The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945

by Anna Brickhouse

Overview

In The Unsettlement of America, Anna Brickhouse explores the fascinating career and ambivalent narrative legacy of Paquiquineo, a largely forgotten Native translator of the early modern Atlantic world. Encountered by Spanish explorers in 1561 near the future site of the Jamestown settlement, Paquiquineo traveled to Spain and from there to Mexico, where he was christened as Don Luis de Velasco. Regarded as a promising envoy to indigenous populations, Don Luis experienced nearly a decade of European civilization before thwarting the Spanish colonization of Ajacán, his native land on the eastern seaboard, in a dramatic act of unsettlement.

Throughout this sweeping account, Brickhouse argues for the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as well as a range of other translators acting in Native-European contact zones while helping to shape an arena of inter-indigenous transmission in Europe and the Americas, from coastal Virginia and the Floridas to Cuzco, Peru; from colonial Cuba and Mexico to London and the royal court in Cordova, Spain. The book argues for the conceptual significance of unsettlement: the literal thwarting or destruction of settlement as well as a heuristic for understanding a range of texts related to settler colonialism throughout the hemisphere. As Brickhouse demonstrates, the story of Don Luis was told and retold-as well as censored, distorted, and suppressed-in an array of writings from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this "unfounding father" as they unfold across the centuries, The Unsettlement of America addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his compelling story and speculates on the implications of the literary afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199729722
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/03/2014
Series:	Imagining the Americas
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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 Ajacán
Epistolary Theory and the Record of Indigenous Authorship: the Quirós and Segura Letter
The Lost Colony of Ajacán and the Letter of Juan Rogel
Don Luis, estragado: the Relación of Juan Rogel
The Fictive and Visual Don Luis
'En esto me e engañado,' 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 más 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: Andrés 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, Ajacán, 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 Ajacán to Aztlá

Editorial Reviews

"This is a fascinating and important book with an ambitious historical and disciplinary range.... Traitor, manipulator, far-sighted opponent of settlement and conquest-Brickhouse reads the contemporary accounts scrupulously and brilliantly in order to explore Don Luis's complex identity." —Nineteenth-Century Literature

"This is an excellent literary study of a historic figure and the world he witnessed. For historians it is a thought-provoking read that reminds us to question our sources." —Journal of American History

"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." —Amy Kaplan, author of The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U. S. Culture

"Perhaps the most unsettling message of The Unsettlement of America is that a figure so important as the 'unfounding father' Don Luis de Velasco has largely been forgotten. In recovering his enigmatic presences-from his role in both advancing and thwarting the Spanish attempt to colonize the Chesapeake in the 1570s through a host of obscure and not-so-obscure texts down to the twentieth century—Anna Brickhouse reveals much about the agency of indigenous peoples in the continent's history, about the nature of translation and conquest, and about the logics and illogics of settler colonialism." —Daniel K. Richter, author of Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts

"The Unsettlement of America is both a tremendous scholarly feat and a brilliant critical provocation. It traces the literary record of Don Luis de Velasco, a Native American anti-colonialist translator and captive from an area that the Spaniards called Ajacán and the English called Virginia, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Retrieving the history of this fascinating figure against the grain of a largely Euro-American colonialist archive written in Spanish and in English, this book represents a major intervention into colonial Latin American, (early) American, Hemispheric American, and Native American studies scholarship." —Ralph Bauer, author of The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures

"This is a sweeping tour de force that deserves a broad circulation, particularly among those drawn to cutting-edge works of which this is an outstanding exemplar." —Journal of Jesuit Studies

From the Publisher