Hemispheric American Studies
Caroline F Levander editor Robert S Levine editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Rutgers University Press
Published:4th Oct '07
Should be back in stock very soon
This landmark collection brings together a range of exciting new comparative work in the burgeoning field of hemispheric studies. Scholars working in the fields of Latin American studies, Asian American studies, American studies, American literature, African Diaspora studies, and comparative literature address the urgent question of how scholars might reframe disciplinary boundaries within the broad area of what is generally called American studies. The essays take as their starting points such questions as: What happens to American literary, political, historical, and cultural studies if we recognize the interdependency of nation-state developments throughout all the Americas? What happens if we recognize the nation as historically evolving and contingent rather than already formed? Finally, what happens if the "fixed" borders of a nation are recognized not only as historically produced political constructs but also as component parts of a deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?
With essays that examine stamps, cartoons, novels, film, art, music, travel documents, and governmental publications, Hemispheric American Studies seeks to excavate the complex cultural history of texts and discourses across the ever-changing and stratified geopolitical and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere. This collection promises to chart new directions in American literary and cultural studies.
These superb essays represent cutting edge contributions to the burgeoning field of transnational and hemispheric studies, and expand its scholarship by offering new ways in which scholars might refocus, from the national to the hemispheric and global. This collection's aim to decenter American Studies is an imperative to the evolution of the field. -- Emory Elliott * Distinguished Professor and Director, Center for Ideas and Society at the Univer *
ISBN: 9780813542232
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 25mm
Weight: 510g
366 pages