ABSTRACT
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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |22 pages
Introduction
part I|74 pages
The Foundations for Firsting in Historiography and Literature
chapter 2|14 pages
The Last of the First? Madness and the Jungle in the Chronicles of the Indies
chapter 3|15 pages
Dying in Their Own Minds
part II|74 pages
Modernity and Unfamiliarity as Firsting Principles
chapter 5|16 pages
The Grammar of Inanimacy
chapter 6|16 pages
Firsting and Lasting in the History of Science
chapter 7|17 pages
History and Progress
chapter 8|23 pages
The Afterlife of Settler-Colonial Occupation
part III|86 pages
Un-Firsting the West