Genealogies of Latin Americanism

“You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Bob Dylan’s 1979 lyric makes for a fitting maxim to describe the institutional development of Latin American literary studies as it emerges from Fernando Degiovanni’s fascinating book Vernacular Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline. The notion of service, Degiovanni shows, was central to the birth and evolution of Latin Americanism as a field of scholarly inquiry. But the interests that its practitioners sought to serve were not necessarily academic in nature. In fact, another phrase that this book brings to mind is the advice that Deep Throat gives Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” Economics, it turns out, ruled our academic institutions long before the onset of neoliberalism.

In his history of the field over the first six decades of the twentieth century, Degiovanni makes two central points. First, the “production of knowledge about Latin American culture . . . was mediated since its beginnings by the specter of war”—not only the two World Wars and the Cold War, but also military responses to popular mobilizations within Latin American states (Degiovanni 1). Second, and more importantly, among the field’s primary objectives was “the theorization of the continent as a hemispheric market”—a space, that is, free of upheaval and conflict, hospitable to investors, and eminently capable of progress. The field as we know it, in other words, was not born from “the tradition of essay writing about continental identity” that started around the turn of the century with writers like Martí, Rodó, and Vasconcelos, who championed Latin American “spirituality” in opposition to the “materialist” north (1–3). If anything, it was born in direct opposition to that tradition.

The idea that economics drive academics is not new, of course. Deans and provosts have long understood that a field and its object of study don’t properly exist until they have a dedicated budget line. According to this logic, Latin Americanism wasn’t born as such in the United States until it achieved a properly funded institutional space in the academic edifice. This first occurred around the beginning of the twentieth century, during the Pan Americanist fervor that followed in the wake of the Spanish-American War. The field was further consolidated in the 1930s, boosted by the Good Neighbor Policy—along with the federal, foundational, and corporate funds that accompanied it.

Similarly, the fact that economics and geopolitics played a central role in US-based Latin American Studies, including its social-science dimension, has long been a given. It’s an argument advanced persuasively, for instance, in Mark T. Berger’s sweeping Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas 1898–1990 (1995). Over the first two-thirds of this time period, Berger writes, the “work of Latin Americanist academics complemented and helped legitimize the U.S. rise to predominance in the Caribbean region and beyond” (46). Pan Americanism, as an ideology and a practice, was the driving force behind this tendency. Its rise in the early twentieth century, Berger argues, “coincided with the professionalization of the study of Latin America. Pan American ideas have been central to the institutionalization of Latin American studies in North America between the First and Second World Wars” (45). According to Berger, this process, “has been, and continues to be, linked to a tendency on the part of U.S. historians, political scientists, and policy makers to project distinctly North American ideas about a common past and a common future on the region as a whole” (45).

Likewise, James D. Fernández and others have shown how the rise of Spanish language teaching, Hispanism, and Latin Americanism in the United States during World War I was intimately tied not only to shifting attitudes vis-à-vis German and Germany, but also to changes in the way the United States saw its...