scholarly journals “Breathing the Air of a World So New”: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
JENNIFER TERRY
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
New World ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
Dominant Discourses

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

Catholics in Colonial America (1500–1700)

2020 ◽  
pp. 325-355
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Alta California ◽  
Full Knowledge ◽  
The Caribbean

Conversionary efforts in the New World mirrored attitudes and practices in the Old. Christendom remained as much a project in the New as in the Old, and thus religious differences remained as problematic in the Americas as they did in Europe. Images of military conflict—combat, battle, and victory—language familiar on the Continent—infused the outlook of early modern Catholic missionaries, whereas Spanish and French missionaries in the New World often had the arm of the state to protect them and, all too often, to coerce the natives. This chapter selectively examines initial missionary efforts in a variety of locations—Spanish missionary outreach in the Caribbean, Peru, and Alta California and French missions in North America. The depth of Native American conversions was as varied as the methods used to produce them. On a superficial level, conversion meant a transfer of loyalty or allegiance, often without a full knowledge of what that transfer entailed. Or, with defeat, conversion might represent a conscious acknowledgment of the more powerful Christian God over weaker traditional deities.

The Creole Synthesis in the New World

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
New World ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Colonies

This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New Orleans and the Ohio. It also looks at a preliminary example of iconographic analysis that reflects the riverine and maritime creole synthesis: James Henry Beard's 1846 painting Western Raftsmen. The chapter contends that blackface minstrelsy was pioneered by George Washington Dixon and Thomas Dartmouth Rice in the 1830s and codified by Joel Walker Sweeney and Daniel Decatur Emmett (and the blackface troupes they founded) in the early 1840s, and thus represents the earliest comparatively accurate and extensive observation, description, and imitation of African American performance in the New World.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Sharon D. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Police Force ◽  
Social Health ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Large Numbers

There are moments in history when there are major breakthroughs in the power of social movements. Large numbers of people recognize the depth of injustice, see possibilities of beauty and integrity heretofore unknown, and find new forms of coming together to bring about change. We are living in such a time. We also live in a time of genuine threat – rising authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia, increasing environmental degradation, morally unconscionable income and wealth disparities, a dangerously militarized police force, and a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets people who are African American, Native American and Latinx. Moreover, we are confronting ongoing threats of war and terrorism, escalating Islamophobia, and a national political system that is largely ineffective, paralyzed by increasingly high levels of division and polarization. We are in a struggle for the very soul of democracy, and all that we hold dear - interdependence, reason, compassion, respect for all human beings, and stewardship of the natural world that sustains us,– is under direct, unabashed assault. This book is meant for those who are concerned about dangers to our democracy, and to our social health as a nation. It is for those who desire to work for social justice, and to respond to essential protests by enacting progressive change.

scholarly journals “Seeing These Good Souls Adore God in the Midst of the Woods”

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-300
Author(s):  
Muriel Clair
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
New France ◽  
Hunting Season ◽  
Subarctic Region ◽  
Kinship Networks ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries

Up to 1647, Jesuit missionaries in New France attempting to evangelize nomadic Algonquians of North America’s subarctic region were unable to follow these peoples, as they wished, in their seasonal hunts. The mission sources, especially the early Jesuit Relations, indicate that it was Algonquian neophytes of the Jesuit mission villages of Sillery and La Conception who themselves attracted other natives to Christianity. A veritable Native American apostolate was thus in existence by the 1640s, based in part on the complex kinship networks of the nomads. Thus it appears that during that decade, the Jesuits of New France adopted a new strategy of evangelization, based partly on the kinship networks of the nomads, which allowed for the natives’ greater autonomy in communicating and embracing Catholicism. A difficulty faced by the Jesuit editors of the Relations was how to concede to the culture of the nomads without offending their devout, European readers of the era of the “great confinement,” upon whom the missionaries depended for financial support. One way the Jesuits favorably portrayed nomadic neophytes—who were often unaccompanied by a missionary in their travels—was by underscoring the importance during hunting season of memory-based and material aids for Catholic prayer (Christian calendars, icons, rosaries, crucifixes, oratories in the woods, etc.). Thus, in the Jesuit literature, the gradual harmonization between Native American mobility and the Catholic liturgy was the key feature of the missionaries’ adaptation to the aboriginal context of the 1640s—a defining period for the Jesuit apostolate in North America through the rest of the seventeenth century.

Tricksters in African, African American, and Caribbean Folktales and Cultures

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Pan African ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Rich

The trickster is one of the most complex and widespread archetypes of Pan-African literatures and cultures, such as those from Africa, the United States, and the Caribbean. It is a folk character who invokes a multiplicity of meanings, including transcendence of boundaries between good and bad, morality and immorality, truth and lie, and many other entities. Dwelling on third, sacred, innocuous, and marginalized spaces, the trickster is a universal figure whose location in crossroads or other unusual spaces epitomizes the forced or voluntary alienation of individuals and communities from around the world. Therefore, the trickster is more than the childlike character who enjoys duping other pranksters and being “naughty.” In Pan-African traditions, the trickster is an animal or human character whose situation and movements symbolize the harsh conditions of millions of people of African descent due to brutal historical forces such as slavery, colonialism, and other oppressions. In the Americas, Europe, and other locations where they were brought, enslaved Africans carried knowledge of the trickster persona from their folktales and cultures, and later blended this tradition with lore and customs of Europeans and Native Americans in the New World. Thus, although it was one of the most brutal human experiences, the transatlantic slave trade led to the formation of hybridity, or cultural mixing, embodied in the rich spoken and written Pan-African narratives in which trickster figures deploy various strategies to resist oppression, assert their humanity, and gain freedom. The works mentioned in this study reflect the historical, social, political, and cultural backgrounds out of which trickster icons of selected Pan-African folktales came. Such works reveal the hybridism and survival strategies that enslaved Africans developed in the United States and the Caribbean by mixing their African traditions with Native American, European, and other customs. Understanding such cultural diversity will enable scholars and students of Pan-African folklore to have the open-mindedness that is necessary to study the vast traditions that influenced such customs. To guide readers, this bibliography gives a comprehensive list of major collections of African, African American, and Caribbean folktales, tale-types, motifs, and scholarly studies of such narratives published since the early 20th century. The bibliography shows that enslaved Africans did not come to the New World as blank slates. Instead, these populations had folklore, knowledge, memories, and practices that helped them to resist oppression and affirm their humanity.

Truth and the Experiential

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo F. Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Natural Philosophers

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.

Estimated Correlations and Dating of South and Central American Culture Sequences

1958 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 353-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon R. Willey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
North America ◽  
New World ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Central American ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Southwestern United States ◽  
Culture Area ◽  
Conventional Culture

The correlation of culture sequences provides the basic framework of archaeology, the essential understructure of any interpretations which may follow. In the New World, prehistoric sequence correlations seldom are projected for territories of greater size than the conventional culture area. The southwestern United States, Peru, or, at the largest, eastern North America are classic examples. The reason for such a restriction seems to be that native American cultures but rarely outrun the boundaries of their natural environmental settings, and it is difficult to effect alignments of culture phases or units on an interareal basis.

Native American Networks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Native North America

Networks describe how people and places are connected. In Native North America, these connections took the form of kinship, trade, and various forms of alliance—all of which overlapped in ways that make it impossible to analyze one category without considering the others. At a basic level, all of these networks depended on the communication of information, which circulated as fact and rumor across the continent. Varying by region and topography, Native peoples traveled by canoe, foot, and (from the colonial period onward) horseback along trail networks that linked diverse Native American towns and facilitated both continental and transatlantic trade and communication. The study of networks, whether in the form of trade, kinship, or Native-defined alliances, allows historians to transcend typical boundaries of analysis, such as borders drawn by European cartographers. Throughout the 18th century and even into the 19th century, these borders were fictions, as Native Americans continued to control much of the continent. An abundance of archaeological evidence reveals the exchange networks that spread material items and cultural beliefs long before the colonial period. Some of the most well-known pre-Columbian networks involved agriculturalist settlements often grouped under the label “Mississippian,” which thrived along the Mississippi and its tributaries from approximately the 11th through 16th centuries. But other networks crisscrossed the continent, from the Great Plains to the Southwest. These long-existing but shifting networks facilitated the later spread of European trade goods. To varying degrees, following the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples participated in a new system of exchange, capitalism, which commodified the natural world and has drawn considerable attention from scholars. Political power in Native North America was dynamic, organized by kinship networks that were both local and regional in importance. Families belonged to larger groups known as clans, which facilitated connections beyond the village. Typically, Native peoples traced these clan origins to some other-than-human ancestor. Kinship did not necessarily represent biological connections. Through ceremonies, Native peoples created what scholars call “fictive kinship” to create networks across distances and even into Euro-American communities.

Buried perspectives

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Terry
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
North American ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Song Of Solomon ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Historical Structures ◽  
The North ◽  
American Landscape ◽  
Dominant Discourses

In examining representations of engagements with the North American landscape in the fiction of Toni Morrison, this article seeks to explore the author’s revision of dominant discourses about the topography and symbolic spaces of the continent and her exposure thereby of historical structures of power. Focusing on her fourth novel, Song of Solomon (1977), it traces how Morrison attempts to give voice to African American experience and identity and to revisit and contest familiar stories of national belonging and being in the land. In crafting tales of black displacement, dispossession, estrangement, travel, discovery, connection and home, the author is found to excavate buried perspectives and shape her own potent narrative act.

Violent Readings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hofreiter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Real World ◽  
New World ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Violent Behaviour ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
Ex Post Facto

The chapter addresses the question in how far herem texts have inspired and shaped war and violent behaviour in the real world. It briefly reviews passages in Ambrose and Augustine that arguably constitute patristic antecedents to later violent readings. This review is followed by a detailed treatment of the reception of herem texts during the medieval crusades, which draws on crusading chronicles, songs, poems, epics, and sermons; then by briefer sections on the medieval inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the New World, the ‘Christian holy war’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, and colonial wars in North America. The chapter demonstrates that the OT generally and herem texts specifically provided narratives, categories, and labels by which Christians understood themselves and their ‘enemies’. Herem texts were sometimes used to justify massacres ex post facto; at the same time, it cannot be demonstrated that they shaped the planning or execution of mass slaughters.

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