Unsettlement of America

The Unsettlement of America explores the career and legacy of Don Luis de Velasco, an early modern indigenous translator of the sixteenth-century Atlantic world who traveled far and wide and experienced nearly a decade of Western civilization before acting decisively against European settlement.

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 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