Before Americans settler colonists made pictures, writes Neil Harris in his cultural history, The Artist in American Society, “they used words.” In their beginning, in other words, was the word. Visual art lagged behind verbal artifact. Many factors could explain this, ideological (a Puritan aversion to icons), to material (the costliness of tools like paints and brushes), and infrastructural (the belated emergence of institutions for specialized training in the production of images). Yet the consequences of this condition have remained underexplored by students of American literature and the imagination it expresses. How, this panel asks, did colonial writers translate what they saw and perceived into words? What theories of sign and symbol distinguished verbal inscription from visual representation and how did those theories, so often used to shore up racism and dispossession, transform in the colonial setting? What consequences did various genres of writing have on the modes of perception and recognition, the “ways of seeing” that came to shape what a range of Americans held to be self-evident? And, finally, what insights can the colonial period of literary production, in turn, offer us into recent efforts to reclaim the writing of literary criticism as a proper art? Our panel, composed of scholars across rank, and with commitments to a range of complementary modes of critical inquiry (Black Studies, Indigenous Studies), looks forward to engaging with a foundation in specifically literary study, which we anticipate will make expeditious the summary of longer papers into more abbreviated, fifteen minute presentations.

The panel’s papers span the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, with a provocative detour into the first years of the twentieth to open up a fresh look into the past. Antonia Halstead’s paper examines the intersection of painting and transatlantic colonial narratives in the very long eighteenth-century, turning our attention to a pair of representations: Richard Ligon’s 1657 text A True and Exact History of Barbados and Isaac Sailmaker’s 1694 painting The Island of Barbados. Tracing motifs from the written to the visual registers, Halstead considers how Ligon’s manipulation of scale and perspective produces provocative distortions in Sailmaker’s visual representation of Barbados. Through this comparative study, she shows how the imagined reader plays critical role in the colonial creation and representation of the early Americas.

From the seventeenth century, the panel then turns to the profound influence of Washington Irving on the visual imagination of American readers in the early republic. Philip Brown introduces Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819-1820) to trace its varying representations of the human mind across that collection’s several tales: from a blank page ready for printing to a mode of landscape description that mimics the process of etching and coloring an illustration. Brown shows how Irving’s Crayon exemplifies an aesthetic determined predominately by the processes of mass print visual culture, and its effects on perception. Next, Chris Lukasik’s paper contextualizes Irving’s Sketchbook within the discourse of difference in the early republic. He turns to one commonly overlooked story in the Sketchbook, “The Wife” to demonstrate the significance of its gendered politics to racial discourse. Finally, he shows the remediation of the text by the Black engraver Patrick Reason for a Black patron. It now would reflect a position of white male gentility, with privileges and pleasures available to its many readers even if they did not belong to that position in actual life, circulating its mode of visibility widely even without the presence of any visual media.

Finally, Caroline Wigginton approaches the panel’s central question by reading Early American writings through an Indigenous North American theorization of seeing. Her paper turns to a book illustration by Ho-Chunk artist and teacher Angel de Cora (1871-1919) for Mary Catherine Judd’s collection Wigwam Stories (1900). Wigginton demonstrates how the illustration abstracts and combines ways of seeing developed by sketching the Indigenous people she encountered on her journeys through the Upper Plains. Her reading of de Cora’s work opens up broader ways for understanding earlier texts, including 1830s Ho Chunk mixed-race identity affidavits, written in the aftermath of the Black Hawk War, and eighteenth-century settler colonial visual and scriptive descriptions of Ho Chunk, Meskwaki, and other neighbor nations.