Hemispheric American Studies (review)

Hemispheric American Studies will appeal to scholars interested in work interrogating the efficacy of conventional models of area and national studies as paradigms for research on literary and cultural production in the Americas. The collection consists of fifteen contributions from established scholars that utilize a variety of interdisciplinary methodologies to discuss comparatively an array of texts and performances produced throughout the western hemisphere from the colonial period to the present. The essays share a suspicion that American Studies, which has traditionally assumed that the temporal and spatial borders of an exceptional United States constitute natural delimitations for scholarly inquiry, closes our eyes to intriguing transnational connections. Editors Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine raise such suspicions in their introduction, asking, “what happens if the ‘fixed’ borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs that can be ignored, imaginatively reconfigured, and variously contested, but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?” (7).

To engage this question, the authors identify points of transnational convergence that might escape the notice of national and area studies paradigms. A case in point is Anna Brickhouse’s discussion of “Hemispheric Jamestown,” in which Brickhouse discusses the Spanish Jesuit presence in the Jamestown area prior to the English settlers’ arrival. Because U.S. nationalists fetishize Jamestown as the first English settlement in the New World, Brickhouse suggests, literary historians working from American Studies perspectives have ignored significant narratives relating Spanish-Native American contact in present-day Virginia. Through readings of these narratives, Brickhouse moves past the aporias produced by such limitations.

Among the most intriguing contributions are those of Timothy Marr and Kandice Chuh, whose essays are respectively entitled “‘Out of This World’: Islamic Irruptions in the Literary Americas” and “Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres: Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World.” These discussions validate the collection’s project of exploding constricting disciplinary borders by demonstrating that Hemispheric Studies can serve as a home for two topics that do not fit neatly into the American Studies paradigms that might seem their proper arena, namely Islamic-American Studies and Asian-American Studies. At the same time, Marr and Chuh point toward new futures for Hemispheric Studies by moving past the field’s tendency to focus on the New World’s European and African genealogies at the expense of those of Asia and the Middle East.

These and other contributions (those I have mentioned here were chosen arbitrarily and illustrate the norm rather than the exception) make this volume indispensible reading for scholars interested in non-traditional comparative approaches to understanding the Americas. As Susan Gilman writes in her afterword to the collection, “‘Hemispheric Studies,’ as it is experimentally deployed, questioned, and, at times, jettisoned in this volume of essays, is poised to make a difference to thinking about comparative U. S. studies” (330). If the essays in this collection serve as any indication, that difference will be one for the better.