Queequeg’s Coffin

[Dave Monroe]

Queequeg’s Coffin: Indigenous Literacies and Early American Literature
Author(s): Birgit Brander Rasmussen
Published: 2012
Pages: 224
Illustrations: 1 map, 10 figures
Paperback: $23.95 - In Stock 978-0-8223-4954-9

The encounter between European and native peoples in the Americas is
often portrayed as a conflict between literate civilization and
illiterate savagery. That perception ignores the many indigenous forms
of writing that were not alphabet-based, such as Mayan pictoglyphs,
Iroquois wampum, Ojibwe birch-bark scrolls, and Incan quipus.
Queequeg's Coffin offers a new definition of writing that comprehends
the dazzling diversity of literature in the Americas before and after
European arrivals. This groundbreaking study recovers previously
overlooked moments of textual reciprocity in the colonial sphere, from
a 1645 French-Haudenosaunee Peace Council to Herman Melville's
youthful encounters with Polynesian hieroglyphics.

By recovering the literatures and textual practices that were
indigenous to the Americas, Birgit Brander Rasmussen reimagines the
colonial conflict as one organized by alternative but equally rich
forms of literacy. From central Mexico to the northeastern shores of
North America, in the Andes and across the American continents,
indigenous peoples and European newcomers engaged each other in
dialogues about ways of writing and recording knowledge. In Queequeg's
Coffin, such exchanges become the foundation for a new kind of early
American literary studies.

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