A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination by John Patrick Leary (review)

Despite what its title promises, Leary's book is not, strictly speaking, a cultural history in the classical and purist sense of a "continuous systematic narrative". Although its architecture is defined by only a rough chronology, the author uses a historicist approach in treating cultural products as a lens through which past events have been viewed. Written in the tradition of Edward Said's seminal work Orientalism, the book uncovers the ideological roots, assumptions and implications of the notion of underdevelopment (implied or explicit) as expressed in a variety of cultural discourses originating in the United States of America and dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing illustrations and evidence from a wide array of primary sources and representational media (newspaper reports, painting, photography, film, travel narratives, poetry, novels), Leary studiously examines the diverse, complementary and often competing ways in which cultural practitioners have portrayed Latin America as an object /subject of comparison with the USA. Cuba and Mexico are the main reference points for this analysis, with examples from other Latin American territories (Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Brazil) invoked at appropriate points where they serve to further strengthen or expand the book's thesis. The areas of Latin American life and experience viewed as being characterized in terms of underdevelopment range from personality to politics, from geography to cultural habits.

The analysis is driven primarily by the author's search for what he refers to as the "moral" content of aesthetic framing, as he shows time and again that far from being transparent, cultural expressions are ideologically charged prisms whose mediating function is often to distort rather than clarify reality. Hence the reader is induced to become aware of the contradictions, ambiguities, false notions of history, and meanings that lie beneath the surface of apparently neutral or transparent renderings of events. What is not said is shown to be as eloquent and instructive as what is said. A historical will is also evident in the author's constant comparison of successive depictions of the same phenomena.

The introduction provides the groundwork of generalities on which the author builds thematic structures in subsequent chapters. It examines the meanings invested in the term underdevelopment from its explicit use in international economics (1942) to its implied or explicit presence in earlier and subsequent fictional and non-fictional discourses such as travel writing, journalism, film and poetry. Though connected by the work's common thesis, that "in looking at Latin America Americans are routinely looking at themselves", (p.18) each of the book's six chapters could be read discretely insofar as it revolves around a different construct from a different time period in the US discourse on Latin American underdevelopment.

Chapter one, "Latin America as Anachronism", focuses on the motif of underdevelopment in the context of the short-lived US fantasy of Cuba's annexation to the USA in the period between 1848 and the beginning of the US Civil War. Through readings of various editorials of La Verdad, a newspaper sponsored by white Cuban exiles in the USA, the author reveals the hidden agenda of annexationist discourse, premised as it was on an unfavourable comparison of the backwardness of Cuba to the USA ("the modern nation of futurity"), as well as the subtext of white racial self-preservation as the underlying motivation of the US-based Cuban advocates of annexation and their US expansionist allies. Additionally, the author balances the picture by referencing anti-annexationist discourses as well as the ways in which the period has been analysed by other scholars.

In the second chapter "Latin America as Nature", Leary turns to one of the most prevalent and potent images of Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the image of a simultaneously wild and wonderful territory as projected through the eyes of US travel writers of the period who linked the Latin American region's natural environment to...