Hemispheric American Studies (review)

The essays in Hemispheric American Studies explore the literary, cultural, social, political, and economic relationships between the United States and other nations in the Americas. Continuing the self-reflexive work of American Studies that has revised notions of the nation-state—initially focusing on differences within the borders and later turning toward transnational connections—the collection highlights the possibilities and dangers of comparative area studies that challenge the centrality and exclusivity of the United States. The essays reframe American Studies by employing New World, postnational, transnational, trans-American, inter-American, and comparative American studies perspectives, but their attention is to the critical space created in a hemispheric imaginary.

Editors Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine write in their introduction, “Hemispheric American Studies . . . complicates questions of the national, and thus raises rather than resolves interpretive problems. In this sense hemispheric studies can be regarded as a heuristic rather than a content- or theory-driven method; it allows for discovery of new configurations rather than confirmation of what we think we already know.” The book is organized roughly chronologically, moving from work on colonial contact and the early American republic, across the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth century. Rather than suggesting a teleological formation of the contemporary United States, however, the essays trace moments in which America has been constituted out of sedimented and contested histories, acknowledging that the work of “moving beyond the nation does not mean abandoning the idea of nation but rather recognizing its dynamic elements and fluid, ever-changing, essentially contingent nature” (9).

Some authors expand understandings of important sites within the US in light of hemispheric connections. Anna Brickhouse, for example, revisits Jamestown as the “originary moment of European-indigenous encounter” (19) for the English in the Americas. Brickhouse turns to Spanish colonial writings of an earlier Jesuit settlement on the Chesapeake Bay to consider contradictory accounts of the Powhatan boy who lived with the missionaries. Rodrigo Lazo examines early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, not as the birthplace of American ideals, but as a site of Spanish-language print culture that engaged with emergent conceptions of US freedom and democracy in dialogue with Hispanophone countries. Kirsten Silva Gruesz queries the importance of New Orleans and its connections to Honduras through a wide range of cultural artifacts such as inter-American expositions, Spanish-language literary reviews, novels such as O. Henry’s 1904 Cabbages and Kings (noted for its invention of the term “banana republic”), and discussions of Latino populations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Other chapters examine how artistic and racial forms move between hemispheric locations. Ralph Bauer compares creole subjects in British and Spanish America, noting how differing conceptions of race and the native were strongly in contestation throughout the eighteenth century. Jesse Alemán traces a hemispheric unheimlich in nineteenth-century literature that “exhumes the legacy of conquest and racial rebellion that haunts the hemispheric presence of the United States” (79). Matthew Pratt Guterl examines conceptions of southern cosmopolitanism in the “American Mediterranean” that connect the American South with Haiti and Cuba, and Jennifer Rae Greeson “seeks to suggest how it was that the formal methods of definitionally domestic U.S. ‘local color’ writing became so easily exportable by the turn of the century to the imperial and neocolonial adventures of the nation in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific” (117). The complex, controversial figure of comic strip character Memín Pinguín is studied by Robert McKee Irwin, who moves beyond reductive readings of the boy as a racist caricature to connect him to the symbolic presence of Afro-Cubans in Mexican popular culture. Rachel Adams asks how Latino borderlands, often imagined as stretching along the southern edge of the US, function northward in a Latino Canadian diaspora.

Two essays consider the importance of the broader Americas to US African Americans’ conceptions of equality and freedom. Michelle A. Stephens analyzes Paul Robeson’s Americanism and internationalism with particular attention to “hemispheric dimensions...