Prompted by the success of European institutes such as Oxford University's Rothermere and Freie Universität Berlin's JFK, the editors of Teaching and Studying the Americas, all of whom teach at Rice University (of the sixteen contributors, seven are based there), are now attempting to launch American studies beyond the usual framework of postnational, transnational, trans-American, inter-American, and comparative American studies into a single hemispheric imaginary. The essays here – which examine Latin American, African American and colonial topics, among others – are born of an intersection between geopolitical, literary, religious and historical studies. Ruth Hill's “Primeval Whiteness” is a fascinating account of the colonial racial myths that still pervade current dialogues of race, and is an interesting critique of the “liberal disguises of mestizaje and indigenismo” (109). Hill demonstrates this to be largely a concoction of nineteenth-century travellers and historians. Her analysis of the white supremacist theology movement Christian Identity – for instance its claims that pre-Columbian civilizations were white men or, to be precise, “ancient white mariners” (128) – makes for engrossing but disturbing reading. Nevertheless, though Hill is indeed correct in saying that “white supremacism is not, and has never been, homogeneous – as monochrome or as monotone – as its proponents are wont to claim” (132), she does not really offer solutions on how to evade the racial categorizing encouraged by some aspects of scholarship – or link her research to the new Hemispheric paradigm championed by the editors. Also of note is Michael O. Emerson's “A Major Motion Picture,” a fluid and elegant analysis of “motion and movement across the globe,” which Emerson contends “is a particularly useful concept for understanding the Americas” (79). Tracing the modern origins of different types of migration (legal, forced, transitory, etc.) from the Mercantile Period (1500–1800) to the present day, it offers first-person accounts of changes in immigrant neighbourhoods in Houston and Chicago – as well as raising a few good questions for examining further this concept of motion and its impact on demographics. His “broader goal”? To “learn how the Americas are either being tied together or separated by these motions” (91).
Ultimately, Teaching and Studying the Americas lives up to one of its premises: that of being refreshingly multidisciplinary. But while its authors offer eloquent critiques of disciplinary boundaries, one inescapable flaw of this volume is its inability to deliver the very “nuts-and-bolts realities of actually implementing” (5) the shortfalls it is meant to redress. There is, in essence, far too much theory and too little practice: it lacks precise pedagogical definitions and fails to identify the very research tools it is meant to identify in the first place – the one exception being “Beyond National Borders: Researching and Teaching Jovita Gonzáles” by Heather Miner and Robin Sanger. While there is no problem in raising rather than resolving such interpretive problems, the very difficulty that these authors encounter in actually defining the hemispheric approach shows it to be too large and over-ambitious an interpretive framework for the present moment. Though the various essays provide some interesting ideas as to how to transition the debate from a national to a hemispheric approach – and are unarguably engrossing in terms of subject matter – the structure of the book shifts incoherently from pedagogy to race to “the role of smallpox in the Demographic Collapse of Mesoamerica” (164). Pinn, Levander and Emerson are clearly adamant on their new hemispheric model; this book as a whole is unfortunately less than the sum of its parts.
