"The modern regulations and pervading attitudes that control native rights in the Americas may appear unrelated to the European colonial rule, but traces of the colonizers' cultural, religious, and economic agendas remain. Patricia Seed likens this situation to a pentimento - a painting in which traces of older compositions become visible over time -and shows how the exploitation begun centuries ago continues today. Seed examines how the goals of European colonialist in the Americas. The English appropriated land, while the Spanish and Portuguese attempted to eliminate "barbarous" religious behavior and used indigenous labor to take mineral resources. Ultimately, each approach denied native people distinct aspects of their heritage. Seed argues that their differing effects persist, with natives in former English colonies fighting for land rights, while those in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies fight for human dignity." -- Book jacket.

"The modern regulations and pervading attitudes that control native rights in the Americas may appear unrelated to the European colonial rule, but traces of the colonizers' cultural, religious, and economic agendas remain. Patricia Seed likens this situation to a pentimento - a painting in which traces of older compositions become visible over time -and shows how the exploitation begun centuries ago continues today. Seed examines how the goals of European colonialist in the Americas. The English appropriated land, while the Spanish and Portuguese attempted to eliminate "barbarous" religious behavior and used indigenous labor to take mineral resources. Ultimately, each approach denied native people distinct aspects of their heritage. Seed argues that their differing effects persist, with natives in former English colonies fighting for land rights, while those in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies fight for human dignity." -- Book jacket.

Manifesting America explores how Native American and Mexican American writers use various kinds of nonfiction to challenge the ideology of manifest destiny.

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: José Martí of Cuba and José Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors. Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson

This collection explores the various forms of narrative, semiotic, and technological mediation that shape the experience of place. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi have assembled a wide array of scholars who give a unique perspective on the phenomenology of place.

When the Europeans first arrived in America, they had a number of preconceptions, prejudices, expectations and hopes about what life in the New World would be like. This book examines the different visions and representations of America conveyed in the writings of Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and the Pilgrim leader William Bradford, taking both writers within their respective literary and historical contexts. Anthologies of American literature have consistently ignored Spanish-language achievements on the grounds of a restrictive interpretation of American literature based on linguistic boundaries. Consequently, Spanish-language texts such as Cabeza de Vaca's or the account by the Hidalgo de Elvas, to name but two examples, have been marginalized in the narrative of American literary history. In seeking to redress this neglect, Galisteo contributes to scholarship which seeks to analyze Early America as a whole, including not only Anglo American perspectives but also the Spanish American aspect of the colonization process.

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.

This provocative analysis of American historiography argues that when scholars use modern racial language to articulate past histories of race and society, they collapse different historical signs of skin color into a transhistorical and essentialist notion of race that implicates their work in the very racial categories they seek to transcend.