@article{1480663,
      recid = {1480663},
      author = {Lifshey, Adam,},
      title = {Specters of Conquest : Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic  Literatures /},
      pages = {1 online resource (192 p.)},
      abstract = {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.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1480663},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823238279},
}