Hemispheric American Studies

Published by Rutgers University Press 2007

Hemispheric American Studies

Edited by: Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813543871

Overview
Contents

About this book

This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?

With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.

Author / Editor information

Caroline F. Levander is a professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is the author of Cradles of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois; Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture; and the coeditor of The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (Rutgers University Press).

Robert S. Levine is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity and Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, and the editor of a number of volumes, including Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader.

Reviews

These superb essays represent cutting edge contributions to the burgeoning field of transnational and hemispheric studies, and expand its scholarship by offering new ways in which scholars might refocus, from the national to the hemispheric and global. This collection's aim to decenter American Studies is an imperative to the evolution of the field.

— Emory Elliott, Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Ideas and Society at the Univer

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Essays Beyond the Nation Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Hemispheric Jamestown Anna Brickhouse Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
2. The Hemispheric Genealogies of “Race” Creolization and the Cultural Geography of Colonial Difference across the Eighteenth-Century Americas Ralph Bauer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3. “La Famosa Filadelfia” The Hemispheric American City and Constitutional Debates Rodrigo Lazo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
4. The Other Country Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest Jesse Alemán Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	75
5. An American Mediterranean Haiti, Cuba, and the American South Matthew Pratt Guterl Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
6. Expropriating The Great South and Exporting “Local Color” Global and Hemispheric Imaginaries of the First Reconstruction Jennifer Rae Greeson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
7. The Mercurial Space of “Central” America New Orleans, Honduras, and the Writing of the Banana Republic Kirsten Silva Gruesz Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
8. “I’m the Everybody Who’s Nobody” Genealogies of the New World Slave in Paul Robeson’s Performances of the 1930s Michelle A. Stephens Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
9. The Promises and Perils of U.S. African American Hemispherism Latin America in Martin Delany’s Blake and Gayl Jones’s Mosquito Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
10. PEN and the Sword U.S.–Latin American Cultural Diplomacy and the 1966 PEN Club Congress Deborah Cohn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
11. The Hemispheric Routes of “El Nuevo Arte Nuestro” The Pan American Union, Cultural Policy, and the Cold War Claire F. Fox Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
12. Memín Pinguín, Rumba, and Racism Afro-Mexicans in Classic Comics and Film Robert Mckee Irwin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
13. “Out of This World” Islamic Irruptions in the Literary Americas Timothy Marr Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	266
14. Of Hemispheres and Other Spheres Navigating Karen Tei Yamashita’s Literary World Kandice Chuh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	294
15. The Northern Borderlands and Latino Canadian Diaspora Rachel Adams Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313
Afterword: The Times of Hemispheric Studies Susan Gillman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	328
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	337
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	341

Language: English
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 366
Illustrations
- Other: 17

eBook

Published: October 4, 2007
ISBN: 9780813543871