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  • Australian-Latin American Relations: New Links in a Changing Global Landscape ed. by Elizabeth Kath
  • Sarah Walsh
Australian-Latin American Relations: New Links in a Changing Global Landscape. By Elizabeth Kath (ed). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 239, $100.00.

Australian-Latin American Relations, an edited collection comprised of work by a number of scholars working in Australia, represents one of the first efforts to make Latin American studies relevant for an Australian audience. This is no small task and deserves congratulation. This collection of essays is also especially timely, as many of the authors discuss, because Latin American nations have become increasingly important to Australia as trade partners and as sources of income by way of tourism and education. As such, Australian-Latin American Relations is a useful text for scholars interested in contemporary connections between regions of the world that have not traditionally been considered together. It also demonstrates how Latin American studies facilitates interdisciplinary research that might otherwise go undone.

One of the most useful contributions that this collection makes is demonstrating that Latin American studies is not only interdisciplinary but contextual. All of the contributors currently live and work in Australia, which gives the collection a distinct flavor. The kinds of questions that Latin Americanists working in Australia ask are often quite different from those working in North America or Europe. For example, Barry Carr and John Sinclair's chapter on the appropriation of Mexican and Latin American cuisine in Australia links this development more to the "Latino-ization" of the United States and young Australians' fascination with all things American, rather than any particular interest in Latin America (68).

All of the chapters have to contend with the fact that Latin Americans are not considered to be a particularly significant migrant community within Australia, mitigating the need for studying the region. This type of claim might sound surprising to Latin Americanists working elsewhere, but area and cultural studies in Australia have very much been determined either by efforts to contextualize contemporary multiculturalism since the 1970s or by economic factors pushing Australia toward close relationships with Asian countries, especially China. In either case, Latin America and its peoples do not really figure. As such, each chapter dedicates at least some time to establishing that Latin Americans are a significant and growing migrant community and that Latin American nations share much more than might be expected with Australia. The first three chapters of the book discuss migration from Latin America to Australia specifically to try and move beyond the issue of cultural relevance.

Based on the Australian preoccupation with economic benefit, three of the chapters discuss contemporary trade relationships between Australia and Latin American nations. These chapters argue that Australians would do well to pay more attention to Latin American nations, particularly the more comparable economies of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Suggestively, [End Page 417] China makes an appearance in this section, as Adrian H. Hearn argues that Australia and Brazil have navigated the complex economic territory that dealing with China entails in similar ways.

One of the more intriguing contributions to the collection is a chapter about how big science has linked Latin American nations and Australia. Victor Del Rio uses the Australian synchrotron initiative to discuss alternative forms of engagement between countries that do not share obvious connections otherwise. This chapter's emphasis on science as a pathway for cultural interaction is notable, but it also reinforces older problems in scholarship about Latin America. One of the factors that Del Rio mentions in hindering collaborative research is that most Latin American politicians do not have the interest or finances available to engage in "big science" projects, in contrast to the resources available in Australia (190). While Australia is rarely treated as a hegemonic influence in Latin America, the relative wealth and political stability Australia maintains allow longstanding notions of Latin American backwardness to continue.

This collection is very much oriented toward policy and economics as the main factors informing the connections between Latin America and Australia. As such, all the chapters characterize the relationship between Latin America and Australia as beginning in the...

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