This panel reflects on dates as placeholders that can generate new tactics for understanding and teaching American literature in this highly charged moment of educational censorship. For an example of the ongoing symbolic power of chronology, one need look no further than the 1619 Project: a special issue of the New York Times Magazine that developed into a book, a film, a website, and an educational foundation. Each incarnation has been met with thunderous controversy. The project’s title signals its intended corrective to the 1620 date of the arrival of the Mayflower, and with it the once-dominant narrative of the Puritan origins of the US national character, now counter-defended by the Federalist Society and other revanchist organizations that target scholarship on race as a threat to national unity. Such a political weaponization of symbolic dates arguably affects the teaching of early American literature more than any other subfield.

Alternative theories of temporality have, of course, been mined by recent scholarship across national literary traditions--from Johannes Fabian’s chronopolitics, through the influential riffs on queer futurity offered by José Esteban Muñoz and others, to the “strategic presentism” proposed by the Victorianists of V21. Indeed, the challenge to Puritan origins among historians is old news within American Literature, where the discourse shifted three decades ago from proto-nationalist constructs toward hemispheric, multilingual, and multi-sited analyses of colonial and racial projects that have generated so many chronological markers that none can dominate the symbolic terrain. This panel proposes more than a critique of traditional periodizations of American Literature (visible in collections such as the 2019 Timelines of American Literature, edited by Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager). Rather, it follows Christopher Castiglia and Susan Gillman, who in their introduction to Neither the Time Nor the Place (2022) argue for analogical rather than chronological ways of understanding relations between present and past, of “converting historical distance into political proximity.” Together, the panelists anchor their interrogation of present-day contexts and classrooms in three texts which would likely be periodized in anthologies as literature of exploration (Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, 1542), of settlement (Cotton Mather’s Triumphs of the Reformed Religion, 1691), and of early independence (John Adams’s 1765 response to the Stamp Act). Each paper explores a different analogical pair of a historical text and a present-day condition.

José F. Aranda, Jr. explores how Critical Latinx Indigeneities scholarship can help navigate the false temporal divides imposed by modernity’s promotion of Eurocentric futures without regard for consequences. Juxtaposing Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of being marooned on or near present-day Galveston Island with Leslie Contreras Schwartz’s poem “Before, During, and After Appendicitis and Harvey, (August-September 2017),” Aranda recalibrates “deep time” from its more typical geological time frame, and resets it to index coloniality in a specific bioregion in order to contemplate better the consequences of modernity, form colonization to climate change.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz questions the way a field-formation with roots in New England may misread regionally specific materials, in a moment when the demographic center of the nation is moving ever further west. Cotton Mather’s biography of John Eliot contains the first Anglo-American reference to “the Spacious Country of California”: a discussion of Eusebio Kino’s failed mission near La Paz, which was met by heavy Indigenous resistance. A counterfactual class assignment (in which Mather visits California) illustrates how the settlement-evangelization project along the western seaboard of North America proceeded along a different temporality than in the east. As Indigenous activists today push back against the outsized place of Franciscan missions in California’s public memory, how can regional and continental frames of space and time be usefully reconciled?

Sam Sommers addresses the pedagogical context of a space once explicitly dedicated to citizen-making: the US survey course. Sommers describes how John Adams’s “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” which argues that we realize our liberty in the pursuit of literary and historical knowledge, began to fail as an origin-point for the survey in light of the post-2016 disdain for expertise and the hyperpolarization of truth claims. Instead, Sommers turned to Barack Obama’s speeches from the memorials for victims of mass shootings, a brutal twenty-first century genre. With this writing of dread and powerlessness, Obama’s voice resembles that of a seventeenth-century New England minister, assuring his audience of divine intervention in the American project. The anachronism of this conviction, and its persisting justification for violence, helps students understand Early America as a field of inquiry coterminous with contemporary life.