Wort Residency Lecture 1: Song as Contested Worlding in Bougainville’s Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique (1756-58)

What historical struggles come into view when we approach song and its discursive interpretation as acts of contested world-making? In this first lecture, I explore this question through reading a French officer’s account of Anishinaabe recitational song as a site for colonial contestation during the Seven Years’ War in North America. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s 1757 campaign diary, which he kept as General Montcalm’s aide-de-camp, relates an incident in which an unnamed Anishinaabe head warrior recounted in song an auspicious dream given by his manidoo (a powerful “essence” and other-than-human “patron,” according to Ojibwe writer Basil Johnston). An attentive observer, Bougainville quoted an Anishinaabe elder’s approving commentary on the dream recitation before critiquing it himself as a deception driven by political self-interest. Strikingly, Bougainville refers to the warrior’s dream song as “récitatif obligé,” a reference to the recent Querelle des Bouffons (1752-54) that I read as satirical. By recontextualizing the warrior’s singing within a French aesthetic-political debate, I argue, this anecdote enacts colonial world-making, in Gayatri Spivak’s critical sense of “worlding the world of the Native.” However, the Anishinaabe men’s acts of singing and interpretation can also be read, following contemporary Indigenous-centering knowledges, as “worlding their own world” (in Chickasaw theorist Jodi Byrd’s words) by incorporating other peoples into “Indigenous histories that span centuries and remain centered in land and relationships.”