Teaching and Studying the Americas is the fruit of various collaborative research projects over the past six years centred at Rice University, Houston, on the implications of a hemispheric American studies. It brings historical and theoretical investigations into the nature of hemispheric studies together with, in the book's final section, a discussion of how such disciplinary transformations have manifested themselves in the “programs and pedagogy” of the profession. In part, then, this book is valuable because it seeks explicitly to marry theory and practice, to explore ways in which the well-documented “transnational turn” has entered the American-studies curriculum or, equally frequently, encountered resistance in classroom praxis.
As Antonio Barrenechea points out in the book's first essay, the idea of America as a hemispheric rather than national entity can be traced back to Herbert Eugene Bolton's 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, where the Berkeley historian influentially outlined what he called “The Epic of Greater America” (13). Questions of French and Spanish influences on US culture have by now become a commonplace of the field, although they are, alas, too often hindered by an inadequate grasp among both students and faculty of non-anglophone languages. As Melissa Bailar also notes here, other kinds of administrative pressure have frequently held back intellectual developments, with, for example, many government grant-making organizations in the United States refusing to cover salary or other support costs for researchers based at non-US institutions (221). Although the editors' introduction applauds various European academic centres – the RAI at Oxford, the JFK in Berlin and the Institute for American Studies at Leipzig – for being “ahead of U.S. institutions in this regard” (8), it is of course also the case that European higher education has been similarly susceptible to various forms of government-sponsored scrutiny and accounting that have often inhibited their intellectual development across national frontiers.
The obvious problem with this collection, as the editors themselves note, is the limited nature of its provenance: all of the book's contributors are based in the United States, and there is a consequent danger of simply reproducing “the particular geoinstitutional context of U.S. universities and academia” (7). At the very least, it would surely have been possible to ask a scholar from Argentina or Brazil to write an afterword, in order to raise questions of linguistic and cultural difference which this collection appears too ready to gloss over. Nevertheless, there are many valuable essays here, particularly the piece “Coloniality at Large” by intellectual heavyweight Walter D. Mignolo, which examines the concept of “the Western hemisphere” in relation to “the colonial horizon of modernity” (49); Rodrigo Lazo's Derridean critique of the idea of an American studies “archive” (205); and also the account by Deborah Cohn and Matthew Pratt Guterl of their pedagogical attempt in the first decade of the twenty-first century to transform Indiana University's American studies program into “a more self-reflexive, transnational, cosmopolitan, or internationalist deployment of that troublesome name” (243). This book has clearly been designed for a broad student market, and it is likely to be useful both to undergraduates trying to acquaint themselves with the general outlines of a hemispheric American studies and also to graduate students keen to orient themselves professionally in relation to this rapidly evolving field. Somewhat unusually for Palgrave, the volume has, in the main, been very nicely produced, although the italicization font for book titles in the last chapter's footnotes is unaccountably missing.
