Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U. S.-Latin American Relations (review)

286 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies tious in criticizing Cuban cultural production , not out of any lingering reverence for socialist/revolutionary culture (which one still ought to preserve in one degree or another ), but because the whole idea of Cuban culture since the Revolution has been to resist being interpreted in terms of concepts such as Euro-American feminism. Therefore, while it has been obvious that a feminist component of whatever configuration has not generally emerged in Cuba, it is not adequate simply to inquire whether feminism or a women's movement exists in Cuba. Concomitantly, the features that Benamou charts certainly do point to a shift in Cuban filmmaking that can surely be related to an emerging project of cultural production that will allow for feminism to be more justifiably used in this context. Elena Feder's essay has two notable features about it: the attention given to gender in Bolivian filmic production, a national tradition that, with the exception of Jorge Sanjinés, has not been in the forefront of production because of the clear economic limitations encountered in that country, and the attention given to video, which is a viable alternative to the enormous cost of conventional film stock and its processing. Video, and its forerunner, super-8, constitute mediums for visual narratives that are easily accessible to subaltern producers. Karen Schwartzman's "The Seen of the Crime" is a detailed analysis ofthe Venezuelan Solveig Hoogesteijn's Macu, the Policeman's, a complex analysis ofthe social positionings of women and a deconstruction of the masculinist Law that defines them, all within the context of the police or detective genre, apparendy à la film noir. Hoogesteijn, who has to receive the same sort of international attention accorded to Bemberg or to Novaro, is, nevertheless , very much in their class (as is also the delightful work of Fina Torres, another Venezuelan feminist filmmaker who, unfortunately, does not get mentioned here). Finally, Rosa Linda Fregoso's essay on the Chicana Lourdes PortUlo's The Devil Never SUeps centers on a film that is rather a standard-issue treatment of family and identity, of loss and memory, and it is more of a description of the film followed by an interview with Portillo, along the same lines as Burton-Carvajal's essay on Bemberg, than it is the more detailed interpretive analysis that makes the other essays particularly compelling . I don't mean to dismiss the value of criticism by interview, but only to underscore how this volume is particularly significant in providing, in the majority ofthe essays on Latin American filmmaking, the sort of in-depth examination of the filmic text that is, in my view, what is needed now, in order to begin to continue to provide the coverage ofthe exceptional richness of Latin American production. David William Foster Arizona State University Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Regions Duke University Press, 1998 Edited by Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand and Ricardo D. Salvatore The product of a 1995 Yale University Conference, this mammoth collection is an ambitious and creative effort to rethink U.S.-Latin American relations. Inspired by the proliferation of work following the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 287 quincentenary ofthe "Columbian Encounter ," the editors propose to examine Latin America's more enduring encounter with the United States. The essays apply some ofthe insights from post-colonial studies on Asia and Africa to Latin America, a region that has inspired little work in this vein. The essays are divided into three sections , an initial trio of theoretical essays, ten empirical studies, and three concluding essays , the last of which combines visual images with a textual analysis. Fernando Coronil offers a foreword highlighting the collection's theoretical conttibutions. In the first essay, Gilbert Joseph outlines the volume's theoretical ambition: to apply cultural analysis to Inter-American relations. He persuasively argues that the development, diplomatic history, and Inter -American relations literatures (whether liberal or Marxist) largely ignored cultural issues. By marrying cultural approaches with political economy, he argues, we can get at the complexity of these relationships, highlighting both their ambiguity and the difficulty of identifying clear boundaries...