Hemispheric American Studies
Introduction

HEMISPHERIC AMERICAN STUDIES:
ESSAYS BEYOND THE NATION
Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine

In 1973 an editorial team at Yale University published American Literature: The Makers and the Making, the most influential American literary anthology of the decade.1 This two-volume work both exemplified the state of the field and set the direction of Americanist literary criticism for the next ten to fifteen years. As framed by the editors Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, the selections in the first volume charted a tripartite literary development beginning with the Puritans’ “Pre-National Literature (1620-1743),” proceeding to the revolutionaries’ “Emergent National Literature (1743-1826),” and culminating with the triumphal achievement of “A National Literature and Romantic Individualism (1826-1861).”  For those authors and texts that didn’t quite fit their nation-based teleological schema, Brooks et al. created an oxymoronic subcategory, “Literature of the Nonliterary World,” where supposedly nonliterary and non-national African American and Native American writers were collected.  Race therefore emerged as an ancillary but not irrelevant excess within an anthology that sought to present seamless connections among race, nation, and literature. Native American writers, for example, complicated the various ideas of the national espoused by the Puritans and American Revolutionaries, while Frederick Douglass’s position within the anthology as a figure of the “nonliterary world” signaled the extent to which the literary itself lay uneasily within the editors’ national frame. 
But perhaps the editors were simply prescient in relegating Douglass to their non-national grouping, for their selected text, an excerpt from My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), was published only a few years before Douglass began to express an interest in emigrating to Haiti. Though he never did emigrate, he retained his fascination, traveled to Hispaniola in 1871 to ask inhabitants what they thought about becoming a black state in a hypothetical American Union, and served as U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti from 1889 to 1891.  He was so admired by Haitian leaders that they chose him as their official representative to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.  Outraged and alienated by the upsurge of whites’ antiblack racism during the 1880s and early 1890s, Douglass in his capacity as Haiti’s representative celebrated the Haitian revolution as “one of the most wonderful events in the history of this eventful century, and . . .  in the history of mankind,” and extolled Haiti as “the only self-made Black Republic in the world.”2  His critique of U.S. racism from within the space of the Haitian pavilion suggests that Douglass’s position in U.S. history cannot be separated from his position in Haitian history—that his relatively recent relocation from the margins to the center of American literature anthologies should necessitate a rethinking of both the national and the literary.
Though it is easy to critique older anthologies that so blatantly uphold traditional notions of nation-based literary history, subsequent revisionary scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s has nonetheless tended to argue that marginalized texts by minority authors like Frederick Douglass should be central to the American canon without addressing the larger question of what constitutes “America.” In other words, much current scholarship now features hitherto forgotten or marginalized writers but continues to take the nation as the key organizing unit for literary and cultural studies.  Douglass’s engagement with Haiti over a nearly forty-year period, however, suggests the larger hemispheric framework in which one of the U.S. nation’s most canonical figures worked and the importance of this framework to the various literary and cultural traditions to which he has subsequently become essential.  Douglass was hardly alone among key U.S. literary and cultural figures for his keen interest in the interconnections among nations, peoples, institutions, and intellectual and political movements in the larger context of the American hemisphere.  His very interest in those interconnections, as disruptive as such thinking may have been to his U.S. nationalism, helped him to see the nation’s potential and limitations within a fuller history of race in the Americas. For Douglass, to move beyond the nation was not to abandon it but instead, through an engagement with overlapping histories and geographies, to better understand it. At the Columbian Exposition, Douglass holds up a Haitian black republican mirror to Chicago’s White City of 1893 in order to represent the larger inconsistencies underpinning late nineteenth-century U.S. racialized nationalism.
 Hemispheric American Studies takes a similarly strategic comparativist approach to consider the overarching shape and texture of American literary and cultural history.  The collection as a whole focuses on the complex ruptures that remain within but nonetheless constitute the national frame, while at the same time moving beyond the national frame to consider regions, areas, and diasporan affiliations that exist apart from or in conflicted relation to the nation. Our collection thus seeks to disrupt the temporal sequence of what Eddie Glaude has termed “nation time”3 by putting different national and extra-national histories and cultural formations into dialogue. By examining the intricately intertwined geographies, movements, and cross-filiations among peoples, regions, diasporas, and nations of the American hemisphere, the collection seeks to contextualize what can sometimes appear to be the artificially hardened borders and boundaries of the U.S. nation, or for that matter, any nation of the American hemisphere.  We bring together a range of scholars working in the fields of Latin American, Asian American, African Diasporan, Canadian, and U.S. literary and cultural studies to address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American Studies. Collectively, the essays draw on current critical work in inter-American and hemispheric studies and suggest future possibilities and directions for comparativist and dialogical approaches to the Americas.  One of the large goals of the anthology is to chart new literary and cultural geographies by decentering the U.S. nation and excavating the intricate and complex politics, histories, and discourses of spatial encounter occurring throughout the hemisphere but which tend to be obscured in U.S. nation-based inquiries.  In short, the essays in this collection approach distinct regions in the Americas, many of which now lie within U.S. borders, as products of overlapping, mutually inflecting fields—as complex webs of regional, national, and hemispheric forces that can be approached from multiple locations and perspectives and that can help us to reframe American cultural analysis.
Although many of the essays in this collection address the United States in some form or other, we contend that analysis of the U.S.’s engagements with a wide and surprising array of geographic entities helps to contextualize and clarify, rather than reproduce, the exceptionalism that has long been central to the nation’s conception of its privileged place in the American hemisphere.  These hemispheric engagements, as our contributors demonstrate, are multidirectional and involve overlapping interactions among various peoples, regions, and nations.  In subjecting such interactions to close scrutiny, our collection seeks to consolidate and extend important work in hemispheric studies, and thus to serve as a sort of handbook (or guidebook) to a burgeoning field.4  Some of the best recent critical work in the field has responded to the challenges posed by Janice Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, “What’s in a Name?”  In that address, Radway called on scholars in American Studies to move beyond nation-based analysis in order to consider the ways in which U.S. nationality is “relationally defined and historically and situationally variable,” and particularly to relinquish “the idea that [U.S.] culture can be adequately conceived of as a unitary, uniform thing, as the simple function of a fixed, isolated, and easily mapped territory.” She also encouraged scholars to resist taking “America” as a default term for the United States.5 We share Radway’s concerns about equating “America” with the United States and we share her sense of the importance of recognizing the limits of a hermetically-defined nation-based analysis.  The title of our anthology, “Hemispheric American Studies,” means to put pressure on the word “American” by tightly linking it with the larger hemispheric world that American Studies has often seemed to exclude—a world that, very much like the U.S. itself, emerged out of a series of colonial conflicts and engagements.  The “invention” of a seemingly autonomous and exceptionalist U.S. nationality developed in relation to the more expansive geographies and longer histories of the Americas, and it is the relation of the U.S. nation to that often elided context that is one of the large subjects of this collection.
As the work of a number of historians and critical theorists has made apparent, the ideas of America, Latin America, and the Western Hemisphere are invented rather than found—constructed rather than natural. Such a distinction is not merely rhetorical but has deep meaning for current critical Latin American Studies, transnational inquiry, American Studies, and post-national commentaries. Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America first popularized the idea that America was not a continent waiting to be discovered but rather an “invention” or conceptual category necessary to the consolidation of a Western world view.  Scholars from Immanuel Wallerstein to Walter Mignolo concur that the modern world-system generated in the long sixteenth century depended upon the invention/creation of the Americas as a geographical and cultural construct.6  Collectively, Wallerstein and like-minded theorists approach this history not so much as a linear process of discovery but rather as evolving theses that culminated in the dramatic moment when the need to give meaning to the land mass that we now refer to as America became more urgent than the need to continue to see the world as one Island of the Earth or an Orbis Terrarum. From this perspective, then, America as a conceptual entity literally did not exist until people made it.  This making was a process even for Columbus, who believed that he had arrived at the eastern shores of the Orbis Terrarum or Asia, and not “America,” because the land mass he saw was imbued with a particular ontological meaning meant to further the one Island of the Earth hypothesis of geographers of the time.
If America was invented rather than discovered, so too were Latin America and the Western Hemisphere ideas that accrued their own particular ontological meanings over time.  From Arthur Whitaker’s description of how the Western hemisphere emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century to Mignolo’s account of the “creation” of Latin America in the early to mid nineteenth century, scholars have suggested that we recognize that the past is transmitted forward through a spatial as well as a linear process.  The Western Hemisphere idea, for example, was a slow genetic process that required not only the acquisition of knowledge but the development of a new feeling of spatial compatibility, not only the spread of Enlightenment political philosophy to North and South America but the belief that, as Mexican statesman Lucas Alamán declared in 1826, “the similarity of their political institutions has bound [the countries of America] even more closely together, strengthening in them the dominion of just and liberal principles.”7  Just as this process of developing shared spatial consciousness inevitably involved occluding, repressing, and appropriating other modes of depicting the past and the numerous other constituencies that occupied space within a temporal frame, so too did the process through which Latin America emerged require the erasure or subordination of indigenous populations. A story of creole and mestizo elites embracing a modernity that required the simultaneous embracing of racism, the idea of Latin America did not so much stand in opposition to as further articulate, and even enable, the invention of America. While independence in all the Americas, including the United States, helped to bring an end to external colonialism, it also facilitated internal colonialism through institutionalized slavery of certain portions of the population and through the repression of indigenous histories, knowledge, and cultural forms.  The recovery of such occluded and contested histories remains a crucial project of hemispheric studies.
With its emphasis on taking account of overlapping and sedimented histories, inter-American or hemispheric studies has profound implications for current scholarly reconsiderations of area studies as a disciplinary practice, as well as for thinking about the possibilities of revitalizing conversations between Latin American and American Studies scholars and between Latin Americanists working in the United States and in Latin America. From a spatio-temporal vantage point, we see that location is always crossed—that Latin Americanists as well as U.S. Americanists have historically tended to think from a colonial discourse that emerges from and all too often depends upon histories of conquest and colonization. The historic complaints by Latin Americanists that the U.S. has appropriated the name “America” to refer to itself as a country and in so doing has marginalized Latin America, for example, insufficiently capture the sometimes shared and sometimes conflict-ridden colonial histories that shaped the Americas.  Precisely because colonialism has not been the sole province of the United States, efforts to “invert[] the naturalized view of the Americas,” with the South occupying a more privileged position, ultimately only “changes the content, but not the terms of the conversation,” as Mignolo has pointed out. In short, such an approach finally proves an inadequate response to the historical processes that have yielded the ideas of nation and hemisphere in the first place. Because area studies typically emphasize space (or geographical locale) over time, it has tended to uphold a constant, crystallized idea of national identity.8 Once we recognize that the nation is not the realization of an original essence but a historical configuration designed to include certain groups and exclude others, we are able to see the nation as a relational identity that emerges through constant collaboration, dialogue, and dissension. Such a relational approach to national identity attends to the uneven power relations that form and are too often erased within concepts of national unity.
Humanities departments have historically tended to reinforce the idea of the separate and free-standing nation-state, with attention to geopolitical interchange generally following formal structures of colonialism. French departments, for example, focus on French literature and culture, Hispanic Studies departments on primarily Spanish, Central American, and South American national traditions, and English departments on American and English literature as separate if sometimes parallel genealogical entities. Within such an intellectual milieu, area studies as practiced by Latin Americanists in particular has offered the promise of crossing such national and disciplinary boundaries and creating research fields that were organized around rubrics other than the nation. Border studies, for example, has focused on the particular locales that spring up at the crossroads of national cultures. Yet, as Alberto Moreiras reminds us, the abandonment of the national referent has not necessarily introduced new modes of thinking, but rather has offered a series of alternative identities and localities that all too often inadvertently replace and reinforce rather than unseat the “more traditional tools for US cultural domination.”9 This collection seeks to avoid some of the pitfalls of those area studies models in which, as Susan Gillman elaborates in her closing commentary, language studies stand in for method, geographical area stands in for disciplinary theory, and indigeneity offers the utopian promise of authenticity. Rather, we approach the hemisphere and the shifting, evolving nations and regions within it from a spatio-temporal vantage point where comparative approaches bring out the contingency of both the nation and region. From such a perspective, retaining a national referent—a national literature in the context of a hemispheric paradigm, for example—of necessity entails an ongoing recognition of the processes through which nations are embedded in and develop gradually out of local and transnational circumstances. In short, by attending to multiple and sometimes competing conceptions of geography and chronology, we are able to see that the idea of a national literature and culture emerges out of a series of subordinations, alliances, and cross-fertilizations that make the nation a richly suggestive but hardly an autonomous entity.
The essays collected in Hemispheric American Studies in various ways chart the interdependencies between nations and communities throughout the Americas. A central goal of the collection is to enlarge the critical frame of Americanist debate by moving beyond traditional area studies paradigms through analyses of the multiple geopolitical terrains encompassed by the hemisphere. Accordingly, the volume is less concerned with documenting the tangible, net effects of U.S. power—the inclusion, exclusion, appropriation, marginalization, domination, exploitation, and invasion of other “neighbor” nations—and instead asks such questions as: What happens to U.S. and American literary and cultural studies if we recognize the asymmetry and interdependency of nation-state developments throughout the Americas? What happens if we let this recognition of the nation as historically evolving and contingent—rather than already formed—revise our conceptions of literary and cultural genealogies? Finally, what happens if the “fixed” borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs that can be ignored, imaginatively reconfigured, and variously contested but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories? We believe that addressing such questions opens up the possibility of developing not only a broader definition of what the U.S. includes but also a more historically complex view of the creative tensions and interdependencies that are embedded within and threaten to undo any fixed notion of “America.” Such an approach shifts the critical focus from the terms under which various constituencies are included or excluded within an already established U.S. governing body to how those seemingly other constituencies actually operate as dynamic parts of multiple nations, some of which deny their presence. Such an approach, not surprisingly, also acts as a corrective to critical endeavors to understand geographic encounters in the hemisphere in terms of a developing U.S.-centered world system, because it suggests the importance of doing literary and cultural history from the perspective of a polycentric American hemisphere with no dominant center.
In this conceptualization, then, to attempt to move beyond the U.S. nation in American Studies is not to abandon the concept of the nation but rather to adopt new perspectives that allow us to view the nation beyond the terms of its own exceptionalist self-imaginings. It is to take full account of the contingency of nation formation, the unpredictability of national histories, and the protean character of the nation itself. Prasenjit Duara remarks that “[w]hen we consider national identity in its changeability, fungibility, and interplay with other identifications, we see that it can be as subversive of the nation-state as it has been supportive.” Interpretive views of the nation from without can be as fungible as from within, and in this regard recent tendencies to conceive of the U.S. in the American hemisphere solely in terms of empire and imperialism tend to overlook the complex series of encounters that collectively comprise national communities in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine, for example, has typically been taken as a key starting point of U.S. hemispheric expansionism, but it is important to recognize that the Doctrine emerged in response to the very real threat posed by European colonialism. As Rodrigo Lazo points out, “the separation of America as a hemisphere promoted by the Monroe Doctrine worked hand in hand with opposition to Spain in some sectors of Latin America.”10  From such a perspective the U.S. nation can be understood in relation to nationalistic Latin American liberation movements of the early to mid nineteenth century. A recognition of this intertwined history of nations in formation presses us to abandon a simple binary that pits the U.S. as a fully formed homogeneous entity against the myriad peoples and nations of the rest of the hemisphere.
Recognizing the overlapping national formations occurring within a hemispheric context likewise highlights the importance of race to the idea of the nation and the cultural formations that represent, contest, and consolidate national identities. Political theorists, historians, and social commentators have long acknowledged the tensions between race and nation. From the observation of the late nineteenth-century political philosopher Ernest Renan that "race marks and orders the modern nation-state," to the work of twentieth-century scholars like Ernest Gellner and Anthony Marx on the ethnic and racial origins of nation-states, critics have consistently observed the powerful ways in which racial identity promotes and at times threatens the idea of the nation.  Yet coincident with such commentary on the racial origins of the nation is an overlapping commentary on the hemispheric dimensions of such racialized national origins.  Jose Martí, for example, challenges readers of "Our America" to think of the nations that comprise America from a comparative, hemispheric perspective—to think of the hypothetical villager's relation to the larger "American" cosmos. Developing a multilayered positionality in relation to local, national, and hemispheric cultures is, in Martí's opinion, the only way to realize full civic representation in a hybrid American world. Almost twenty years later, Randolph Bourne recognized that America was "coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with other lands, of many threads of all . . . colors," and it was in this larger political world—and more particularly in Cuban independence efforts—that W. E. B. Du Bois found powerful models for rethinking the place of blacks in the United States.11  Important social thinkers from Martí to Bourne and from Martin Delany to Du Bois consistently located the racial nation-state within the larger flows of hemispheric culture and recognized the importance of hemispheric parameters in thinking about and helping to develop alternative nationalisms.
Literary texts can offer uniquely rich evidence of the hemispheric resonances that these alliances (and tensions) between race and nation create.  For literary nationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nationality was almost always tied to race. As Appiah remarks, there thus developed in the thinking of the time a “dual connection . . . between, on the one hand, race and nationality, and, on the other, nationality and literature. In short, the nation is the key middle term in understanding the relations between the concept of race and the concept of literature.” This set of interconnections among race, nation, and literature is clearly evident by the late eighteenth century and has important origins in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, particularly his 1767 On the New German Literature, which presents the literary, as Appiah puts it, as “the sacred essence of nationality.”12 Yet analyses of a rich array of literary and cultural documents reveal that nationality, as we have seen with Frederick Douglass, is embedded within hemispheric cultural flows—that nations are intra- as well as inter-dependent entities. Taking account of such dynamic series of ever-shifting and mutually embedding logics and subordinations through a hemispheric approach of necessity opens up literary, cultural, and national frames and requires the development of new ways of conceptualizing archives, texts, and contexts.  Such an approach, as the essays in this collection demonstrate, invariably asks us to reorient ourselves in relation to that which has hitherto seemed familiar and known.13
            As we hope is clear, moving beyond the nation does not mean abandoning the idea of nation but rather recognizing its dynamic elements and fluid, ever-changing, essentially contingent nature. Still, one might ask: What is “Hemispheric American Studies” and how does one assay to move “beyond” the nation? How can one de-center the United States in American Studies, and how can American studies become transnational without bringing about what George Handley has called “a neoimperialist expansion into the field of Latin American Studies?”14  We pose these questions to suggest the nature of this anthology. We are not grandly declaring a new field (“Hemispheric American Studies”), nor are we presenting a utopian solution to the problems and constraints of nation-based literary and cultural inquiry (“Beyond the Nation”). Instead, the title of the collection is intended to point to the broad interpretive and disciplinary challenges that the essays as a group seek to address. Hemispheric American Studies, as represented in the critical practices of the contributors to this volume, complicates questions of the national, and thus raises rather than resolves interpretive problems. In this sense hemispheric studies can be regarded as a heuristic rather than a content- or theory-driven method; it allows for discovery of new configurations rather than confirmation of what we think we already know.  Although the essays present strongly articulated and theorized visions of this protean field or heuristic, they do not issue dictums or argue for one “correct” way of undertaking hemispheric inquiry. Rather, the essays, in the manner of case studies, insist on paying close attention to archives and texts, the local and the global, with an emphasis on developing interpretive perspectives on mutually inflecting literary and cultural histories. Collectively, the essays explore the rich archival evidence of the obscured, often palimpsestic cultural geographies out of which similitude and disparity develop and out of which the nation takes shape as an alternately assumed, imagined, and enduringly important category—but ultimately just one category in a broader interpretive field. Still, if nations and hemispheres are ideas or inventions, they are also social realities with very real consequences for individuals and communities.  Our collection thus takes up questions such as what happens to citizens of one nation when they enter another? How do bodies migrate across nations? Most importantly for our purposes, how are these migrations represented in a diverse range of textual and cultural forms?  With essays that interrogate stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental and non-governmental organization publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts, discourses, and bodies in motion and at rest across the evershifting and multilayered geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere.
Such an approach yields new insights into what has traditionally been called “Early American Studies.” The collection begins with essays by Anna Brickhouse and Ralph Bauer on colonial encounters and exchanges in the Americas, and their analyses point to the limits of what Brooks, Lewis, and Warren (and many other anthologists and literary historians before and since) have conceived of as the pre-national and emergent national periods.  As Brickhouse and Bauer make clear, the very concept of the “pre-national” requires an ahistorical importing of 1776 onto colonial encounters and creole cultures in an extended Caribbean in which national and cultural histories were intermingled, complex, and confused, collectively offering anything but a unitary starting point for a teleological history that would culminate in the U.S. nation. Brickhouse and Bauer challenge those hermetic narratives that present the United States as emerging inevitably from the British settlements of the early seventeenth century, and instead focus on transcultural conflicts involving colonial powers and indigenous peoples in the larger field of the Americas. These are precisely the histories (of imperialism, polyculturalism, multilingualism, and race) that exceptionalist national histories obscure but that nonetheless need to be understood as constitutive of the nation.
In her essay on “Hemispheric Jamestown,” for instance, Brickhouse complicates conventional understandings of Jamestown as the “mother” of slavery and the U.S. nation by considering the crucial role of a Spanish Jesuit settlement that had preceded the English settlement at Jamestown. Through her close consideration of the interactions between the Spanish settlers and the indigenous peoples they encountered, she restores to our understanding of Jamestown a complicated history of Spanish priority and Native-Creole biculturalism, and thus encourages us to read the English history of Jamestown in relation to larger imperial histories of the Americas, particularly with respect to cross-cultural and bilingual interactions that the English writers themselves failed to discern. That hidden history implicates the Pocahontas story and Anglophone chroniclers of Jamestown in a wider hemispheric milieu, helping to disclose indigenous agency and imperial conflict at a site that for too long has been regarded in U.S. nation-based histories as the promulgator of the nation.  While Brickhouse shows how indigenous cultures were in active dialogue with and appropriated the very terms of colonial discourse, Ralph Bauer argues that we can only see the full complexity of modern ideas of race by recognizing a “triangular,” circum-Atlantic discourse of colonial difference that emanated from Spanish America both north across the hemisphere as well as east across the Atlantic.  Bauer thus challenges U.S. nation-based understandings of race by illustrating how birthplace or point of origin continued to play an important role in distinguishing American-born creoles from European peoples in the Americas, and therefore how, by extension, peoples in the Americas became “white,” “red,” or “black” only after having come in extended contact with colonial culture. Through readings of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticias secretas andThomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Bauer charts an understanding of race in the early Americas that emerged not only from the (proto-) scientific models of European imperialism in the New World but also from a geopolitical counter-discourse of creole patriotism that would remain of central importance to  nineteenth-century nationalisms throughout the Western world.
Brickhouse and Bauer ask us to rethink “origins” geospatially by revealing how discourses that seem to reinforce a center/margin paradigm of dominance work against what we actually know about the origins and workings of nations. Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán explore what such a doubled, overlaid approach to American origins reveals about early nineteenth-century print culture and the gothic narrative form, respectively.  Lazo suggests how Hispanophone conceptions of Philadelphia and its printing industry might dislodge the United States from its position as the too-often assumed nodal point for the consideration of power relations in the Americas.  While it might seem initially counterintuitive to conduct such a rethinking from the seat of U.S. nation-making (Philadelphia), Lazo shows how Americanism during the 1820s becomes a hemispheric process rather than a U.S. ideology for such writers and political figures as Vicente Rocafuerte, future President of Ecuador, and the Cuban poet José María Heredia. Describing “la famosa Filadelfia” as a symbol of hemispheric aspirations for breaking away from European monarchical rule, Heredia and other Latin American exiles in Philadelphia used the printing industry to generate and disseminate political material that to some extent subsumed the U.S. to their larger political vision of a vibrantly democratic and free Hispanophone “America.”  Alemán considers another key moment in the advent of the American hemisphere—the moment when Mexico’s antiquity becomes the U.S.’s hemispheric history following its revolutionary break from England—and analyzes how this blending is represented in and through the particular narrative form of the gothic.  Approaching the gothic from a hemispheric perspective reveals a repressed historical presence within the U.S. nation and challenges us to rethink the hemisphere not as cleft in two but as our America and the other America at the same time.  Through readings of early nineteenth-century narratives such as Robert Montgomery Bird’s Calavar, William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, and the anonymously published Xicoténcatl, Alemán illustrates that inter-American gothic anxiety is uncannily intra-American because it emerges not only from without but also from within the United States.
The inevitable blending and overlaying of national histories is in some ways most acute in the geographic area of the U.S. South, described by some in the nineteenth century as the “American Mediterranean.”  Matthew Guterl, Jennifer Greeson, and Kirsten Gruesz explore the literary and social history of this multi-layered, gateway area between North and Central America, paying particular attention to how debates in the United States about slavery, emancipation, citizenship, and corporate capitalism were structured not just by internal political disputes but also by hemispherically shared experiences. As Guterl demonstrates, during the antebellum period a sense of “Southern exceptionalism” co-existed quite easily and naturally with a conviction that the planter class shared a common fate less with the U.S. nation than with slaveholders elsewhere in the hemisphere, a Southern version of manifest destiny that even included Cuba and the empire of Brazil. But what the planter class also shared with the slaveholders of the southern hemisphere was a vision, exacerbated by the “nightmare” of the Haitian Revolution, of imminent collapse. (For African American leaders such as David Walker and Martin Delany, however, who likewise looked South in their efforts to create transnational diasporas, Haiti and the prospect of a free Cuba remained sources of inspiration.) The U.S. South emerges as a liminal and unbordered space not only during the antebellum era, but also during the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction period, when the South entered U.S. literature as an imaginative geographic site for conceptualizing U.S. empire. Through analysis of George Washington Cable’s local color fiction, Greeson suggests that local color writing’s emergence in the post-bellum U.S. was integral to the development of a popular hemispheric expansionist imaginary.  In this model, Southern locales like Louisiana and local color fiction as a genre are embedded within and fuel the national machinery of empire.  But as is clear from Gruesz’s long history (from the late nineteenth through the twentieth century) of New Orleans as a hemispheric “center,” empire is never a simple matter of one nation imposing its desires on others. From the moment when bananas and coffee came to replace cotton as an engine of U.S. and Latin American trade, New Orleans became the focus of the geographic imaginings and desires of political and business leaders from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and the U.S.  In her discussion of texts by O’Henry, Máximo Soto Hall, Annie Proux, and many others, Gruesz asks what it might mean to conceive of New Orleans, and the Gulf of Mexico itself, as a broadly conceived “Central” America where multiple interests and world views are constantly clashing. She also underscores the centrality of race and ethnicity to the many immigration narratives that take the Gulf as a central point of hemispheric transit.
Race, whether conceived nationally or diasporically (or both), is central to the essays by Michelle Stephens and Ifeoma Nwankwo. Though drawing meaning from a national history of slavery that pitted U.S. South against U.S. North, African American writers, performers, and political activists have regularly engaged  larger hemispheric frameworks. Taking the career of Paul Robeson as her subject, Stephens explores how his various performances—whether in song, in the press, onstage, or onscreen—resonated both nationally for white and black American audiences and hemispherically in black communities throughout the diaspora.  His representations of the New World slave, during the 1920s and 1930s, highlight the hemispheric dimensions of black masculine identity and reveal how discourses of race, gender, and nation operate throughout the Atlantic world as discourses of political freedom.  Like Stephens, Nwanko suggests that recent scholarship has focused primarily on unequal relations between the U.S. and Latin-American nations, thereby ignoring relations between U.S. African American and the rest of the Americas.  Nwankwo begins to address such a gap by tracing a hemispheric genealogy of slavery that covers over a hundred and fifty years and that aligns African American writers from Martin Delany to Gayl Jones. Showing how both writers’ engagements with Latin America served as a basis of their advocacy for collective action against racial oppression, Nwankwo argues that Latin America functioned as a powerful political as well as geographic mid-point between African and the U.S. and therefore became a privileged site for U.S. African American writers who wished to claim both an American citizenship and an international network. Her readings of Martin Delany’s Blake and Gayl Jones’ Mosquito in particular reveal that U.S. African American authors were cognizant of and integrally engaged in theorizing a diasporic consciousness that shows nation and hemisphere to be simultaneously enforcing and complicating concepts.
The complicated relations between and across nations’ interests and identities in the Americas are the central concerns of the essays by Deborah Cohn, Claire Fox, and Robert Irwin, which address the tightly interwoven and often symbiotic interactions between U.S. and Latin American artists, politicians, administrators, and cultural impresarios from the Cold War to the present. Focusing on a writing congress, the art world, film, stamps, and dance, these essays as a group demonstrate what Cohn terms “the limitations of scholarly approaches that are confined within the national or regional boundaries set by area studies, themselves products of the Cold War.” The essays also underscore the need to take account of Latin American agency rather than simply surrendering to notions of U.S. domination.  In her case-study of the 1966 International P.E.N. writing congress in New York City, for example, Cohn shows how the artists of the Latin American “Boom” (Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others) sought to use a congress, which to some extent was intended by the host nation to serve the ends of U.S. Cold War nationalism, as a platform to advance their own literary agenda and to air the ongoing debate among Latin American intellectuals about the Cuban Revolution of 1959.  Claire Fox examines similar interplay in her study of the Cuban critic and curator José Gómez Sicre’s efforts to create a hemispheric arts circuit in the Americas. As Fox shows, the “hemispheric success” of Sicre’s prodigy, the young Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, was revealingly asymmetric. Whereas Cuevas was regarded in the U.S. as an angst-ridden modernist whose vision corresponded with the Cold War universalism of the Pan American Union, in Mexico he was seen along more particularist lines as a parodist and critic of national culture. Fox’s archival research illuminates just how canny Cuevas was in working with and through Sicre in exploiting the burgeoning postwar international art market in both venues. Different, competing, and complexly intercultural interpretive frames are also crucial to Irwin’s essay on the controversy surrounding the Mexican government’s 2005 issuing of four postage stamps commemorating the Afro-Mexican comic book anti-hero Memín Pinguín. Just as Cuevas was regarded differently in Mexico and the U.S., so were the images on these stamps. For U.S. Americans, Memín Pinguín was simply another in a long line of stereotypical minstrel images intended to denigrate people of African descent, whereas for many Mexicans, the comic antihero spoke to ideals of racial tolerance.  Irwin’s essay provides a deep history of the image in the context of Mexico’s vexed relationship to Afro-Cuban culture, showing how classic Mexican film and dance of the mid-twentieth century attempted to create a Mexican national imaginary that excluded blackness by constructing a threatening (albeit seductive) Afro-Cuban other. In this respect, Yolanda Vulgas Dulché and Alberto Cabrera’s Memín Pinguín, which drew on these images, assumed importance as one of the few unambiguously positive representations of blackness and racial tolerance in Mexican culture. For Irwin, then, who regards U.S. attacks on the image as misguided because blind to this larger cultural history, the controversy on the Memín Pinguín commemorative stamps underscores the limits of viewing cultural discourses in the American hemisphere through the lens of supposedly autonomous national histories.
For the most part, the essays in this collection collectively adopt a North-South rather than East-West perspective to analyze the contingency and diversity of nation-formation in the American hemisphere. But the opening essays by Brickhouse and Bauer in particular remind us to pay heed to what Paul Giles has termed “hemispheric partiality,” the risk of “replacing nationalist essentialism predicated upon state autonomy with a geographical essentialism predicated on physical contiguity.”15  The essays by Timothy Marr, Rachel Adams, and Kandice Chuh make a special point of enlarging the frame beyond borders and boundaries, underscoring the crucial importance of the global to the hemispheric as well as of considering the hemisphere’s extended and sometimes neglected northern reaches. In his study of Islam in what he terms a “transhemispheric” context, Marr links European exploration of the New World to fantasies of displacing or overcoming the contentious challenge of Islam, showing how the Islamic foundations of the Spanish past have remained a submerged presence within Latin American and U.S. American literary and cultural genealogies. According to Marr, the “irruption” of this haunted and haunting past in writings by Melville, Twain, Paul Bowles, and other writers of the literary Americas suggest the integral relation of Islam to “New World” cultural imaginings.  Kandice Chuh takes a similarly broad North-South/East-West perspective in her discussion of the writings of Karen Tei Yamashita, an Asian American writer living in and writing about Brazil. As Chuh elaborates, Asian American studies require a radical rethinking in relation to hemispheric studies, and vice versa, precisely because Asianness remains immutably “foreign” despite nativity, citizenship, or acculturation within the United States. Rachel Adams’s account of the Argentinian Canadian author Guillermo Verdacchia, whose plays and short stories conceive of an “America” that extends from Toronto to Tierra del Fuego, similarly complicates questions of national identity. As Adams argues through her close readings of Verdacchia, geography is never literal, borderlands can be exported from expected locations along the U.S.-Mexico border to a range of locales in the U.S., Canada, the Southern Americas, and beyond, and the hemisphere itself can be regarded as a “contact zone where Anglo and Latin America meet up, clash, and interpenetrate.”
It is precisely the literary, cultural, and historical consequences of those meetings, clashes, and interpenetrations in the American hemisphere that is the subject of this volume.