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WiSe 20/21: Discourses and Practices of Colonization and Settlement in North America

Alexander Starre

Kommentar

“In the beginning, all the world was America,” John Locke proclaimed in his Second Treatise on Government (1689-90). But when and where does “America” begin? This lecture course deals with colonial societies and intercultural contact zones in North America between the 15th and 18th centuries. We will look at competing European settler cultures, practices of intercultural conflict and intermixture, as well as interdependent socio-economic, aesthetic, and ecological transformations in early modern times (shifting perspective from a Europe-centered narrative of “discovery” to a postcolonial account of conflictive hybridity). Topics include: Early European New World writings (Bacon, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Las Casas, De Vaca, etc.), the first British descriptions of Virginia and New England (John Smith, Thomas Harriot, William Bradford, Thomas Morton), Puritan writings both orthodox and heterodox (John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Edward Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and others), Indian captivity narratives and missionary tracts (Mary Rowlandson, John Eliot), ideas and institutions of slavery and freedom (John Woolman, Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano), intellectual shifts in the late 17th century and in the context of the Great Awakening (Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Chauncy, Benjamin Franklin). Due to the Coronavirus situation, lectures will be pre-recorded and made available on the date of each class as indicated in the syllabus. Schließen