"Por Andarmos Todos Casy Mesturados": The Politics of Intermingling in Caminha's Carta and Colonial American Anthologies
According to the chronicler of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s arrival on the coast of what is now Brazil in April of 1500, less than a week after their first contact with the Portuguese crew, the natives ‘‘poucos a poucos mesturaranse cõ nosco, e abracauãnos e folgauam’’ (96) [‘‘little by little mingled with us. And they embraced us and had a good time’’] (24). The scribe later portrays the Portuguese as equally engaged in the ‘‘mingling,’’ while also suggesting that their motivation extends beyond ‘‘having a good time’’: ‘‘este dia os uimos de mais perto e mais aanosa vontade por andarmos todos casy mesturados’’ (96, my emphasis) [‘‘On that day we saw them closer and more as we wished, for all of us were almost intermingled’’] (24).1 Such scenes of peaceful intermingling and ‘‘merrymaking’’ (96; 24) between Europeans and Amerindians have earned Pero Vaz deCaminha’s letter toKingManuel a foundational position in the Brazilian literary canon and contributed to notions of the distinctive benevolence of Portuguese colonization. Historians and literary critics alike have interpreted the letter as not only the nation’s ‘‘birth certificate’’ but one that attests to a painless delivery.2 The Carta [Letter] may also earn a place in the early ‘‘American’’ canon, if the trend toward more expansive and inclusive anthologies of colonial American literatures prevails. Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer’s The Literatures of Colonial America (2001) includes an extract of Caminha’s letter, along with selections from both North and South America that are translated from Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, and various Native American languages. The preface to Carla Mulford’s Early AmericanWritings (2002) claims a similar comprehensiveness, stating that ‘‘texts included represent the cultures of Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish, German, and English speakers’’ (xviii), although no Portuguese-language texts are in
Insurgent Remains: Afterlives of the American Revolution, 1770-1820
Insurgent Remains disturbs the identification of the American Revolution with U.S. national beginnings by tracing it through its literary aftereffects in the period with which it is identified, 1770-1820. While the American Revolution is thought to have concluded with the Treaty of Paris (1783) and the “birth of the United States, Insurgent Remains reads texts produced in the decades following the peace for delineations of ongoing Revolutionary experiences characterized by loss and constraint that demand creative, collective responses without guarantee. In chapters organized around the re-use and re-circulation of “old” forms and formats—allegory, anthology, tragedy, and petition—I propose that the liminal affective states in the texts I examine are sites of insurgent potential in their own right whose politics are inscrutable when the Revolution is conceived as an oppositional conflict of sides whose descriptive vocabulary reduces to a binary formula (American/British, Loyalist/Patriot). Instead, they become legible as “remains”: pending works of grief, yearning, need, and love that offer vibrant possibilities for collective action and ethical commitment obscured by teleologies of national consolidation. Eschewing preconceived identitarian and partisan markers through which Revolutionary history has conventionally been organized, my approach stresses the roles of literary forms in mediating traumatic experiences of Revolutionary history that may otherwise elude representation. I argue that the itineraries along which these forms travel open up new ways of thinking about the cultural politics of the period and the politics of revolution itself. This project thus seeks to enrich our understanding of the Revolutionary period by expanding the narrow field in which politics seem to operate, attending to modes of historical experience debarred from political consideration by traditional Revolutionary histories bound to binary narratives of conflict and progress. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Amy B. Kaplan
Hill country sheep production. I. The influence of age, flock, and year on some components of reproduction rate in Romney and Border Leicester × Romney ewes.
Data from 7,091 straightbred Romney and Border Leicester × Romney ewes grazed at the Whatawhata Hill Country Research Station over the period 1959 to 1967 have been used to obtain estimates of flock and age-of-ewe effects on reproduction rate and its components and of year-to-year variation. The ewes were from six groups: a Romney control (RCR) flock, a Romney flock in which ewes were mated either to Romney (RER) or to Border Leicester rams (REB), and flocks of first-cross (F1), second-cross (F2), and third-cross (F3) Border Leicester × Romney ewes mated to first-cross Border Leicester × Romney rams. The ewes' ages at lambing varied from 2 to 5 years and no selection was practised. The ratio of number of lambs weaned per ewe present at lambing increased from the RCR (0.84) to the F1 (1.07), then declined with interbreeding to the F2 (0.92) and further to the F3 (0.87) ewes. Similar changes were evident for the percentage of ewes lambing, of multiple births, and of lambs surviving to weaning. Over...