Events
Job Talk by Alison Bigelow
When: Thursday, February 20, 2020 4:00 pm
Where: Kaplan Hall 193
Where: Kaplan Hall 193
Alison Bigelow, Assistant Professor, colonial Latin American literature, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, University of Virginia.
Talk Title: Mining Language: Extractive Industries and Indigenous Knowledge Production in the Early Americas
Talk Description:
Between 1500 and 1820, three out of every four people who crossed the Atlantic Ocean were enslaved Africans. They arrived to a continent where Indigenous people formed the majority of the population. The literatures of the colonial Americas thus differ from works produced in Europe, but for most of its history, our field has followed a European definition of literacy, and has privileged European representations of Native people rather than works by Indigenous agents (Mt. Pleasant, Wisecup, and Wigginton 2018). In this talk, I show how a combination of literary, linguistic, and material cultural studies approaches allows us to read around the silences and fragmentations of colonial archives to center the work of people who wrote “without letters.” My talk focuses on Taíno miners in the Caribbean and Quechua-speaking refiners in the Andes, but my methods can be applied by scholars working in other world regions, historical eras, and textual traditions.
Between 1500 and 1820, three out of every four people who crossed the Atlantic Ocean were enslaved Africans. They arrived to a continent where Indigenous people formed the majority of the population. The literatures of the colonial Americas thus differ from works produced in Europe, but for most of its history, our field has followed a European definition of literacy, and has privileged European representations of Native people rather than works by Indigenous agents (Mt. Pleasant, Wisecup, and Wigginton 2018). In this talk, I show how a combination of literary, linguistic, and material cultural studies approaches allows us to read around the silences and fragmentations of colonial archives to center the work of people who wrote “without letters.” My talk focuses on Taíno miners in the Caribbean and Quechua-speaking refiners in the Andes, but my methods can be applied by scholars working in other world regions, historical eras, and textual traditions.