Seductive imperial narratives and conquest subjectivities: An alternative paradigm for reading contemporary empire

Beginning with the sixteenth-century narratives, The Account: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and The Journey of Fray Marcos de Niza, this work traces the presence of what the author terms "American conquest subjectivities," which are a "vocabulary" designed to maintain a sense of "nationhood" that originated in early Spanish American texts and continues in contemporary iterations in American fiction and popular culture. In my analysis of American conquest subjectivities, I establish a pattern of seductive, narrative technologies that influence the way we read, write, and interpret narratives of American conquest which I treat as indicative of an imperial, American archive.; In exploration of these early-Spanish American texts, the author pays particular interest to representations of liberation and enslavement in early-American, historic texts as a way to expose the relationship between historic depictions and literary representations of the diasporic African Other. The most prevalent example of trans-Atlantic and other slaving systems at-work in these texts is found in the persistent presence of the Moorish, slave Esteban.; Likewise, this work explores the historic and legal commonalities between literary representations of Latin, British and native slaving systems. By using the historic works surrounding The Account and The Journey this work explores the ways in which imperial diasporic subjects are racialized and the role historic gender constructions play in representations of "subject peoples."; Ultimately, this work seeks to assert Esteban's trans-Atlantic experience and the colonial experience of other early explorers as a template for re-reading representations of enslaved and subject peoples found in American fiction.