Firsting in the Early-Modern Atlantic World

For centuries, historians have narrated the arrival of Europeans using terminology (discovery, invasion, conquest, and colonization) that emphasizes their agency and disempowers that of Native Americans. This book explores firsting, a discourse that privileges European and settler-colonial presence, movements, knowledges, and experiences as a technology of colonization in the early modern Atlantic world, 1492-1900. It exposes how textual culture has ensured that Euro-settlers dominate Native Americans, while detailing misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples as unmodern and proposing how the western world can be un-firsted in scholarship on this time and place.

Introduction: Firsting and the Architecture of Decolonizing Scholarship on the Early-Modern Atlantic World Lauren BeckPart I: The Foundations for Firsting in Historiography and Literature1. John Dee, Humphrey Gilbert, and Richard Hakluyt’s Erasure of Native AmericansNate Probasco2. The Last of the First? Madness and the Jungle in the Chronicles of the Indies: Lope de Aguirre and His WritingManuel Lucena Giraldo3. Dying in their Own Minds: Firsting and Lasting in the Early Jesuit Work with the Tupi Language in BrazilVivien Kogut Lessa de Sá4. Literacy and Colonial Beginnings: Inca Garcilaso’s Story of the Letter in Context Julián Díez TorresPart II: Modernity and Unfamiliarity as Firsting Principles5. The Grammar of Inanimacy: Frances Brooke and the Production of North American Settler StatesRachel Bryant6. Firsting and Lasting in the History of Science: Francisco José de Caldas and the Priority Dispute over HypsometryJorge M. Escobar7. History and Progress: Regional Identity and the Useable Past in Nova Scotia, 1857-1877 Nicolas Haisell8. The Afterlife of Settler-Colonial Occupation: Archaeological Excavation as Militarization in the United States-Mexico BorderlandsClaire UrbanskiPart III: Un-Firsting the West9. American Indian DiscoveryJonathan DeCoster10. Unsettling Spanish Atlantic History: Experiences of the Colonized Through Visual and Material CultureLauren Beck11. "This Is an Indigenous City": Un-Firsting Early Representations of VancouverAshley Caranto Morford12. Native American Contributions to Democracy, Marxism, Feminism, Gender Fluidity, and EnvironmentalismBruce E. Johansen

Lauren Beck holds the Canada Research Chair in Intercultural Encounter and is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Mount Allison University.