Taking a fresh look at the first two centuries of French colonialism in the Americas, this book answers the long-standing question of how and how well Indigenous Americans and the Europeans who arrived on their shores communicated with each other. French explorers and colonists in the sixteenth century noticed that Indigenous peoples from Brazil to Canada used signs to communicate. The French, in response, quickly embraced the nonverbal as a means to overcome cultural and language barriers. Celine Carayon's close examination of their accounts enables her to recover these sophisticated Native practices of embodied expressions. In a colonial world where communication and trust were essential but complicated by a multitude of languages, intimate and sensory expressions ensured that French colonists and Indigenous peoples understood each other well. Understanding, in turn, bred both genuine personal bonds and violent antagonisms. As Carayon demonstrates, nonverbal communication shaped Indigenous responses and resistance to colonial pressures across the Americas just as it fueled the imperial French imagination. Challenging the notion of colonial America as a site of misunderstandings and insurmountable cultural clashes, Carayon shows that Natives and newcomers used nonverbal means to build relationships before the rise of linguistic fluency - and, crucially, well afterward.
Celine Carayon is professor of history at Salisbury University.
"A sophisticated study, which is superbly grounded in the secondary literature. . . . [Carayon] extends to the gestural the attention that specialists of colonial and precolonial settings have lavished for some time now on the graphic and the oral. Eloquence Embodied enlarges the realm of the intelligible-for the participants, back then, and now for us."-Early American Literature "Fresh. . . . Eloquence Embodied and its methods for recovering nonverbal gesture and performance will reinvigorate a wider interest in sensory studies of a vast early America."-William & Mary Quarterly "Carayon relays a story of mutual bonding via nonverbal communication among the French settlers in the New World. . . . Historians of First World Peoples in North Carolina would do well to explore the nonverbal interaction between the English and First World Peoples in our state."-North Carolina Libraries "Eloquence Embodied makes significant contributions to our understandings of Indigenous experiences with the colonial encounter, continues the shift in expanding the field of French colonial studies throughout the entire Atlantic, and provides new ways for thinking about long-familiar sources."-H-Early-America "Sheds important new light on the role non-verbal communication played in the French sphere of the New World and to a lesser extent the role non-verbal communication played. . . in communications generally throughout the world."-American Indian Quarterly "Eloquence Embodied is a tour de force of French imperial, linguistic, Indigenous, and diplomatic historical scholarship."-Ethnohistory "Carayon's ambitious book . . . offers both a breathtakingly broad picture of intercultural communication in French colonial America and a simple claim about communication techniques with profound implications for any study of colonization."-Native American and Indigenous Studies "The book unearths a rich kaleidoscope of ways in which colonial peoples read each other's bodies for intent, for deception, for meaning, for sincerity."-American Historical Review "Carayon's writing is precise and engaging. She is an excellent guide, providing a rich sense of time and place surrounding the specific interactions she examines."-Journal of American History "Drawing from an impressive number of primary sources that she has read meticulously, [Carayon] deftly juxtaposes material written at different times and places to tease out patterns of indigenous nonverbal communication."-H-AmIndian
