Qu’il est question d’une langue sauvage

Phrasebooks for European travellers in eighteenth-century North America and the cultural construction of a global Europeanness.

This article explores the vocabularies of Native American languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders and colonial policymakers in North America over the eighteenth century. Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the analysis takes as its endpoint the journals of the famous expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The aim of this study is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from – and less civilised than – the traveller’s own: an ‘otherness’ sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenged the observer’s ethnocentrism. Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro-American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of ‘savage languages’, in terms of both historical diachronicity and time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience.

This focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre-existing cultural categories and stereotypes. A close reading of these often-neglected primary sources helps us to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of the Amerindian within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness.

Giulia Iannuzzi, “‘Qu’il est question d’une langue sauvage’: Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth-Century North America”, History (2021). https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13138.

Access the full text in open access on the publisher’s website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-229X.13138

Contact me if you wish to receive a pdf.

Lawson, A New Voyage (1709), page 225
John Lawson, A New Voyage North Carolina: Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of that Country (London, 1709), 225. In his Voyage, Lawson inserted a brief vocabulary giving the English translation of words in Tuskeruro (Tuscarora), Pampticough (Pamlico) and Woccon. Copy at John Carter Brown Library.

How Europe Used Time to Rule the World

Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries) – introducing History of Historiography 77 (2020)

Aim of the introduction to the monographic issue Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries) is to throw into relief current debates demonstrating the need for greater academic research into imperial times.

The question that underlies the contributions to the special issue is how to synchronise the study of history in a postcolonial age; how to navigate history while accounting for the traditional uses of concepts like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernity.

This introduction critically distances the logic underpinning periodisations by challenging the uncritical use of a given interval of time as the basis of a neutral partitioning, and takes stock of how postcolonial studies and global historians have drawn attention, in recent years, to the contingent and political origins of these timeframes.

It contends that, for all the talk about a “temporal” and an “imperial turn”, time and empire still appear, at times, to be largely undertheorized in relation to each other. It highlights new conceptualisations brought to the study of temporality in relation to empire by the history of emotions, and of material cultures, put forward by the study of gendered subjectivities, and stimulated by the attention to long-term shifts favoured by novel methodology of environmental history. It takes stock of Reinhart Koselleck’s influence on these historiographical turns, and of recent re-evaluations of his work on time and concepts.

A special emphasis on the eighteenth century seeks to contribute new perspectives on overlooked imperial dynamics that influenced the politics of time during that period.  Industrialisation; modern timekeeping; the growth of the novel; the combination of the antiquarian’s methods and philosophical history, all were once said to have changed the experience of time in eighteenth-century Europe.

Drawing on the hypothesis that conceptions of the future are crucial to our understanding of ideas and practices of time, tradition, history, and change, this introduction also discusses our conception of the history of utopian times, and the specific ties the future has to the history of imperial conceptions and projects.

The concluding section is devoted to present the methodological purpose behind the special issue: to set out four case studies to trace new pathways for the study of the imperial legacies in the making of a global history of time.

I am very grateful to the other contributors of Imperial Times for the productive discussions we had while working together on this project.

Full bibliographical data:

Matilde Cazzola, Edward Jones Corredera, Giulia Iannuzzi, and Guido G. Beduschi, Introduction. Imperial Times. Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time
pp. 11-23, DOI: 10.19272/202011501001

STORIA DELLA STORIOGRAFIA
Histoire de l’Historiographie · History of Historiography · Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung

Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa – Roma
*
77, 2020/1

Full text is available on the publisher’s website and via the Torrossa platform

Contact me at giannuzzi <at> units.it if you wish to receive a pre-print version for research and teaching purposes.

Cite this article as: Giulia Iannuzzi, "How Europe Used Time to Rule the World," in Geographies of Time, 05/05/2021, https://ian.hypotheses.org/1771.

This blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

Imperial Times

How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries)

History of Historiography monographic issue: towards a history of imperial uses of time.

STORIA DELLA STORIOGRAFIA
Histoire de l’Historiographie · History of Historiography · Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung

Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa – Roma
*
77, 2020/1
here on the publisher website

ToC:
Matilde Cazzola, Edward Jones Corredera, Giulia Iannuzzi, and Guido G. Beduschi
Introduction. Imperial Times. Towards a History of Imperial Uses of Time
pp. 11-23, DOI: 10.19272/202011501001
*
Guido G. Beduschi
“To Imitate the Ancients, Having Adopted the Corrections of the Moderns”. Scipione Maffei’s Consiglio politico
pp. 27-52, DOI: 10.19272/202011501002
*
Giulia Iannuzzi
“This New and Unexampled Way of Writing the History of Future Times”. The Rise and Fall of Empires and the Acceleration of History in Samuel Madden’s Eighteenth-Century Memoirs from the Future
pp. 53-88, DOI: 10.19272/202011501003
*
Edward Jones Corredera
Investing in the Enlightenment. The Financial Revolution and the Global Origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire
pp. 89-111, DOI: 10.19272/202011501004
*
Matilde Cazzola
“Sometimes, the Past is the Present”. Electoral Reforms, the Working Classes, and the British Empire
pp. 113-148, DOI: 10.19272/202011501005

I am very grateful to the other contributors of Imperial Times for the productive discussions we had while working together on this project.

Full text is available on the publisher’s website and via the Torrossa platform

Contact me at giannuzzi <at> units.it if you wish to receive a pre-print version for research and teaching purposes.

Cite this article as: Giulia Iannuzzi, "Imperial Times," in Geographies of Time, 24/04/2021, https://ian.hypotheses.org/1756.

This blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth-Century North America

at Eighteenth-Century Research Seminars – 2021 Programme

The interpreters are eloquently placed at the centre of an illustration depicting Fort Frontenac, where the governor of Nouvelle France, La Barre, negotiated a peace with the Iroquois following a military expedition by the French in 1684.
From Lahontan, Nouveaux voyages, I, “Lettre VII” (1703).
Copy at Bibliothèque nationale de France via Gallica. Non known restriction for scholarly use.

This paper explores the vocabularies of Native American languages published as part of the travel accounts written by explorers, traders, and colonial policy-makers in North America, in the course of the eighteenth century.

Starting with the renowned Voyages by the Baron de Lahontan, the aim of this paper is to foreground what these lexicographic compilations reveal about European encounters with societies categorised as radically different from – and less civilised than – the traveller’s own: an ‘otherness’ sometimes exploited as a mirror and term of comparison that challenges the observer’s ethnocentrism.

Drawing on existing scholarship about the cultural history of Euro-American encounters in the modern age, this study puts forward an original analysis of the temporal conceptualisations underpinning vocabularies of ‘savage languages’, both in terms of historical diachronicity and of time as a culturally constructed frame of human experience.

The focus on the lists of words and phrases included in travel accounts, journals and relations makes it possible to question the relationship between the recording of linguistic evidence and travel narratives, and explore the complex negotiations between empirical observation and pre-existing cultural categories and stereotypes.

A close reading of these often understudied primary sources contributes to identify recurrent conceptual tropes and assign a central role to the historicisation of Native Americans within wider processes of cultural construction of a global Europeanness.

This presentation is part of

Eighteenth-Century Research Seminars
2021 Programme

https://edinburgh18thcentury.weebly.com/2021-programme.html

The Eighteenth-Century Research Seminars take place throughout semester 2 and are open to all.

All meetings will be held online, using Collaborate, from 4:30–5:30pm UK time. (Follow the link to the programme above to sign up via Eventbrite)

10 February
Regis Coursin (Montreal) ‘Against Despotism: Approaching the Republican Atlantic, c.1769–1791’

Giulia Iannuzzi (Trieste) ‘Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth-Century North America’

Cite this article as: Giulia Iannuzzi, "Phrasebooks for European Travellers in Eighteenth-Century North America," in Geographies of Time, 27/01/2021, https://ian.hypotheses.org/1659.

This blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

Yellow Perils from a Future Past

The cultural construction of race and the racialization of the enemy in narratives and illustrations between the end of the Nineteenth and the first years of the Twentieth century

A particularly graphic chapter in the history of Western perceptions of the East is represented by the Yellow Peril trope, proliferating in a wave of narratives and illustrations between the end of the Nineteenth and the first years of the Twentieth century.

This trope fascinates me as I find it an apt example of how the cultural construction of race and of a racialized enemy may work in popular-culture products. The yellow peril idea also interacted especially with future scenarios and proto-sciencefictional imagination. Continue reading “Yellow Perils from a Future Past”

“They had published inaccurate maps and false accounts”

“Savages”, Anglo-French competition, and the circulation of knowledge in the eighteenth-century North Atlantic

At the dawn of the Franco-Indian and the Seven-Years Wars – which would place the North Atlantic at the centre of a new, global balance between European powers – the North American space is fought over by means of historical narrations and forms of geographic-historical knowledge.

Continue reading ““They had published inaccurate maps and false accounts””

“Me veux-tu manger? – Dyoutsenten”: “Savage” phrasebooks for European travellers in the early-modern North Atlantic

Lahontan, Petit dictionnaire de la langue des sauvages, in Nouveaux Voyages … (La Haye, 1703), vol. 2, detail. Copy at John Carter Brown Library via Internet Archive. No known restriction for scholarly use.

Lists of words and expressions in translation from European languages to “savage” idioms – and sometimes viceversa – have been been a key feature of travel accounts since the earliest contacts between European travellers and American societies.

These vocabularies today tell us a lot about how European observers saw, represented, and interacted with their Amerindian interlocutors. Under a typographical organisation which usually suggests an objective registration of equivalences between different languages, these lists more often reflect trade jargons and pidgins, and inclusions and absences might reveal prejudices and curiosities that shaped the European explorers’ – and later colonial administrators’s – perspectives on the “New Indies” (as the telling quote in the title, from Jacques Sagard’s Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 1632, suggests).

Preparing this paper for 2020 edition of Translating Cultures gave me the chance to focus on the linguistic issues connected with the conceptualisation of Amerindian societies in eighteenth-century European culture.

About Translating Cultures (from the official website): “Started in 2009 by Rolando Minuti and Antonella Romano as a joint seminar for History PhD students in the Dipartimento di studi storici e geografici (University of Florence) and the Department of History and Civilization (European University Institute), the workshop is now developing into an extended, permanent programme and a network of projects and initiatives that converge on the topic of cultural interaction”.

Cite this article as: Giulia Iannuzzi, "“Me veux-tu manger? – Dyoutsenten”: “Savage” phrasebooks for European travellers in the early-modern North Atlantic," in Geographies of Time, 01/03/2020, https://ian.hypotheses.org/962.

This blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

“The Indians are a People that never value their time”

“We are fond of searching into remote Antiquity, to know the Manners of our earliest Progenitors; and, if I am not mistaken, the Indians are living Images of them.”

Colden 1747

I presented this paper – titled “The Indians are a People that never value their time”: Mappature dei “selvaggi” e concettualizzazioni del tempo storico nello spazio nordatlantico del primo Settecento – at the 2019 conference of the Italian Society for the Study of the XVIII century (L’invenzione del passato nel XVIII secolo, 27-29 May 2019).

Aim of this research is to look at and locate conceptions of time as part of the processes that characterized European
encounters with populations perceived and represented as ‘others’ during the eighteenth century, in order to lay bare the connections between the development of new ideas of time and the geographical expansion of Western colonial powers.

Here’s the conference program

Cite this article as: Giulia Iannuzzi, "“The Indians are a People that never value their time”," in Geographies of Time, 28/05/2019, https://ian.hypotheses.org/225.

This blog is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

“I suspect our Interpreters may not have done Justice to the Indian Eloquence”

At the postgraduate conference “Forme e linguaggi della comunicazione storica, dall’antichità all’epoca contemporanea” in 2019 I delivered a paper drawing on Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1727, 1747) to reflect on textual genealogies and translations in the late-modern Nord Atlantic.

In this research I came across quite a few significant loci in which the history of American “savages” became a competing ground between English and French authors, and the Indian eloquence a fascinating topic for Eighteenth-century travellers and writers to argue the status of American societies as instances of humanity in its infancy.

The conference was organized by some colleagues from the PhD course in Historical Studies at the University of Florence. They did an amazing job putting together a programme across disciplinary boundaries.

Lahontan, New voyages to North-America (tr. Nouveaux
voyages
) (London, 1703) vol. II, title page. Copy at John Carter Brown Library via Internet Archive. No known restriction for scholarly use.

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