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  • On the Limits of History and Hemispheric Literary Studies
  • Kimberly O’Neill (bio)
Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture. Shelley Streeby. Duke University Press, 2013.
The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico. James H. Cox. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

The burgeoning field of hemispheric literary and cultural studies tends to generate two distinct, but connected scholarly modes: rigorous historicist analyses of recovered or understudied texts, situated in their print and material cultural contexts; and trenchant historiographies and metacommentaries, appearing most often in the introductions to critical essay collections and the special issues of journals.1 The latter have offered many significant admonitions to the former, but the reflexivity of hemispheric studies has contributed both to its rigor and to the stultifying expansiveness of its project: the call to span the many languages and cultures, national and regional histories, theoretical paradigms, and disciplines of the Americas.

In light of this ongoing conundrum, two significant new monographs provide an occasion to consider the praxis of hemispheric studies. James Cox’s The Red Land to the South (2012) and Shelley Streeby’s Radical Sensations (2013) exemplify and advance the keen, inventive historicist inquiry that has become the trademark of hemispheric studies. Cox and Streeby share investments in subjects who write against state violence and imperialism in the early twentieth century. These scholars both use extensive print culture research to recover and elucidate underexamined figures and texts, emphasizing as they do the importance of form (the trope of Mexico in Cox’s case; tropes of affect and ocularity in Streeby’s). Their work invites us to reflect on the utility of historicist methods for navigating the pitfalls of transnational fields. Ultimately, these cases suggest that we might develop more opportunities to put such projects in conversation, to articulate their stakes, and to build on the foundation they lay. [End Page 172]

1. The New Historicism and Hemispheric Studies

The version of hemispheric studies that I discuss here is proffered largely by scholars of literature and culture, especially from programs in English, American studies, and Latina/o studies. The historicist bent of this scholarship arises from its methodological climate: the New Historicism’s mandates to question reified narratives of the past—discourses of nationalism in particular—and to engage work in History, Latin American and Area studies, Ethnic studies, Political Science, and Psychology. Susan Gillman recalls that among literary scholars, New Historicism brought new scrutiny of “our contexts; then, with the concept of imagined communities and increasing attention to the phenomenon of nationalism, the category of nation came under fire, and a search ensued for alternative units of study, including . . . borders, diasporas, hemispheres, and oceans” (328). Recent historiographies by Ralph Bauer and Rodrigo Lazo remind us of the long tradition of hemispheric thinking among US Americans, but they have also identified the 1990s as the decade in which comparative and transnational approaches to American studies began to proliferate. The 1990s saw a boom in inter-American criticism by key figures in Latin American and Latina/o studies, English, and History such as Vera Kutzinski, Lester Langley, Lois Parkinson Zamora, José David Saldívar, Doris Sommer, and Deborah Cohn.2 Lazo, whose essay is of particular importance for my meditations here, explains that the key studies of the 1990s concentrated first on the nexus of literature and history, then on print and material cultural archives.

Just as New Historicism provided the rationale for hemispheric studies, its modus operandi has served hemispheric literary and cultural critics as they have confronted the hazards endemic to transnational scholarship. The most worrisome of these has been that mostly Anglophone scholars (particularly those trained in English and American studies) risk perpetuating the very imperial disciplinarity they may seek to undo.3 Enlightened by this caution, many of the best hemispheric approaches have turned to historicist analysis and archival research to attend to the interaction between texts in multiple languages and to probe the imperialism that has come to define US engagement with “Nuestra América” (as José Martí famously hails the American nations he challenges to band together against the US monolith). The landmark 1993 collection, Cultures of United States Imperialism, is markedly...

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