ABSTRACT
Wilfried Raussert’s invitation to contribute to this Companion to Inter-American Studies took me back to my years as a professor in the doctoral program in American Studies at New York University, when I taught Inter-American Studies for the core curriculum on several occasions between 1997 and 2002. Appointed to direct the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies in 2002, I gave greater emphasis to what transpired south of the U.S. border, although it is difficult to separate the two ends on either side of the hyphen, whether we deal with migration, the drug wars, or the economic, political, social, and cultural repercussions of neoliberal policies and the succession of hemispheric trade agreements – more than 20 – beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. However, I think that one can discern a difference between how Inter-American Studies was conceived before the new millennium and how one may frame them subsequently in the wake of a range of globalized movements and after 9/11. Let me take my own syllabus description – which reflects the spirit of the field at the time – as the point of departure:
This core course examines the relations between the United States and its neighbors to the North and South. Special attention is given to influence in both directions, such as the U.S. as a model of development, and Latin America as a model for leftist politics. The course will begin with the emergence of the ideology of Manifest Destiny, in the context of the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, concomitant U.S. interventions, exploratory expeditions, the Mexican-American War. The racist attitudes toward Latin Americans, which served to legitimize expansionism and imperialism, contribute to an understanding of racial formation in both regions, which we shall examine in the context of abolitionism, and comparative views on miscegenation and apartheid, within the framework of national consolidation. The development of a ‘Latin’ anti-imperialism by the likes of José Martí, José Enrique Rodó, José Vasconcelos, and others addresses this expansionism in the context of the Spanish/Cuban-American War, and the subsequent repudiation of the Social Darwinist ideas that legitimized that expansionism. This is evident not only in the political and intellectual-literary writings of José Carlos Mariátegui and in the artwork of the Mexican Muralists, but also in the sympathetic, leftist solidarity of John Reed and Waldo Frank. One relatively under-examined contact is the mutual interest between Latin American writers and artists and their counterparts in the Harlem Renaissance. The course
examines not only the multidirectional collaborations of Latin and North Americans, but also the class, racial, and gender implications of these interactions, particularly through the “representational machines” of what Ricardo Salvatore calls “informal empire,” the “soft” power that is wielded through the production and instrumentalization of cultural difference (73). The Good Neighbor Policy took an interesting turn in the World War II years, as the Roosevelt administration felt the need to woo often hostile Latin American publics to the side of the Allies. This entailed a change in cultural policy, including intervention in Hollywood productions that presented unflattering and racist images of Latin Americans. We shall examine the journals, films, and exhibitions sponsored by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, and the accounts of Latin American and Canadian reception of these cultural collaborations. From the late 1940s on, the U.S. exported a model of development – epitomized by Rostow’s Americo-centric five stages of economic growth – that contributed to a culturally deracinating modernism in the region. The Cold War policies and interventions of the postwar period were met in Latin America by a pointed anti-imperialism, which we shall examine in relation to Central America and the Caribbean, Cuba in particular. We shall also study the impact in the U.S. and Canada of dependency theory, socialism, revolution, nationalist cultural politics, and solidarity with decolonizing nations. These developments are also part of the historical circumstances in which the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s takes on revolutionary dimensions. The Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of this period are couched in such revolutionary terms. Revolution is also the framework for the 1970s and 1980s Central American wars of national liberation. As the Cold War waned and the U.S. moved into an era of globalization under the sign of neoliberalism, the Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican movements transitioned – with the carrot of affirmative action and consumerism and the stick of counterinsurgency – from their nationalist revolutionary phase to identity politics and multi culturalism. In the 1990s, the Central American solidarity movement split in two directions: Some activists took the route of Latino identity politics and multiculturalism, others, like those who formed the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN) and subsequently Alianza Americas (formerly NALAAC), organized around immigrant rights. The emergence of border studies, bi-and multi-lingualism, translocalism, cultural studies, and the relative abandonment of the anti-imperialist lens for thinking cultural politics, are some of the developments to be examined in light of the controversy over American identity and new migrations, the emergence of panethnicity, and the move away from a black-white racial polarity of former years.
