The Voyage and The Grammar of Identity: Imagining Collectivity in the Early Colonial Period

Abstract

In this dissertation, I employ digital corpus analysis, close readings, and analyses of the material book to show that readers—from sixteenth-century Portugal to eighteenth-century Britain and the early nineteenth-century United States—used narratives of maritime exploration to articulate collective identity, including themselves in the “we” of those books’ persistent plural narration. They doodled visions of a racial or national collective on the margins of the book; they offered accounts of that collective in their writings, in lyric and narrative form; and their felt affiliations intensified as the travel book evoked collective danger. Yet notions of the “we” also differed greatly from reader to reader. I show how women readers such as Eliza Haywood often used travel books in divergent ways, fashioning imagined counter-collectives of women. When the Black sailor Olaudah Equiano crouches with a candle in a tow locker writing his journal of the Racehorse’s 1773 expedition, he asserts his inclusion in the “we,” refusing to allow readers to imagine the British nation as uniformly English and white. In 1783, the Connecticut sailor John Ledyard describes collective commerce among Pacific Northwest Native peoples, imagining it as a model for an American polity. And, from the poetry of Luís de Camões and Anna Laetitia Barbauld to the novels of Daniel Defoe, literary texts echo travel books’ collective identification as they weave fictions of national identity. In tracing these reading and writing practices, I revise accounts of gender, racial, and national identity that have been too often grounded in received accounts of Western individualism. I also contribute to histories of empire, history of cartography, and history of the book.