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....

As Green as Paradise is a lyrical weave of a governor's story, once a conquistador. It is a tale of loves lost and dreams unfulfilled, of characters condemned to forge ahead in a world at once old and new. 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...

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...