The Unsettlement of America

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.

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.

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