The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century Literature by Stephen M. Park (review)

This work of literary and cultural criticism is labeled as "Caribbean Studies" on the cover, but its broad, bilingual scope is, as the title suggests, an example of the "Hemispheric turn" in American Studies (5). Mexico is as important to the study as the Caribbean, and not only European but also indigenous and African influences are discussed. For Park, "including a multiplicity of voices and scholars is a fundamental step toward thinking outside the logic of US-centered modernity at work during the Pan American era" (232). The latter epoch (1910–41 [3]) is given heuristic cohesion through two opposing images: the House of the Americas in Washington, D.C., the home of the US-led Pan American Union (PAU) (1), and Diego Rivera's mural Pan American Unity in San Francisco, California (227). The first structure embodies the creation of an imagined union between the "Americans" (United States) and the "Pan" (Latin America). This bond was based on commerce, socio-economic modernity that followed a US model, and the belief that the United States was the center of knowledge-production in opposition to Latin America, which was to be studied, understood, and consumed. As his depiction of the PAU implies, Park's study does not romanticize its implicit imperialism, but neither is it a simplistic diatribe against Yankee oppressors. It does not even "arrive at a final ruling to condemn or redeem the hemispheric turn" in American Studies that can be traced to the PAU (5). His ekphrasis of Rivera's painting is an "alternative to mainstream Pan Americanism" (230); he does not "attempt to map an entire Pan America but instead depicts specific loci of collaboration" among "workers, artists, and intellectuals of the Americas" (231). These loci, while bound by his critique of the PAU, give unity to the disparate topics of Mesoamerican images in William Carlos Williams and Simón Bolívar, racism in Cuba and the Depression-era US South, US feminisma xicana and Third-World Feminism, and dance-anthropology in Haiti.

In each chapter, he returns to a PAU text or event and shows how the authors, artists, and intellectuals affirm and trouble the harmonious, one-sided cultural and political unity proposed by the organization. The chapters are well organized and grab the reader's interest by clearly showing the information's innovation and usefulness. Themes are explored in a variety of texts, literary, artistic, and cultural, and they carry over from one chapter to the next smoothly. He always makes the connections clear between the works compared. His prose is limpid and engaging, and the reader will not get lost in unnecessary jargon, convoluted syntax, or unexplained allusions, especially since photographs of visual art and architecture are interspersed.

The chapter on Williams contextualizes him as part of the Mayan Revival, including discussions of architecture and popular representations of archaeology. Mesoamerican cultures served as the vital empires on which the United States could base its greatness in the 1920s, breaking with the imagination of the indigenous as "always already dead" (21). The latter could be said of his interpretation of contemporary Latin America, including his mother's homeland of Puerto Rico (52). The chapter on Latin American myths traces the figures of Simón Bolívar and Quetzalcóatl. The snake-serpent represented rupture with the past and a culturally hybrid future for the Americas (57–58). He was appropriated by Bernardino de Sahagún, Bolívar, Manuel Gamio, José Clemente Orozco, Rivera, and D.H. Lawrence to different ends. The modern myths of Bolívar, Vasconcelos, and Martí were part of or alternatives to the PAU (65 and 73). In the chapter on Alejo Carpentier, Park looks beyond a surrealist reading of ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! to present it as a counter-narrative to PAU-endorsed eugenics written by a revolutionary who shared a jail cell with Afro-Cubans, not merely [End Page...