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For several years now, literary scholars, especially those who work in early literary periods, have been asking questions about the authority of the documents on which their work is based and the relationship between old texts and contemporary theories: How are we to read evidence in the archive outside our own (presentist) set of interests and desires? On what authority are we to recover the voices of those who inhabit these archives especially when they were enslaved and hence silenced? Can we isolate literary beginnings that are not mere projections of our own desire for a singular archive and a seamless canon of letters? These questions are particularly pertinent to fields that are defined as early where questions of beginnings and genealogy inform and haunt literary history. The project of Early American Literature has a long experience dealing with such matters.
Consider, for example, the roundtable "Historizing Race in Early American Studies," published in volume 41, number 2 (2006), of Early American Literature. For this roundtable, Sandra Gustafson asked three major scholars in the field-Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian - to discuss the question of race in early American literature. The issues at hand, here, were essentially three: the imagination and constitution of race in the inaugural moment of American culture; the genealogy of racial categories in the national consciousness (and unconscious); and the expanding geography of race as it made its way from the murky beginnings of early settlement to the consolidation of the Republic. In her introduction to the roundtable, Gustafson isolated one issue directly related to the problem of beginnings, namely
the uneasy fit between the texts that we study and current definitions of "the literary." . .. The project of unearthing "lost" texts has of necessity gone hand in hand with the creation of interpretive methodologies for reading works that do not match current critical conceptions of the literary or fit into critical narratives that have been laboriously pieced together over the last few decades. (309)
Could the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, for example, be read outside the framework of her discovery and establishment as a founding figure in a reconstructed literary tradition? Was there a reading of Wheatley that was not a projection of our own desire for...