This title adds a new hemispheric dimension to the publisher's series on The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America. Despite the book's unremarkable and even confusing main title, Improvised Continent should be read by all scholars with a stake in the “hemispheric turn” in American studies. Historians of inter-American cultural exchange – especially art and literature – will also find much of value here. Improvised Continent follows upon books on the intersection of culture and politics, among them Claire Fox's Making Art Pan-American: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (2013) and Stephen Park's The Pan American Imagination: Contested Visions of the Hemisphere in Twentieth-Century Literature (2014). Unlike so many American studies accounts, Cándida Smith creates a complex picture of various US and Latin American agents interacting, and forging different (and sometimes shifting) attitudes towards US-led cultural policies. Furthermore, despite rightly seeing the United States as a centripetal power, the book's account of pan-American exchange disrupts the playing field. Even when dealing with a stacked deck, cultural “exchange” is multidirectional; it brings on many changes.

Improvised Continent is split into fourteen short chapters. It provides a macro vision by tracing the transnational circulation of artists, writers, photographers, and intellectuals, mostly via cultural-exchange programs. The first part of the book discusses the formation of the Pan American Union in 1890, including the ways in which Latin American authors – among them Ruben Darío (Nicaragua) and Gabriela Mistral (Chile) – responded to what many saw as a Trojan horse meant to ensure US political and economic domination. The coalition grew during World War I, offering an opportunity for hemispheric solidarity vis-à-vis the Old World: “A robust ‘American’ identity was an essential ingredient, in which the ‘New World’ experience was to be foregrounded as the foundation for a closely linked community” (9). The efforts at collaboration only intensified as World War II followed suit. The book's early chapters explore how the will to know one's neighbor produced a canon of US regional histories of Latin America. Other chapters juxtapose US and Latin American responses to the development of a modern version of what Edmundo O'Gorman calls “the invention of America.” Compare Waldo Frank, whose New World poetics “required a timeless Latin America whose magical reality could reverse the mistakes of the North,” to the Argentine intellectual Victoria Ocampo, who founded the journal Sur, and favored “cosmopolitan Latin American writers” aligned with European modernism (54). Cándida Smith devotes a full chapter to US Latino poet William Carlos Williams's hemispheric manifesto In the American Grain (1925). But the author is at his best when treating backgrounds and contexts rather than the literary texts themselves. There is hardly a scholarly quotation on Williams, or on the other literary works under study (although the author makes up for this by providing information drawn from publisher's archives).

Considering that Improvised Continent is a hemispheric history, I find a surprising omission in that Herbert Eugene Bolton, a US “good-neighbor” historian who first proposed the type of “greater-America” scholarship that Cándida Smith excels in, goes missing from the book. Bolton had admirers (including Lewis Hanke, who finds a place in the book), but also detractors, most notably the aforementioned Mexican historian O'Gorman.

Another part of the book discusses Mexican muralism. This is familiar terrain, as is the account of the Latin American boom and the political engagement of authors after the Cuban Revolution. But in Cándida Smith's hands, such familiar issues gain in hemispheric importance. Another highlight of the book is its treatment of the movie star Carmen Miranda, a walking and talking good-neighbor stereotype who has been a favored subject of US Latino studies in their effort to track exotic and unfair stereotypes. Miranda was despised by all professional critics but beloved by the working-class public in her native Brazil. The lesson is clear: here and elsewhere, Cándida Smith exposes how the messy, uneven, and even unpredictable consequences of cultural reciprocity can disrupt partisan academic paradigms: “The irony of the pan-American movement … is that the vision of a fuller intersubjective communication collided against the necessity of formulas, even of stereotypes, to present comprehensible social messages” (135).

If there is a main protagonist in Improvised Continent it would most certainly be the Brazilian author Érico Veríssimo, who was at one time among the most popular and widely translated Latin American writers in the United States. Through his public lectures, Veríssimo aided US State Department efforts to further cultural exchange, angering many hardline Latin American intellectuals in the process. Still, it is Veríssimo's disenchantment with US hemispheric utopianism as related at the end of Improvised Continent that spells the end of cooperation and concludes a tale of policy failure. Here, Cándida Smith explores the Cold War and the communist threat to US interests. Knowledge about one's neighbor assumed a form of reconnaissance; cultural exchange in the interest of hemispheric security and economic ties before World War II turned into an imperative to coerce sameness out of national differences. As is well known, the United States helped to install Latin American dictators seeking to snuff democratically elected leftist governments during this time. The author elaborates this part of the story through one of the finer institutional histories found in the book: José Gómez Sicre and the establishment of the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC in 1976. Cándida Smith presents a picture of an institution facing a divide between abstraction on the one hand and political art the other. Such battles over authenticity in New World aesthetics would dissipate under global neoliberalism by the 2000s. Accordingly, Improvised Continent ends with a coda on Alfonso Cuarón's multinational film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), which the author considers “a stepping-stone in the synthesis of the Americas, not excluding the United States, into a shared cultural market that involves more than blockbusters” (272). Improvised Continent provides a similar synthesis within a Boltonian trajectory, wherein the Americas are not one.