL Description: Publisher website
Secondary URL: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/the-silence-of-the-miskito-prince
Secondary URL Description: Open-access version
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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