Winner of the 2015 A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia Book Prize, a global competition, for the best book in English, French, or Portuguese on any topic linking Asia and Africa.The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.

The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

Literature & Fiction

Lifshey, Adam

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States argues that the moment the United States became an overseas colonial power in 1898, American national identity was redefined across a global matrix. The Philippines, which the United States seized at that point from Spain and local revolutionaries, is therefore the birthplace of a new kind of America, one with a planetary reach that was, most profoundly, accompanied by resistance to that reach by local peoples.  Post-1898 Filipino literature in Spanish testifies crucially to this foregrounding fact of American global power, for it is the language of that tradition that speaks directly to the reality of one empire having wrested land from another. Yet this literature is invisible in American Studies programs, Asian Studies programs, Spanish and English departments, and everywhere else. Subversions of the American Century will change that. After Subversions, students and scholars in various American Studies disciplines as well as Asian, Spanish, and Comparative Literature fields will find it necessary to revisit and revamp the basic parameters by which they approach their subjects.

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States argues that the moment the United States became an overseas colonial power in 1898, American national identity was redefined across a global matrix. The Philippines, which the United States seized at that point from Spain and local revolutionaries, is therefore the birthplace of a new kind of America, one with a planetary reach that was, most profoundly, accompanied by resistance to that reach by local peoples.Post-1898 Filipino literature in Spanish testifies crucially to this foregrounding fact of American global power, for it is the language of that tradition that speaks directly to the reality of one empire having wrested land from another. Yet this literature is invisible in American Studies programs, Asian Studies programs, Spanish and English departments, and everywhere else. Subversions of the American Century will change that. After Subversions, students and scholars in various American Studies disciplines as well as Asian, Spanish, and Comparative Literature fields will find it necessary to revisit and revamp the basic parameters by which they approach their subjects.

Winner of the 2015 A-Asia/ICAS Africa-Asia Book Prize, a global competition, for the best book in English, French, or Portuguese on any topic linking Asia and Africa. The Magellan Fallacy argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa, though virtually unknown, reimagines the supposed centers and peripheries of the modern world in fundamental ways. Through archival research and comparative readings, The Magellan Fallacy rethinks mainstream mappings of diverse cultures while advocating the creation of a new field of scholarship: global literature in Spanish. As the first attempt to analyze Asian and African literature in Spanish together, and doing so while ranging over all continents, The Magellan Fallacy crosses geopolitical and cultural borders without end. The implications of the book, therefore, extend far beyond the lands formerly ruled by the Spanish empire. The Magellan Fallacy shows that all theories of globalization, including those focused on the Americas and Europe, must be able to account for the varied significances of hispanophone Asia and Africa as well.

This book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing "America" as not a particular country or continent but a foundational narrative, in which conquerors arrive at a shore intent on overwriting local versions of humanity, culture, and landscape with inscriptions of their own design. This imposition of foreign textualities, however dominant, is never complete because the absences of the disappeared still linger manifestly, still are present. That apparent paradox results in a haunted America, whose conquest is always partial and whose conquered are always contestatory. 
Readers of scholarship by transatlanticists such as Paul Gilroy and hemispherists such as Diana Taylor will find new conceptualizations here of an America that knows no geographic boundaries, whose absences are collective but not necessarily interrelated by genealogy. The five principal texts at hand - Columbus's diary of his first voyage, the Popol Vuh of the Maya-K'iche', Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Evita's Cuando los Combes luchaban (the first African novel in Spanish), and Pynchon's Mason &amp; Dixon - are examined as foundational stories of America in their imaginings of its transatlantic commencement. Interspersed too are shorter studies of narratives by William Carlos Williams, Rigoberta Menchú, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Martí, Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel García Márquez. These texts are rarely if ever read together because of their discrete provenances in time and place, yet their juxtaposition reveals how the disjunctions and ruptures that took place on the eastern and western shores of the Atlantic upon the arrival of Europeans became insinuated as recurring and resistant absences in narratives ostensibly contextualized by the Conquest.
The book concludes by proposing that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the great American novel.
After Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures, America will never seem the same.

Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures (American Literatures Initiative)

American Literatures Initiative

The avocado carver was once a conquistador.  This time, though, he aims to arrive in peace, as a governor, leading his relatives across the sea to a new world where they will found a settlement in a green valley.  Yet his hopes for harmony with the indigenous people do not develop as planned.  And distant dark forces conspire against him, certain that his relatives share a secret and forbidden heritage.  His memories pursue him too, images of a childhood upon a faraway island, and of a dusty peninsula that he will never see again.As Green as Paradise is a lyrical weave of the governor's story, flowing with fables of beauty and solitude. It is a tale of loves lost and dreams unfulfilled, of characters condemned to forge ahead in a world at once old and new: scribes and inquisitioners, soldiers and scholars, storytellers and warriors, a unicorn hunter and a pirate and a wanderer, a poet and a musician too. And amid story upon story, the governor carves dim codes into the pits of discarded avocados and remembers it all.

As Green as Paradise

Genre Fiction

NAP/SCARITH

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lifshey, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lifshey, Adam

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lifshey, Adam. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States

Subversions of the American Century: Filipino Literature in Spanish and the Transpacific Transformation of the United States

The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish

Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures (American Literatures Initiative)

As Green as Paradise