The Pan American Imagination

In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression—from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in an interdisciplinary approach, which he frames as a politically resistant intellectual practice, using it not only to examine the historical phenomenon of Pan Americanism but also to explore the implications for current transnational scholarship.

It is almost impossible to imagine the United States without making reference to Italy. There is scarcely any aspect of American culture untouched by Italy—its history, art, architecture, fashion, film, music, the mafia, or even more viscerally its food. Italy occupies a space of near mythical proportion in the American imagination. When many Americans think of, or dream about and imagine, the good life, how and where they would like to live, they think most often of Italy; the beauty, the life-style, the romance, the excitement and sense of adventure that Italy offers. By looking at the fluid and multi-dimensional imaginative interactions Americans have with Italian culture and society, this comprehensive and robust volume offers a new and novel way of exploring the influence of Italy upon the United States. University of New South Wales historian Ian James Bickerton argues that if we wish to understand the United States, and how Americans define themselves and their nation, it is vital to examine how they imagine themselves, and he demonstrates that throughout U.S. history one of the most powerful stimulants shaping the imaginary world of Americans has been Italy.

People dreamed of cosmic exploration—winged spaceships and lunar voyages; space stations and robot astronauts—long before it actually happened. Space and the American Imagination traces the emergence of space travel in the popular mind, its expression in science fiction, and its influence on national space programs. Space exploration dramatically illustrates the power of imagination. Howard E. McCurdy shows how that power inspired people to attempt what they once deemed impossible. In a mere half-century since the launch of the first Earth-orbiting satellite in 1957, humans achieved much of what they had once only read about in the fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and the nonfiction of Willy Ley. Reaching these goals, however, required broad-based support, and McCurdy examines how advocates employed familiar metaphors to excite interest (promising, for example, that space exploration would recreate the American frontier experience) and prepare the public for daring missions into space. When unexpected realities and harsh obstacles threatened their progress, the space community intensified efforts to make their wildest dreams come true. This lively and important work remains relevant given contemporary questions about future plans at NASA. Fully revised and updated since its original publication in 1997, Space and the American Imagination includes a reworked introduction and conclusion and new chapters on robotics and space commerce.

An essential overview of this blossoming field, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies is the first collection to draw together the diverse approaches and perspectives on the field, highlighting the importance of Inter-American Studies as it is practiced today. Including contributions from canonical figures in the field as well as a younger generation of scholars, reflecting the foundation and emergence of the field and establishing links between older and newer methodologies, this Companion covers: Theoretical reflections Colonial and historical perspectives Cultural and political intersections Border discourses Sites and mobilities Literary and linguistic perspectives Area studies, global studies, and postnational studies Phenomena of transfer, interconnectedness, power asymmetry, and transversality within the Americas.

What is Pan-Americanism? People have been struggling with that problem for over a century. Pan-Americanism is (and has been) an amalgam of diplomatic, political, economic, and cultural projects under the umbrella of hemispheric cooperation and housed institutionally in the Pan-American Union, and later the Organization of American States. But what made Pan-Americanism exceptional? The chapters in this volume suggest that Pan-Americanism played a central and lasting role in structuring inter-American relations, because of the ways in which the movement was reinvented over time, and because the actors who shaped it often redefined and redeployed the term. Through the twentieth century, new appropriations of Pan-Americanism structured, restructured, and redefined inter-American relations. Taken together, these chapters underscore two exciting new shifts in how scholars and others have come to understand Pan-Americanism and inter-American relations. First, Pan-Americanism is increasingly understood not simply as a diplomatic, commercial, and economic forum, but a movement that has included cultural exchange. Second, researchers, political leaders, and the media in several countries have traditionally conceived of Pan-Americanism as a mechanism of US expansionism. This volume reimagines Pan-Americanism as a movement built by actors from all corners of the Americas.

What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig relies on long scholarly experience to answer these and other questions. Hemispheric Imaginations, an ambitious interdisciplinary study of literary representations of Latin America as encounters with the other, is among the most extensive such studies to date. It will appeal to a broad range of scholars of American Studies.

Telling America's Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), "Cultural Exchange" (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.

"This book narrates exchanges between English- and Spanish-language poets in the American hemisphere from the late 1930s through the rise of the 1960s. It doing so, it contributes to a crucial current of humanistic inquiry: the effort to write a cosmopolitan literary history adequate to the age of globalization. Building on correspondence and manuscripts from collections in Europe and the Americas, the book first traces the material contours of an evolving literary network that exceeds the conventional model of "the two Americas." These relations depend on changing contexts: an era of state-sponsored transnationalism, from the wartime intensification of Good Neighbor diplomacy, to the Cold War cultural policy programs of the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s; a prosperous market for translations of Latin American poetry in the US; and a growing alternative print sphere of bilingual vanguard journals such as El Corno Emplumado (Mexico City, 1962-1969). As the book articulates these histories of exchange, it also theorizes how poets employ the resources of language to transform popular images of the hemisphere from a locus of political conflict into a venue of supranational cultural citizenship. Feinsod describes how inter-Americanism was enacted through diplomatic structures of literary address, multilingual writing, and appeals to a shared indigenous heritage through the genre of the meditation on ruins. By tracing the coevolution of midcentury poetry with the geopolitics of the hemisphere, the book expands existing literary histories of the period through revelatory comparative readings supported by archival findings"--