This book intervenes in transatlantic and hemispheric studies by positing Americaas 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 & 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 Mench瞿, 繕lvar N瞿瞻ez Cabeza de Vaca, Jos Mart癒,
Mark Knopfler (former lead singer of Dire Straits) and Gabriel Garc癒a M�rquez. 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.
