Specters of conquest [[electronic resource] ] : indigenous absence in transatlantic literatures / / Adam Lifshey

• Autore: Lifshey Adam
• Pubblicazione: New York, : Fordham University Press, 2010
• Edizione: 1st ed.
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (195 p.)
• Disciplina: 809/.933587
• Soggetto topico: Literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc; Comparative literature - Theory, etc
• Soggetto geografico: America In literature; Western Hemisphere In literature; America Civilization
• Soggetto genere / forma: Electronic books.
• Note generali: "American Literatures Initiative."
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: 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
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Specters of conquest
• ISBN: 0-8232-4118-1; 1-283-29716-7; 9786613297167; 0-8232-3827-X; 0-8232-3240-9
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910456772403321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II
• Serie: American literatures initiative.