Dr. Alemán’s Article on the Gothic Conquest of Mexico Republished in The Spectralities Reader

Like the return of the repressed, Dr. Jesse Alemán’s article, “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest,” has been republished in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, a new collection edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. The Spectralities Reader brings together for the first time foundational theoretical works, cultural studies, and literary analyses of ghosts, spirits, specters, and other forms of hauntology that constitute spectral studies. The reader also includes works by Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Giorgio Agamben to name a few.

“The Other Country” first appeared in the pages of American Literary History and was subsequently reprinted in the collection Hemispheric American Studies (co-edited by Caroline Levander and Robert Levine) before reappearing in The Spectralities Reader. The essay argues that the history of the conquest of Mexico serves as an uncanny, gothic figuration in the nineteenth-century Anglo American imaginary.