Hemispheric American studies took shape as a field aiming to contest an exceptionalist understanding of the United States by showing the nation to be, as Caroline Levander and Robert Levine put it, “a relational identity that emerges through collaboration, dialogue, and dissension.”Footnote ¹ Since the field's inception, landmark works of comparativist scholarship by Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Anna Brickhouse, Laura Lomas, and others have tracked the literary and political exchanges between the US and Latin America and thus demonstrated that the cultures of the hemisphere develop in relation to one another.Footnote ² Now that long-standing inter-American relations have gained scholarly recognition, what shapes should new hemispheric American studies scholarship take? Recent monographs by Helmbrecht Breinig and Stephen Park suggest some answers.

In Hemispheric Imaginations, Breinig explains that “with few exceptions, my readings do not aim at the comparative perspective that is applied in much of the work done in literary and cultural studies on hemispheric matters” (11). Breinig's approach to hemispheric relations, rather, is philosophical and theoretical. He is concerned with the epistemological, hermeneutic, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of “the problem of dealing with the Other” as they arise in English-language fiction about Latin America produced in the US and Canada during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and especially twentieth centuries. The first two chapters of Hemispheric Imaginations present a rather densely theorized framework for approaching that large body of writing, a framework that is informed by Latin American studies and European philosophers of alterity like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Emmanuel Levinas. Breinig argues that most US and Canadian treatments of North America's southern neighbors take the shape of “Latinamericanism”: a discourse that epistemologically subsumes the Latin American Other into the terms of North American stereotypes and thereby casts Latin America as static, backward, and unvariegated. However, Breinig holds, some works of fiction manifest a more Levinasian appreciation of the “epistemological problem” of cultural difference and so “make the Other come closer and yet make its incommensurable alienity visible” (37, 47). Throughout the book, Breinig thus finds particular aesthetic and ethical value in texts like Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) that eschew the protocols of realist representation in order to dramatize the challenge of grasping the Other.

The moments of Hemispheric Imaginations that attend to such epistemologically self-conscious texts offer a meaningful counterweight to the large body of American studies scholarship that demonstrates the prevalence in the US of more intellectually imperious perspectives on Latin America. Yet by the same token, readers may find Breinig's broader arguments about the hierarchizing operations of Latinamericanism to cover familiar ground. Breinig, for his part, sees his contribution in terms of scale: while others have found such patterns in particular periods and geographies, his “aim is to show the transhistoric persistence of Latinamericanism and its directedness at virtually the whole hemisphere outside the United States and Canada” (16). To demonstrate that point, Breinig follows his theoretical framing with ten wide-ranging chapters: three treat US representations of Columbus, interventionism in Latin America, and the Mexican Revolution; another looks at how changing conceptions of nature shaped presentations of hemispheric difference; one more considers the interactions of ethnicity and gender in Latinamericanism; and a trio of chapters track a post-1970s shift from realism to metafiction in novels on inter-American relations. Canadian literature, too often overlooked in hemispheric studies, is the subject of the last two chapters. By Breinig's own admission, these chapters “do not follow any regular pattern but, essay-like, present individual interpretations” (26). As such, while the broad scope of Hemispheric Imaginations may be novel, it's often unclear how its readings cohere into arguments that intervene in hemispheric American studies. Indeed, because Breinig's readings tend to cast texts as instantiations of broader axioms – for instance, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm (1981) is taken as “a demonstration of universal structures of human, societal behavior” (299) – Hemispheric Imaginations misses an opportunity to pursue what seems a meaningful question for hemispheric studies: namely how might inter-American literature lead us to revise philosophical truths and critical theories taken in North America and Europe as axiomatic and universal?

While Hemispheric Imaginations examines many works, its archive remains noticeably partial. Though the book discusses work by European American, African American, and Native American writers, US Latino texts are discussed “only rarely” because, Breinig suggests, “they belong to a somewhat different discursive system” (12, 277). And given the non-comparative orientation of Hemispheric Imaginations, the book considers neither Latin American responses to Latinamericanism nor non-English writing from the US and Canada. Since Latino and Latin American writing has been central to hemispheric American studies’ efforts to understand the literary and cultural relations between the US and Latin America, the scant engagement of Hemispheric Imaginations with those bodies of writing is surprising, and those exclusions carry substantial intellectual consequences. In particular, the selectivity of Hemispheric Imaginations yields a portrait of North American literatures as monolingual formations largely cordoned off from Latino and Latin American culture. As such, the boundaries of the book's archive have been drawn in a way that overdetermines its argument, for classed as beyond the purview of the study are those texts that could suggest paradigms of inter-American relation besides apprehending the Other – paradigms like cultural exchange, translation and mistranslation, textual circulation, and adaptation, such as have been important to recent work in hemispheric studies.

In contrast, Park's The Pan American Imagination assembles an archive narrower in period but broader in medium and language than that of Hemispheric Imaginations and thereby demonstrates how much hemispheric American studies still has to gain from comparative scholarship. Park examines a variety of English- and Spanish-language materials – from literature to murals to dance performances – produced largely between 1910 and 1941. These decades witnessed the flourishing of pan-Americanism: “a way of thinking about and representing the peoples of the Western Hemisphere as part of a knowable, unified whole” (2). Pan-Americanism, as Park argues, centers on the “act of compiling and organizing knowledge” (2); as such, this broad cultural project has its roots in a network of institutions, including university libraries, academic disciplines like anthropology and Spanish American studies, and especially the Pan American Union, an international organization that sought to collect and share knowledge amongst the nations of the Americas. Crucially, for Park, pan-Americanism was a discourse rooted in the US that cast its southern neighbors as an object of knowledge: it set out “to accumulate knowledge about Latin America but not from Latin America” (9, original emphasis). As a result, in pan-Americanism, a “rhetoric of cooperation and subtle imperialism are bound together” (3). However, Park demonstrates, alongside this “dominant narrative of Pan Americanism” a number of writers and artists “challenged the idea of a totalizing vision of the Americas and the presumption that it could all be seen from Washington, D.C.” (220, 221). The Pan American Imagination is as interested in these challenges to pan-Americanism, and their “alternative ways of understanding the hemisphere” (220), as in the dominant discourse itself.

Because Park's six chapters move across not just media but also languages, they provide compelling accounts of how pan-Americanism occasioned transnational interactions amongst its proponents and critics during the modernist period. Each chapter focusses on a writer or artist whose work “demonstrates inter-American cultural exchange,” along with the “forms of disciplinary knowledge” their work opposes (3, 14). In particular, the book considers William Carlos Williams's engagement with Maya and Aztec archaeology, José Clemente Orozco's murals in relation to the transnational mythologies around Simón Bolívar and Quetzalcoatl, Alejo Carpentier's novel ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó! (1933) in relation to eugenics and anthropology, the interplay of photography and journalism in documentary texts like Carleton Beals and Walker Evans's The Crime of Cuba (1933), the engagement of Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) with earlier traditions of transnational feminism and travel writing, and Katherine Dunham's twinned careers as an anthropologist and a dancer.

Yet as Park puts it, his “intent is not to merely apply a hemispheric frame to our understanding of American literature and culture but instead to explore the history of the hemispheric idea itself” (4). The book's epilogue thus offers a reflection on the “promises and perils” of hemispheric American studies, especially the way efforts to decenter the nation might “be silently reinforcing a U.S.-centered model of American studies” if insufficient attention is paid to perspectives from elsewhere in the Americas (223). The book closes with the argument that hemispheric American studies must “avoid the totalizing narratives that we have seen in the idea of Pan Americanism” (232).

The Pan American Imagination itself manages to avoid such totalizing visions while still offering insights of substantial scope by virtue of its attention to form and genre. For Park, the most powerful alternative visions of the hemisphere appear in works that lie between artistic fields, like Williams's combinations of poetry and prose, and Orozco's architecturally engaged mural painting. These “mixed-genre” works, Park argues, employ “formal hybridity to challenge established ways of knowing,” especially the “disciplinary boundaries that construct Latin America as an object of study” (174). What Park's study thus offers is neither non-generalizable case studies nor a totalizing theory of hemispheric relations, but rather an account of a formal matrix conducive to oppositional knowledge production across a range of inter-American contexts. By doing so, The Pan American Imagination suggests how a politically reflexive attention to literary and artistic form can yield meaningful insights for hemispheric American studies.