Hemispheric Studies Tomorrow

Stephen M. Park’s The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) is to be commended for its risk-taking, ambitious agenda: to inspire a new wave of hemispheric studies that is truly multiperspectival and interdisciplinary. Drawing from media as varied as poems, buildings, dance, documentary photography, murals, novels, and conference proceedings, Park develops several axes for his scholarly orientation, such as (in no particular order) black, feminist, archaeological, mythical, eugenic, and economic. Such keywords inform each of the book’s six chapters, distributed into three sections—on indigenous, Cuban, and minority themes—that would merit a monograph each. The first section analyzes appropriations of pre-Columbian motifs in the poetry and prose of William Carlos Williams, as well as in frescoes by José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera; the second contextualizes a novel by Alejo Carpentier and pictures by Carleton Beals and Walker Evans within the racial and regional politics of their day; the third discusses hybrid works by Anna Castillo and Katherine Dunham that drive hemispheric studies to a gray zone shared by dance, ethnography, and fiction. Park’s goal is to historicize and exemplify currents that represent the utopian moment of Pan Americanism against the grain of its primary function as a public relations facade for US imperialism in the continent. The present essay considers this study and its critical agenda, namely, the hemispheric paradigm. I focus on the questions of how and to what extent the book and paradigm can, in fact, be anti-imperialistic.

To be sure, hemispheric studies is susceptible of facile criticism. It is neither US-centric enough for mainstream English departments nor specific enough for Latin Americanist Spanish and Portuguese departments. It is easily dismissed, as Park notes early on, citing work by Anna Brickhouse, Antonio Barrenechea, Sophia McClennen, and others as “intellectual tourism” (5). One may retort that there is nothing wrong with tourism, particularly the intellectual kind, but Park goes meta: “my examination of Pan Americanism is itself a reflection on intellectual tourism” (5). This defensive stance seems to agree with the implicit condemnation of dilettantism, and the book goes to great lengths to credential itself among its various potential readerships. By that metric alone, it fails. Art historians might object to Park’s discussion of Diego Rivera’s murals (chapter 1 and the epilogue); science studies scholars ask for a different take on the transnational eugenicist movement (chapter 3); ethnochoreologists on Katherine Dunham (chapter 6); and so on. For that matter, the undersigned Latin Americanist is content with the author’s analyses of Carpentier, Martí, and Ortiz. They clearly lack what Latin Americanists do, but there is plenty else they bring to the table. There is no reason to fear that the book, and by extension, the hemispheric paradigm, encroaches upon other subdisciplines in the way that historical Pan Americanism did upon individual nations.

The Pan American Imagination calls for a forum of the informed to fully realize the considerable potential of its ideas, which can play out at various levels, as matters of curriculum and otherwise. This forum would show that interdisciplinarity holds no trump card over the disciplines that, in circular fashion, render it meaningful in the first place. Put differently, a study of this nature evinces the need for a robust, multidisciplinary humanities faculty at each college and university across the nation. Administrators, take note: hemispheric studies is similar to, and certainly no less relevant than, mathematics pedagogy, whose practitioners often have joint appointments in Math and Education. They are no less mathematicians or pedagogues than their peers in each unit (departments being reifications of knowledge practices), but they are neither pure mathematicians nor teachers of teaching. If this warrants being called dilettantism or intellectual tourism, then so be it. For its part, The Pan American Imagination is clearly dilettantish, but that should be regarded unapologetically as its strength. Its greatest contribution is creating bridges among specialists, not developing a sustained line of inquiry, as a traditional monograph does, or even providing a scholarly introduction to a subject. Again, its ideal curricular instantiation would be a cross-disciplinary faculty seminar...