Over the past two decades, hemispherism—in the form of books, journals, curricula, and even a few highly coveted teaching posts—has transformed American studies. It would seem that Americanists have left behind a US-centric and neoimperialist discipline; they now favor one in which America is a “hemispheric” geopolitical configuration. Yet, much like successful British colonization in the “New World” nearly a century after the Spanish Conquista, the development is belated. Currently, ideological suspicion substitutes for more difficult—and rewarding—conversations with other voices of the Americas via languages and literatures as inaugurated by the Peruvian scholar Luis Alberto Sánchez in the 1930s and absorbed by US academia as “Literature of the Americas” in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, judging from the foci and scope of two of the three books under discussion here, maybe literature—as a gateway to the hemispheric differences that remain a desideratum—is making a comeback.
Lee Bebout’s Whiteness on the...
