Specters of Conquest : Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures / Adam Lifshey.
Lifshey, Adam, author.
2010
PN441 .L445 2010eb
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Title Specters of Conquest : Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures / Adam Lifshey.
Author Lifshey, Adam, author.
ISBN 9780823238279
DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823238279
Published New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2010]
Copyright ©2010
Language English
Language Note In English.
Description 1 online resource (192 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1515/9780823238279 doi
Call Number PN441 .L445 2010eb
Dewey Decimal Classification 809/.933587
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.
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System Details Note Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics text file PDF
Source of Description Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
In Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form print 9780823232383
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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

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