Inter-American studies or Imperial American studies?

Abstract

As inter-American studies gain greater academic visibility, we are now in a position to ask whether the field constitutes an imperial threat to Latin American literary and cultural study, or whether it provides a valuable basis for cross-cultural comparison. Do inter-American studies represent the latest variation on the Monroe Doctrine of policing the region? What do we make of the fact that inter-American studies blossoms just as Latin Americanism becomes increasingly more powerful in the academy? This article argues that while questions of empire and appropriation must be considered as we assess this burgeoning field of inquiry, an inter-American perspective also affords possibilities for studying cultural production. These possibilities include comparative studies of works that have been largely marginalized by scholars of the Americas, such as Brazilian and indigenous literatures. In addition, the inter-American approach is able to put pressure on nationalist and cultural essentialist epistemes by focusing on the ways that culture often transgresses borders, both geographic and identitarian.     

'Blood Meridian', or the evening redness in the east: 'itinerant degenerates bleeding westwards'

Abstract

Blood Meridian (1985), written a decade after US withdrawal from Vietnam and even as Reaganite policies actively destabilized Nicaragua and sustained the despicable in El Salvador, centres nominally on Sonora, Mexico. However, we argue that, from the perspective of the post-1975 USA, Sonora specifically and systematically resembles South Vietnam, with the Treaty of Guadalupe (1848) resembling the Geneva Agreements of 1954. Central to McCarthy's demystification of the chronological and global reach of US imperialism is the figure of the Judge, readable as a personification of the US permanent arms economy and a tour guide to genocide. In a 20th century characterized by mass murder and enforced migration of peoples, it is appropriate that a judge, a representative of the state, should embody what has constituted the activity of modern governments.     

The black Atlantic,American studies and the politics of the postcolonial

Abstract

Twelve years of scholarship in the field of black-Atlantic-meets-American studies has resulted in a substantial body of knowledge around the extraterritorial excursions of US subjects and their cultural output. Despite the opportunities that the black Atlantic offered, it has begun to seem that the repositioning of academic perspective it stems from has itself become part of the discursive problems surrounding US American studies. This article suggests that it is time to rethink (black) Atlantic studies in the context of its partial institutionalization within the academy. First, it revisits the methodological and theoretical possibilities the field offered. Second, it examines some of the shortcomings which, in the early stages of the project, it was possible to overlook if not entirely ignore. Third, it looks at developments in the field of postcolonial studies, suggesting some conceptual tensions of relevance to postcolonial, US American, and American studies more generally.     

Tarzan the German-Eater

Abstract

This article raises questions about methodology in the study of transnational popular writing by examining the international popularity of Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of the Tarzan novels. Critical anti-imperialist analyses have found in Burroughs's fiction a dangerous metaphorics supporting imperialistic US foreign policies. In Weimar Germany, resistance to the Tarzan novels emerged that all but eliminated the market for these otherwise internationally popular fictions. Yet the German reaction shows how the idea of 'empire', embodied in tropes of race and gender, could continue to function in debates about international popular literature. At the same time, Burroughs was forced to adapt to international markets by tempering his imperialistic fictions. Burroughs's work after the controversy shows a shift in the depiction of national 'others', yet it had little radical potential because Burroughs had turned his imperial gaze inward, towards the internally colonized: Native Americans.