The Unsettlement of America
Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560-1945
Anna Brickhouse
Reviews and Awards
Winner of the 2014 James Russell Lowell Prize
Co-Winner of the Early American Literature Book Prize
"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
