Teaching and Studying the Americas Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present

by Pinn, Anthony B.; Levander, Caroline F.; Emerson, Michael O.

• ISBN13: 9780230615120
• ISBN10: 0230615120
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Interdisciplinary work across the humanities and social sciences is moving beyond analysis of any one nation in isolation and instead placing urgent questions in the larger matrix of the Americas as a hemisphere. But little attention has been given to the overarching methodological, institutional, and pedagogical issues resulting from the growth of inter-American, or American hemispheric studies.Teaching and Studying the Americasis designed to give close consideration to the range of fundamental challenges and questions that a hemispheric studies perspective raises. It is unique in its primary concern with questions of institutional practice, pedagogic transformation, and research perspectives.

Author Biography

Anthony B. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies. Pinn is also the author/editor of twenty-four books, including Varieties of African American Religious Experience; The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology; and African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on a book dealing with the aesthetics of black religious experience and a co-edited volume on theoretical and methodological considerations related to the study of religion in popular culture.

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is author or co-editor of several books, including Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois. She is currently writing two books: Where is American Literature? and Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S./Mexico Border.

Michael O. Emerson is the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the award-winning Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America; People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States; and Passing the Plate. He currently is conducting a study of immigrants and their civic involvement. His most recent books including Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach and Religion Matters: What Sociology Teaches Us about Religion in Our World.

Table of Contents

Introduction--Alexander Byrd, Michael Emerson, Caroline Levander, and Anthony B. Pinn * PART I: LOCATING AND DISLOCATING THE AMERICAS * Good Neighbor/Bad Neighbor: Boltonian Americanism and Hemispheric Studies--Antonio Barrenechea * Bad Neighbor/Good Neighbor: Across the Disciplines Toward a Hemispheric Studies-- Caroline Levander * Coloniality At Large: The Western Hemisphere and the Colonial Horizon of Modernity--Walter Mignolo * PART II: DISCIPLINING HEMISPHERIC STUDIES * A Major Motion Picture: Studying and Teaching the Americas--Michael O. Emerson * Embodied Meaning: The ‘Look’ and ‘Location’ of Religion in the American Hemisphere--Anthony B. Pinn * Primeval Whiteness: White Supremacies, (Latin) American History, and the Transamerican Challenge to Critical Race Studies--Ruth Hill * The Making of ‘Americans’: Old Boundaries, New Realities--Karen Manges Douglas and Rogelio Saenz * Interdisciplinary Approaches to Teaching the History of the Western Hemisphere--Moramay López-Alonso * PART III: PROGRAMS AND PEDAGOGY * Beyond National Borders: Researching and Teaching Jovita González--Heather Miner and Robin Sager * Migrant Archives: New Routes In and Out of American Studies--Rodrigo Lazo * Partnering Across the Americas: Crossing National and Disciplinary Borders in Archival Development--Melissa Bailar * Ghosts of the American Century: The Intellectual, Programmatic and Institutional Challenges for Transnational/Hemispheric American Studies--Matthew Guterl and Deborah Cohn