Post 4

As we’ve begun studying life writing in the eighteenth century archive, one aspect of archival study that has interested me is the gaps in archival preservation, and the impacts of those gaps on our understandings of American history. As a class, we’ve discussed how eighteenth-century depictions of indigenous people and enslaved people are most often filtered through the voice of the white colonizer, and the voices of these people themselves are largely silenced. One key example of this filtering and silencing lies in Knight’s writings of her travel from Boston to New York, a journey which was “practically unheard of for a woman at this period” (Rogers, 100), making it a remarkable piece of writing in the archive. However, she writes of the native people she encounters in a quite dehumanizing way, a dehumanization which is exacerbated by the fact that the indigenous people of whom she speaks do not have the literate or social power to respond with their own voices. Her initial description of the natives she encounters is that they “are the most savage of all the savages of that kind that I had ever seen: little or no care taken (as I heard upon enquiry) to make them otherwise” (Knight). By referring to them as “savages” inherently in need of reform by white society, she immediately reveals herself to be deeply unreliable and biased in her depictions of the indigenous people she comes across.

As Bravo discusses in his chapter “Indigenous Voyaging, Authorship, and Discovery,” it matters whose stories are told, and how they are framed through perspective. He writes, “Genres of travel writing in the long eighteenth century...tend to align the reader’s understanding with the perspective and understanding of the author, and thus the recognition of authorship matters a great deal” (Bravo, 73). Bravo’s writing focuses on a specific voyage taken by an Inuit tribe in 1810, but there could have been a far greater number of such journeys that we simply don’t know about because their narratives are not a part of our archive. Were such narratives better preserved, our modern framings of eighteenth century travel and voyages may not be so intensely coded as white and European, partially due to the social changes that would have been required to incite such preservation.

Works Cited

Craciun, Adriana, and Mary Terrall, editors. Curious Encounters : Voyaging, Collecting, and Making Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century. Published by the University of Toronto Press in Association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2019.

Knight, Sarah Kemble. The Journal of Madam Knight. Edited by George P. Winship, New York, P. Smith, 1935.

The Meridian Anthology of Early American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Louisa May Alcott, 1650-1865. Edited by Katharine M. Rogers, New York, Meridian, 1991, pp. 100-111.