Imagining Our Americas

by Shukla, Sandhya; Tinsman, Heidi

• ISBN13: 9780822339618
• ISBN10: 0822339617
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a region that transcends national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume's substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and an historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S./American studies and Latin American studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas' most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neo-liberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. They consider the varied histories of African Americans' presence in Mexican and Chicano communities; the different racial and class meanings that cumbia, a Colombian musical genre, assumes as it is absorbed across national borders; and the contrasting visions of anti-colonial struggle in Cuba and the Philippines embodied in the respective writings of the literary giants and national heroes José Martí and José Rizal. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii's plantation labour system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Both building on and departing from previous work, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas.

Table of Contents

About the Series

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Across the Americas

Up from Empire: James Weldon Johnson, Latin America, and the Jim Crow South

Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolivar's Ismael and Rizal's Marti at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Confederate Cuba

Pleasure and Colonial Resistance: Translating the Politics of Pidgin in Milton Murayama's All I Asking for Is My Body

Experimental Dreams, Ethical Nightmares: Leprosy, Isolation, and Human Experimentation in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii

Tracking the "China Peril" along the U.S. Pacific Rim: Carpetbaggers, Yacht People, 1.2 Billion Cyborg Consumers, and the Bamboo Gang, Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You!

Uprooted Bodies: Indigenous Subjects and Colonial Discourses in Atlantic American Studies

Blackness Goes South: Race and Mestizaje in Our America

Queer Harvests: Homosexuality,the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba

Dislocations of Cold War Cultures: Exile, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Form

The Attributes of Sovereignty: The Cold War, Colonialism, and Community Education in Puerto Rico

All Cumbias, the Cumbia: The Latin Americanization of a Tropical Genre

"Panama Money": Reading the Transition to U.S. Imperialism

Contributors

Index

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