Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures by Adam Lifshey (review)

In The Eye of the Story (New York: Random House, 1977), Eudora Welty, describing Mississippi’s river country, claims, “I have never seen … anything so mundane as ghosts, but I have felt many times there a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me” (286). Closing with a reiterative list of characters and events that have contributed to this sense of place, Welty declares: “Whatever is significant and whatever is tragic in its story live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things” (Eye of the Story, 299). Unlike Welty, Adam Lifshey’s Specters of Conquest does not link place to a specific locale; to the contrary, it conjures a broadly transatlantic world in which the [End Page e-11] primary significance of boundaries lies “in their trespassing” (14). Still, while suggesting that ghosts, properly understood, are never mundane, Lifshey, like Welty, stresses the significance of the unseen to the lived reality of the present. More specifically, he examines how multivalent indigenous absences, both forced and elected, haunt the New World.

In his first chapter, Lifshey analyzes “the inaugural ghost story of America,” Christopher Columbus’s diary of his 1492–1493 transatlantic voyage (22), which was not published until 1825. The only surviving copy of the diary is a heavily edited edition produced by the well-known Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas at least four decades after Columbus’s expedition. Thus, like several of the texts analyzed in later chapters, this one is highly mediated. This is important, Lifshey argues, because when they “incorporate other scribes,” such texts become “deincorporated.” As such, they become haunted by ghostly absences that must be taken into account, even if their authors “cannot always be identified” (15). Delving into the contents of Columbus’s journal, Lifshey underscores its constant descriptions of native populations disappearing just before the admiral and his men can make their presence felt. “This becoming absent” is “a mark of resistance” that comes to haunt Columbus because it represents the extent to which he cannot control peoples whom he otherwise claims to be weak, cowardly, and easy to conquer (26). Lifshey’s central emphasis, here and in subsequent chapters, on a strategic and resistant form of absenting contrasts strikingly with the archetypal image of Columbus planting the imperial flag into the soil of the New World, surrounded by compliant, all-too-present native bodies.

Chapter 2 focuses on texts produced, at least in part, by indigenous Americans: namely, the Popol Vuh, a sixteenth-century (postconquest) account of Mayan mythology and social practices written in the K’iche’ language, and I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, a 1983 testimony that mixes descriptions of twentieth-century Mayan practices with forceful narrations of the injustices suffered by that population at the hands of the Guatemalan government. Like Columbus’s diary, both of these well-known texts are highly mediated. Modern editions of the former are based on a copy of a copy made at the beginning of the eighteenth century by a Spanish priest, while the latter was shaped from oral testimony given by Menchú to the Venezuelan anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos. Underscoring the interpretative complexities that arise as a result of such furtive origins, Lifshey identifies “a discourse of atextuality” in which indigenous narrators simultaneously assert and withdraw themselves (42). His compelling interpretation of the Popol Vuh, for example, hinges on careful readings of multiple versions and translations (in K’iche’, Spanish, English, and French) of its opening [End Page e-12] and closing passages, whose very discrepancies, he claims, demonstrate the efficacy of the indigenous strategy of absenting, which gives this work a “ghostly” meaning that is at once palpable and illegible.

Chapter 3 interprets Daniel Defoe’s much-imitated Robinson Crusoe as a novel about the conquest of America and the ghostly absences it generates. By drawing attention to aspects...