Specters of conquest : Indigenous absence in transatlantic literatures / Adam Lifshey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lifshey, Adam.

Contributor:

American Literatures Initiative.

Series:

American literatures initiative.

American literatures initiative

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature.

Comparative literature--Theory, etc.

Comparative literature.

America--In literature.

America.

Western Hemisphere--In literature.

Western Hemisphere.

America--Civilization.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (195 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2010.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing "America" as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly, still are present. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand - Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest.The book concludes by proposing that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the great American novel.After Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, America will never seem the same.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Columbus the Haunted: The Diary of the First Voyage and William Carlos Williams’s “The Discovery of the Indies”

2. Indigenous Atextualizations: The Popol Vuh and I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala

3. Castaway Colonialism: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Account

4. Apparitions of Africa: Leoncio Evita’s When the Combes Fought and José Martí’s “Our America”

5. Subjunctive America: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera

Epilogue: The Elision Fields: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Postscripts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

"American Literatures Initiative."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9786613297167

9780823241187

0823241181

9781283297165

1283297167

9780823238279

082323827X

9780823232406

0823232409

OCLC:

801363603