Hemispheric Imaginations: North American Fictions of Latin America by Helmbrecht Breining (review)

This book begins with a caveat that pinpoints its own desiderate: In spite of its title, Hemispheric Imaginations does not address mutual imaginaries of North and Latin American cultures about the respective other part of the Western hemisphere. As clarified in its subtitle, North American Fictions of Latin America, the volume undertakes to explore the rich engagement of United States and Canadian literature with Latin America—including Mexico and the Caribbean here—since the independence of the United States. Moreover, although it also draws on other genres and groups of writers, the book primarily analyzes works of narrative fiction penned by white authors during the twentieth century in order to chart key manifestations of what Breinig calls "Latinamericanism" in mainstream North American literature. Following Enrico M. Santí and Alberto Moreiras, and analogous to the concept of Orientalism as laid down by Edward Said and others, the term refers to a complex of hegemonic Anglocentric cultural perceptions and representations of Latin America. The explicit focus on "fictions" in the subtitle of Hemispheric Imaginations further underlines not only the fictional character of even factual literary text production but also the work of cultural construction this body of writing undertakes. This falls in line with the volume's stated objective "to study literary symbolizations of attitudes, discourses, and the cultural imaginary" (xiv) of North American selfhood and Latin American alterity (xii).

Hemispheric Imaginations consciously positions itself in the flourishing bodies of transnational American and Inter-American Studies that have developed in particular since the 1990s. Although it spans a larger time period and geographic area of North American engagement, its stringent structure and focus on prose fiction from the United States and Canada render the book more systematic and coherent than many other volumes in the field. Moreover, especially in view of its examining primarily works of "mainstream" literary production, the volume convincingly dismantles Anglocentric "hegemonic thinking" (xiv). In particular, it consciously draws upon scholarship and paradigms of thought from various parts of the Americas as well as Western Europe to critically engage with its primary sources in a series of nuanced in-depth analyses.

The book's twelve chapters are divided into five sections. The first part, comprises the introduction and a theory chapter, provides crucial definitions of the key terms, methodologies, and theoretical approaches that inform Hemispheric Imaginations. This is followed by a section, whose three chronologically ordered chapters look at how American fiction from the early national period to the 1980s depicted three actors and developments in Latin American history that were of crucial concern for the United States: The person of Christopher Columbus gradually turned from being a figure of Eurocentric identification to one of Spanish denigration in the imagination of the United States (Chapter 3), whereas the "opening" of Latin America to U.S. interventionism in the nineteenth century was informed by and itself inspired projects of imperialist expansion (Chapter 4). As Chapter 5 argues, the Mexican Revolution functioned as a projection plane for a host of concerns, ranging from socialist dreams of sociopolitical change via modernist aesthetic experiments to postmodernist deconstructions of national identities and stereotypes. Part three unravels the uses of two key dichotomies in the discourse of Latinamericanism: the distinction of nature and civilization addressed in Chapter 6, on the one hand, and the symbolic gendering of places, cultures, and people as "masculine" or "feminine" in Chapter 7, on the other. The section convincingly shows how travelogues and fiction employed both lines of reasoning particularly to make sense of geographic, cultural, and ethnic alterity, though often to pursue a discourse of Anglo North American superiority.

The fourth section of Hemispheric Imaginations picks up where part two left off, as it analyzes postmodern American literary engagements with Latin America's past and present in the context of the social and political disruptions that shaped the United States from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Two of the section's three chapters focus on...