Imagining Our Americas

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a region that transcends national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume's substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and an historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S./American studies and Latin American studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas' most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neo-liberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. They consider the varied histories of African Americans' presence in Mexican and Chicano communities; the different racial and class meanings that cumbia, a Colombian musical genre, assumes as it is absorbed across national borders; and the contrasting visions of anti-colonial struggle in Cuba and the Philippines embodied in the respective writings of the literary giants and national heroes José Martí and José Rizal. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii's plantation labour system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Both building on and departing from previous work, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas.