The Unsettlement Of America

Download or read book The Unsettlement of America written by Anna Brickhouse and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The book attends specifically to the interpretive and knowledge-producing roles played by Don Luis as a translator acting not only in Native-European contact zones but in a complex arena of inter-indigenous transmission of information about the hemisphere. The book argues for the conceptual and literary significance of unsettlement, a term enlisted here both in its literal sense as the thwarting or destroying of settlement and as a heuristic for understanding a wide range of texts related to settler colonialism, including those that recount the story of Don Luis as it is told and retold in a wide array of diplomatic, religious, historical, epistolary, and literary writings from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Tracing accounts of this elusive and complex unfounding father from the colonial era as they unfolds across the centuries, The Unsettlement of America addresses the problems of translation at the heart of his story and speculates on the implications of the broader, transhistorical afterlife of Don Luis for the present and future of hemispheric American studies.

Download or read book The Unsettling of America written by Wendell Berry and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical inquiry into the ways Americans have exploited and continue to exploit the land that sustains them, tracing attitudes toward and methods of farming from the eighteenth century to the present

Download or read book The Unsettling of America written by Wendell Berry and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it. Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely and enduring of our life on this earth.” Wendell Berry is one of those people, writing and working, as ever, with passion, eloquence, and conviction.

Download or read book Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes written by Jerome McGann and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes unpacks the interpretive problems of colonial treaty-making and uses them to illuminate canonical works from the period. Classic American literature, Jerome McGann argues, is haunted by the betrayal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian treaties—“a stunned memory preserved in the negative spaces of the treaty records.” A noted scholar of the “textual conditions” of literature, McGann investigates canonical works from the colonial period, including the Arbella sermon and key writings of William Bradford, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated treaty folios and Autobiography, and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. These are highly practical, purpose-driven works—the record of Enlightenment dreams put to the severe test of dangerous conditions. McGann suggests that the treaty-makers never doubted the unsettled character of what they were prosecuting, and a similar conflicted ethos pervades these works. Like the treaty records, they deliberately test themselves against stringent measures of truth and accomplishment and show a distinctive consciousness of their limits and failures. McGann’s book is ultimately a reminder of the public importance of truth and memory—the vocational commitments of humanist scholars and educators.

Download or read book Seasons of Misery written by Kathleen Donegan and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stories we tell of American beginnings typically emphasize colonial triumph in the face of adversity. But the early years of English settlement in America were characterized by catastrophe: starvation, disease, extreme violence, ruinous ignorance, and serial abandonment. Seasons of Misery offers a provocative reexamination of the British colonies' chaotic and profoundly unstable beginnings, placing crisis—both experiential and existential—at the center of the story. At the outposts of a fledgling empire and disconnected from the social order of their home society, English settlers were both physically and psychologically estranged from their European identities. They could not control, or often even survive, the world they had intended to possess. According to Kathleen Donegan, it was in this cauldron of uncertainty that colonial identity was formed. Studying the English settlements at Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Barbados, Donegan argues that catastrophe marked the threshold between an old European identity and a new colonial identity, a state of instability in which only fragments of Englishness could survive amid the upheavals of the New World. This constant state of crisis also produced the first distinctively colonial literature as settlers attempted to process events that they could neither fully absorb nor understand. Bringing a critical eye to settlers' first-person accounts, Donegan applies a unique combination of narrative history and literary analysis to trace how settlers used a language of catastrophe to describe unprecedented circumstances, witness unrecognizable selves, and report unaccountable events. Seasons of Misery addresses both the stories that colonists told about themselves and the stories that we have constructed in hindsight about them. In doing so, it offers a new account of the meaning of settlement history and the creation of colonial identity.

Download or read book Land of Hope written by Wilfred M. McClay and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For too long we’ve lacked a compact, inexpensive, authoritative, and compulsively readable book that offers American readers a clear, informative, and inspiring narrative account of their country. Such a fresh retelling of the American story is especially needed today, to shape and deepen young Americans’ sense of the land they inhabit, help them to understand its roots and share in its memories, all the while equipping them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in American society The existing texts simply fail to tell that story with energy and conviction. Too often they reflect a fragmented outlook that fails to convey to American readers the grand trajectory of their own history. This state of affairs cannot continue for long without producing serious consequences. A great nation needs and deserves a great and coherent narrative, as an expression of its own self-understanding and its aspirations; and it needs to be able to convey that narrative to its young effectively. Of course, it goes without saying that such a narrative cannot be a fairy tale of the past. It will not be convincing if it is not truthful. But as Land of Hope brilliantly shows, there is no contradiction between a truthful account of the American past and an inspiring one. Readers of Land of Hope will find both in its pages.

Download or read book Unsettling India written by Purnima Mankekar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-04-25 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Unsettling India, Purnima Mankekar offers a new understanding of the affective and temporal dimensions of how India and “Indianness,” as objects of knowledge production and mediation, circulate through transnational public cultures. Based on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in New Delhi and the San Francisco Bay Area, Mankekar tracks the sense of unsettlement experienced by her informants in both places, disrupting binary conceptions of homeland and diaspora, and the national and transnational. She examines Bollywood films, Hindi TV shows, advertisements, and such commodities as Indian groceries as interconnected nodes in the circulation of transnational public cultures that continually reconfigure affective connections to India and what it means to be Indian, both within the country and outside. Drawing on media and cultural studies, feminist anthropology, and Asian/Asian American studies, this book deploys unsettlement as an analytic to trace modes of belonging and not-belonging.