The Unsettlement of America

Anna Brickhouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere.

• Prologue and Acknowledgments ; Part I - The Methods and the Story ; Chapter One - Mistranslation and Unsettlement ; Columbus and La Navidad: A Parable of Unsettlement ; Treasonous Translators, Interpretive Infidelity, and the Unsettling Captivity of John Smith ; Autonomous Translation and the Story of Juan Ortiz ; Hispanophone Squanto ; Chapter Two - An Unfounding Father: The Story of Don Luis ; How Paquiquineo Became Don Luis ; Rhetorical Instrumentality and the Failed Expedition of 1566 ; Don Luis's Negocio: Jesuit Spiritual Conquest and the 1570 Settlement of Ajacan ; Epistolary Theory and the Record of Indigenous Authorship: the Quiros and Segura Letter ; The Lost Colony of Ajacan and the Letter of Juan Rogel ; Don Luis, estragado: the Relacion of Juan Rogel ; The Fictive and Visual Don Luis ; 'En esto me e enganado,' or, What Happened to Alonso? ; Part II - The Afterlives of Don Luis ; Chapter Three - El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and the Political Don Luis: ; the Hemispheric Epistemology of La Florida del Inca ; Pedro de Ribadeneyra and the Emergence of Don Luis as a Political Figure ; Garcilaso's Desolate Americas: Don Luis in Cordova, Spain ; "The present high price of negroes in that place": Garcilaso's Las Casas ; Cabeza de Vaca and Captivity (Un)redeemed ; The Failure of Imperial Translation: Garcilaso's Cabeza de Vaca ; Americas Exceptionalism ; Chapter Four - Don Luis in La Florida ; "El mas ladino de todos": the (Anti-)Conquest Memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda ; The Hemispheric Consciousness of the Calusa: the Problem of the Interpreter ; Don Luis Resurrected: Andres de San Miguel and the Ladino Baroque ; Part III - The Translation of Don Luis: From the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the Good Neighbor Policy ; Chapter Five - The Politics of Unsettlement in the Nineteenth Century ; Robert Greenhow and "Oregon Country" ; Edgar Allan Poe and the Unsettling Narrative of Julius Rodman ; Don Luis and the Doctrine of Discovery ; John Gilmary Shea and the "Log Chapel on the Rappahannock" ; William Cullen Bryant and the Popular Don Luis ; Don Luis and the Dawes Act: Alice Fletcher's Indian Education and Civilization ; The Translators of Nineteenth-Century Indian Reform: ; Colonial Settlement and the Native Critique of Anthropology ; Chapter Six - The Good Neighborly Don Luis: Roanoke, Ajacan, and the Hemispheric South ; "The First Colony": Roanoke v. Virginia ; "Africay," Croatans, and the Spanish Fate of Paul Green's The Lost Colony ; "Mr. Cabell Goes South": Don Luis as the "First Gentleman of America" ; From Epic to Ironic National History ; From the Western Hemisphere Idea to Anglo-Atlantis ; The Conquest of Irony ; Epilogue - From Ajacan to Aztla

A marvelous achievement that profoundly unsettles fundamental assumptions about colonial encounters in the European conquest of the Americas. The fascinating story of a Native American translator, Don Luis de Velasco, powerfully challenges the binary between indigeneity and cosmopolitanism that structures past and present historical narratives. Brickhouse's intellectual creativity in reading against the grain, reaching across historical periods, and reflecting on methodology makes this book a model for future scholarship in hemispheric and transnational American studies.