America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies. Antonio Barrenechea

MELUS ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 225-227
Author(s):  
Ariel Jade Santos
Keyword(s):  
Hemispheric Studies

Hemispheric Studies

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 234-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Bauer
Keyword(s):  
American Studies ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Investigation ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Terra Incognita ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Previous Decade ◽  
The 1960S

When, in 1990, Gustavo Pérez Firmat asked, “Do the Americas have a common literature?” He was responding to a fledgling critical endeavor that had been pioneered during the previous decade in only a handful of studies, by such Latin Americanists and literary comparatists as M. J. Valdés, José Ballón, Bell Gale Chevigny, Gari Laguardia, Vera Kutzinski, Alfred Owen Aldridge, and Lois Parkinson Zamora (“Cheek” 2). Although “inter-American literary studies”—the comparative investigation of the “literatures and cultures of this hemisphere” as one unit of study—seemed to Pérez Firmat “something of a terra incognita” in 1990 (“Cheek” 1–2), the hemispheric conception of American studies had originated in the United States some sixty years earlier with the Berkeley historian Herbert Eugene Bolton (1870–1953), who argued, in his seminal 1932 presidential address to the American Historical Association, for an “essential unity” in the history of the Western hemisphere (472). Although the contributing historians in Lewis Hanke's 1964 collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common History? gave this “Bolton Thesis” a decidedly mixed review, the thesis provided the inspiration for Pérez Firmat's landmark collection and a starting point for much subsequent hemispheric scholarship. Meanwhile, inter-American studies has had a strong tradition in Europe that is, in fact, older than Pérez Firmat's or Hanke's collection. As early as the 1950s, the eminent Italian Americanist Antonello Gerbi was publishing his groundbreaking works in comparative hemispheric and Atlantic history, which studied the early modern polemic about the degenerative influences the New World environments had on plants, animals, and humans. Also, Hans Galinsky, at the University of Mainz, was exploring the literature of the European discovery and aesthetic forms such as the baroque in the early Americas from a comparative perspective in the 1960s.

Remapping Genre through Performance: From “American” to “Hemispheric” Studies

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (5) ◽  
pp. 1416-1430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Field Of Study ◽  
Hemispheric Studies ◽  
Sports Events ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Theater Music ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
A Performance

Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that scripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performance encompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such as dance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. A performance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas as performance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it is difficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What might the shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoire of cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis of the performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not only their object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions.

Hemispheric Studies Tomorrow

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-612
Author(s):  
Héctor Hoyos
Keyword(s):  
Hemispheric Studies
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