Queequeg's Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature

The encounter between European and native peoples in the Americas is often portrayed as a conflict between literate civilization and illiterate savagery. That perception ignores the many indigenous forms of writing that were not alphabet-based, such as Mayan pictoglyphs, Iroquois wampum, Ojibwe birch-bark scrolls, and Incan quipus. Queequeg's Coffin offers a new definition of writing that comprehends the dazzling diversity of literature in the Americas before and after European arrivals. This groundbreaking study recovers previously overlooked moments of textual reciprocity in the colonial sphere, from a 1645 French-Haudenosaunee Peace Council to Herman Melville's youthful encounters with Polynesian hieroglyphics.By recovering the literatures and textual practices that were indigenous to the Americas, Birgit Brander Rasmussen reimagines the colonial conflict as one organized by alternative but equally rich forms of literacy. From central Mexico to the northeastern shores of North America, in the Andes and across the American continents, indigenous peoples and European newcomers engaged each other in dialogues about ways of writing and recording knowledge. In Queequeg's Coffin, such exchanges become the foundation for a new kind of early American literary studies.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments xi Introduction. " A New World Still in the Making: 1 1. Writing and Colonial Conflict 17 2. Negotiating Peace, Negotiating Literacies: The Undetermined Encounter with Early American Literature 49 3. Writing in the Conflict Zone: Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno 79 4. Indigenous Literacies, Moby-Dick, and the Promise of Queequeg's Coffin 111 Afterword 139 Notes 145 Works Cited 185 Index 201

About the Author :
Birgit Brander Rasmussen is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration at Yale University. She is coeditor of The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, also published by Duke University Press.

Review :
"Quequeeg's Coffin sweeps away the origin stories of American literature by beginning with the encounter between European colonialism and indigenous cultures; it revises prevailing notions of 'literacy' and 'writing' by placing indigenous literary traditions alongside, and in dynamic relation to, the alphabetic systems of the colonizers; and it emphasizes the often volatile interactions between, and continuing sycretism among, vastly different notions of literacy. It is the realization of an exciting, ambitious undertaking." David Kazanjian, author of The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America "Birgit Brander Rasmussen's exploration looks into the formation of the Americas beyond and below imperial/national boundaries. The excavation she proposes invites us to rethink what 'American literature' means. Beyond literature written in alphabetic characters and English language, there are 'American literatures' in other imperial languages as well. But, above all, there are non-alphabetic writings and Native Americans' narratives as well as Afro-American and Arabic literacies among slave narratives. This book announces the end of an era in the national literary imagination and opens up 'America' beyond the United States." Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options