ABSTRACT
Inter-American approaches Inter-American Studies seeks to enlarge our perspective; it invites us to look beyond the national toward the hemispheric, or at the least to situate the regional and the national in the bigger picture of the New World. While an inter-American approach runs the risk of glossing over differences and while few scholars can claim expertise on the whole Western Hemisphere, Inter-American Studies maintains that the relevance and impact of many of the phenomena we study in our academic practice do not stop at national borderlines. Nor do they stop at social, political, gendered, ethnic, religious, educational, economic, historical, ideological, or any other borderlines. Intent on exploring what Herbert Eugene Bolton called the ‘wider horizons,’ Inter-American Studies proposes a departure from insular thinking and an espousal of hemispheric contexts. While the challenges of an inter-American academic practice are numerous, 1 the rewards are even more so.
