Esteban

Esteban, one of the first Africans to explore North America, is deserving of scholarly reexamination, and Dennis Herrick, a journalist and popular historian, has taken up the task. Long a footnote in the history of the early sixteenth-century Narváez expedition and the Spanish exploration of what is today the southwestern United States, Esteban played a more important role in these expeditions than many scholars have understood or acknowledged. Herrick attempts to set that record straight in this new biography. His career could have been situated in an Atlantic world context—Atlantic biography has been a major genre in Atlantic history—but Herrick ignores that scholarship and the broad approach to the Atlantic world that undergirds it. One problem any biographer of Esteban faces is that only scattered references to him exist in many of the sources. The silence of the archives is an issue that historians of slavery in particular are grappling with and devising strategies to overcome, but the author is not attuned to that scholarship either. What we are left with is a pedestrian approach to what could have been a more exciting project of historical revision

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Context (archaeology · Political science · Scholarship · Silence · Situated · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• Identity reclaimed

  Bahare Jalali Farahani•Journal of Postcolonial Writing•2025

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