Caroline Levander - Hemispheric American Studies

Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 435–447, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00532.
Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary

Thoughts on Research and Pedagogical
Challenges
Caroline Levander
Rice University
Abstract
Over the past two decades, important work in many academic disciplines has
increasingly begun to break down many of the regional and national boundaries
that have long characterized the study of the Americas. Future research and
curriculum on the hemisphere will, no doubt, continue to emphasize comparative
and cross regional studies. What happens to U.S. and Americas literary and
cultural studies if we recognize the asymmetry and interdependency of nation-state
development throughout the hemisphere? This is the question the following
article addresses.
Over the past two decades, important work in many academic disciplines
has increasingly begun to break down many of the regional and national
boundaries that have long characterized the study of the Americas. Future
research and curriculum on the hemisphere will, no doubt, continue to
emphasize comparative and cross regional studies. New graduate and
undergraduate programs at institutions such as University of Southern
California, Indiana University, and the University of Toronto, new journals
such as Comparative American Literature and Review of International American
Studies, new book series such as ‘Imagining the Americas’ (Oxford University
Press), and new associations such as the International American Studies
Association mark a dramatic shift in focus away from nation-based
frameworks. Interdisciplinary work that moves beyond analysis of any one
nation in isolation and that places urgent intellectual questions in the
larger matrix of the Americas as a hemisphere has begun to assume academic
prominence across humanities and social science disciplines. This textured,
comparative study has promoted creative, original insights into the full
complexities of life and thought in the Americas.
Yet such a set of practices provokes some complex questions: What
happens to U.S. and Americas literary and cultural studies if we recognize
the asymmetry and interdependency of nation-state development throughout
the hemisphere? What happens if we let this recognition of the nation as
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436 Hemispheric American Studies
historically evolving and contingent – rather than already formed – revise

our conceptions of literary and cultural genealogies? Finally, what happens
if the ‘fixed’ borders of a nation are not only recognized as historically
produced political constructs that can be ignored, imaginatively reconfigured,
and variously contested, but are also recognized as component parts of a
deeper, more multilayered series of national and indigenous histories?
Addressing such questions opens up the possibility of developing not
only a broader definition of what the United States includes but a more
historically complex view of the creative tensions and interdependencies
that are embedded within and threaten to undo any fixed notion of
‘America’. In American literary studies, for example, new scholarship has
documented how key cultural figures ranging from Charles Brockden
Brown to Washington Irving, John Adams to Walt Whitman, James Fenimore
Cooper to Herman Melville, Pauline Hopkins to William Faulkner located
portions of the United States within hemispheric as well as national
frameworks. Whitman’s ‘The Spanish Element in our Nationality’, for
example, argues that the ‘composite American identity’ that all Americans
should celebrate depends on an ever-present, if too often ‘invisibl[e]’,
‘Spanish character’ (1147)1. Such attention to the cross-filiations and com-
posite national identities comprising ‘American identity’ puts Whitman in
direct dialogue with José Martí, whose America is, of necessity, racially
and ethnically hybrid.
In this essay, I will provide an overview of the large questions with
which this emerging area of inquiry wrestles. I will then turn to two
related questions that a hemispheric studies approach pose to individual
disciplines such as American literature, history, and religious studies: namely
how does a hemispheric rather than a nation-based approach impact and
transform teaching and research? What new tools and methods does such
a model require for pedagogy and scholarship? Key to a hemispheric studies
practice is the notion that opening up fields of inquiry to acknowledge
the instability and fluidity of local, regional, and national communities
does not simply involve ‘including’ more texts and histories in our existing
disciplinary fields. As importantly, such an approach asks us to rethink
how we understand and access those texts and histories. Therefore this
essay concludes by considering programmatic and pedagogical questions
(how does one teach hemispheric studies at undergraduate and graduate
levels?) and research questions (what new tools, methods, and approaches
are necessary?). After charting some of the key debates that a hemispheric
studies paradigm has generated, I will conclude by turning to its potential
impact on teaching and research tools.
Mapping New Directions in American Studies

In 1994 an essay appeared in American Literary History that shook up the
field. Carolyn Porter’s ‘What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping
© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 435–447, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00532.x
Hemispheric American Studies 437
American Literary Studies’ accused U.S. Americanists of failing to question

the most fundamental assumption of their field-imaginary: that the nation
itself should be ‘the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis’2. Nation-based
literary study, Porter argued, has traditionally rested on the bedrock of
‘an idealized cultural nationalism now set in relief by its own failures’, and
she made the rather cutting point (via the ‘what we know that we don’t
know’ of her title) that Americanists had become increasingly aware of
this conceptual blindspot (470). Her essay thus aspired to reconstruct the
field through a sort of critical shock therapy, as she urged Americanists to
break away from the bounded unit of the U.S. nation and aspire to bring
into their critical work nothing less than ‘a quadruple set of relations’:
between Africa and the Americas, Europe and Latin America, Latin
America and North America, and North America and Europe. The starting
point for such a massive project of disciplinary reconstruction, she suggested,
should be a reconsideration of U.S. literary and cultural histories in
the larger territorial (and discursive) frame of the ‘American’ hemisphere.
The payoff of attending to ‘cultural, political, and economic relations
between and within the Americas’ would be a fissuring and relativizing
of ‘America’, in which new and more historically responsive stories and
perspectives would come into focus. Such an approach would be quite
different from the topographical comparative models that dominated
‘literature of the Americas’ study of the 1980s and early 1990s; instead, she
imagined a ‘field reconstellated by a historicized politics of location’ (510).
Porter’s influential call for an enhanced hemispheric – indeed trans-
hemispheric – literary and cultural study in fact appeared at the moment
when transnational, postnational, and empire studies were coming into a
new prominence. A year earlier Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease had
brought out their Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993), and there
quickly followed a number of monographs and collections that both called
for and demonstrated the value of moving beyond the frame of the nation.
This corpus includes but is not limited to Pease’s National Identities and
Post-Americanist Narratives (1994), Jeffrey Belnap and Raúl Fernández’s
‘José Marti’s “Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies’
(1998), Doris Sommer’s Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority
Writings in the Americas (1999), John Carlos Rowe’s Post-National American
Studies (2000), Walter Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000), Shelley
Streeby’s American Sensations (2002), Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire
(2002), Kirsten Silva Gruesz’s Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican
Origins of Latino Writing (2002), Ralph Bauer’s The Cultural Geography of
American Literature (2003), Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn’s Look Away: The
U.S. South in New World Studies (2004), Anna Brickhouse’s Transamerican
Literary Relations (2004), and Rodrigo Lazo’s Writing to Cuba (2005). The
2002 founding of the journal Comparative American Studies signaled the
institutional recognition of the field’s importance, and that journal and
others have recently featured a spate of special issues that have specifically
addressed connections between U.S. literary and cultural history and the
Americas. Notable in this regard are the 2003 special issue of PMLA
edited by Djelal Kadir on ‘America, the Idea, the Literature’; the 2003
special issue of Modern Fiction Studies edited by Paula Moya and Ramón
Saldivar on ‘Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary’; the 2004 special
issue of Radical History Review edited by Sandhya Shukla and Heidi
Tinsman on ‘Our Americas: Political and Cultural Imaginings’; and the
2006 special issue of American Literary History edited by Caroline Levander
and Robert Levine on ‘Hemispheric American Literary History’. While Porter
in the 1994 ALH could lament the dearth of comparative hemispheric
work and the failure of U.S. Americanists to wrestle with issues of power
and location, the next ten years would produce such an outpouring that
Susan Gillman, in a review essay in a 2005 issue of ALH, could bemusingly
term Americanists’ turn to the hemispheric and trans-hemispheric ‘the New,
Newest thing’, remarking that Americanists ‘appear to be condemned
repeatedly’ to take note of such larger contexts ‘each time with the same
shock of the new’ (196)3.
As this extensive list suggests, much of the best recent critical work in
the field has responded to the challenges posed by Porter and by Janice
Radway’s 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association,
‘What’s in a Name?’. In that address, Radway called on scholars in American
Studies to move beyond nation-based analysis in order to consider the
ways in which U.S. nationality is ‘relationally defined and historically and
situationally variable’, and particularly to relinquish ‘the idea that [U.S.]
culture can be adequately conceived of as a unitary, uniform thing, as the
simple function of a fixed, isolated, and easily mapped territory’ (10, 15)4.
She also encouraged scholars to resist taking ‘America’ as a default term
for the United States. Accused of being both ‘too small’ because it equates
the United States with America and ‘too large’ because it overlooks local
subcultures within the U.S., American Studies has been undergoing a state
of conceptual transformation. The rich, wide-ranging scholarship outlined
above suggests the nature of that transformation. By putting pressure on the
word ‘American’ such scholarship links its subject with the larger hemispheric
world that American Studies has often seemed to exclude – a world that,
very much like the U.S. itself, emerged out of a series of colonial conflicts
and engagements. This work reveals that the ‘invention’ of a seemingly
autonomous and exceptionalist U.S. nationality developed in relation to
the more expansive geographies and longer histories of the Americas.
This body of recent scholarship, combined with the work of a number
of historians and critical theorists, has made apparent that the ideas of
America, Latin America, and the Western Hemisphere are invented rather
than found – constructed rather than natural. Such a distinction is not merely
rhetorical but has deep meaning for current critical Latin American Studies,
transnational inquiry, American Studies, and post-national commentaries.
Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America first popularized the idea
that America was not a continent waiting to be discovered but rather an

‘invention’ or conceptual category necessary to the consolidation of a
Western worldview. Scholars from Immanuel Wallerstein to Walter Mignolo
concur that the modern world-system generated in the long sixteenth century
depended upon the invention/creation of the Americas as a geographical
and cultural construct. Collectively, Wallerstein and like-minded theorists
approach this history not so much as a linear process of discovery but
rather as evolving theses that culminated in the dramatic moment when
the need to give meaning to the land mass that we now refer to as America
became more urgent than the need to continue to see the world as one
Island of the Earth or an Orbis Terrarum. From this perspective, then,
America as a conceptual entity literally did not exist until people made it.
This making was a process even for Columbus, who believed that he had
arrived at the eastern shores of the Orbis Terrarum or Asia, and not
‘America’, because the land mass he saw was imbued with a particular
ontological meaning meant to further the one Island of the Earth hypothesis
of geographers of the time.
If America was invented rather than discovered, so too were Latin
America and the Western Hemisphere ideas that accrued their own
particular ontological meanings over time. From Arthur Whitaker’s description
of how the Western Hemisphere emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth
century to Mignolo’s account of the ‘creation’ of Latin America in the
early to mid-nineteenth century, scholars have suggested that we recognize
that the past is transmitted forward through a spatial as well as a linear process.
The Western Hemisphere idea, for example, was a slow genetic process
that required not only the acquisition of knowledge but the development
of a new feeling of spatial compatibility, not only the spread of Enlightenment
political philosophy to North and South America but the belief that, as
Mexican statesman Lucas Alamán declared in 1826, ‘the similarity of their
political institutions has bound [the countries of America] even more
closely together, strengthening in them the dominion of just and liberal
principles’ (2)5. Just as this process of developing shared spatial consciousness
inevitably involved occluding, repressing, and appropriating other modes
of depicting the past and the numerous other constituencies that occupied
space within a temporal frame, so too did the process through which Latin
America emerged require the erasure or subordination of indigenous
populations. A story of creole and mestizo elites embracing a modernity that
required the simultaneous embracing of racism, the idea of Latin America
did not so much stand in opposition to as further articulate, and even enable,
the invention of America. While independence in all the Americas, including
the United States, helped to bring an end to external colonialism, it also
facilitated internal colonialism through institutionalized slavery of certain
portions of the population and through the repression of indigenous histories,
knowledge, and cultural forms. The recovery of such occluded and contested
histories remains a crucial project of hemispheric studies.
Still, if nations and hemispheres are ideas or inventions, they are also
social realities with very real consequences for individuals and communities.
Thus Hemispheric Studies takes up questions such as what happens to
citizens of one nation when they enter another? How do bodies migrate
across nations? How are these migrations represented in a diverse range of
textual and cultural forms? Hemispheric Studies, most fundamentally, seeks
to excavate the complex cultural history of texts, discourses, and bodies
in motion and at rest across the evershifting and multilayered geopolitical
and cultural fields that collectively comprise the American hemisphere.
Humanities departments have historically tended to reinforce the idea
of the separate and free-standing nation-state, with attention to geopolitical
interchange generally following formal structures of colonialism. French
departments, for example, focus on French literature and culture, Hispanic
Studies departments on primarily Spanish, Central American, and South
American national traditions, and English departments on American and
English literature as separate if sometimes parallel genealogical entities.
Within such an intellectual milieu, area studies as practiced by Latin
Americanists in particular has offered the promise of crossing such national
and disciplinary boundaries and creating research fields that were organized
around rubrics other than the nation. Border studies, for example, has
focused on the particular locales that spring up at the crossroads of
national cultures. Yet, as Alberto Moreiras reminds us, the abandonment
of the national referent has not necessarily introduced new modes of
thinking, but rather has offered a series of alternative identities and localities
that all too often inadvertently replace and reinforce rather than unseat
the more traditional tools for U.S. cultural domination.
With its emphasis on taking account of overlapping and sedimented
histories, inter-American or Hemispheric Studies has profound implications
for current scholarly reconsiderations of area studies as a disciplinary practice,
as well as for thinking about the possibilities of revitalizing conversations
between Latin American and American Studies scholars and between
Latin Americanists working in the United States and in Latin America.
Since 1994 the divide between Latin American studies and American studies
has, in some respects, widened, with Latin Americanists often accusing
Americanists of appropriating specialized fields of knowledge. The all too
familiar exceptionalist critique of this ‘new’ American studies scholarship
targets scholarship that takes neighboring nations, regions, and communities
as its subject because such scholarship too often assumes the U.S. nation
as the default unit of intellectual engagement governing ‘comparativist’
approaches. This body of work ignores scholarship that has been done in
other fields, such as Canadian and Latin American studies, and that is often
published in non-U.S. venues and in languages other than English. As a
result, it too often reproduces the same totalizing structures of U.S. privilege
that include ‘others’ only to subordinate them to U.S. interests, keeping
the U.S. at the center of seemingly pluralist debate. Such a scenario posits
U.S. Americanists either as naïve expansionists or cosmopolitan humanists

and Latin American area studies scholars as the worldly wise proponents
of anti-imperialist scholarship. Yet Candace Slater’s observation that Latin
American studies generally excludes Brazil and other non-Spanish-speaking
regions and is thus in its own right exceptionalist reminds us that allegations
of exceptionalism can cut in multiple directions.
From a spatio-temporal vantage point that Hemispheric Studies
encourages, we see that location is always crossed – that Latin Americanists
as well as U.S. Americanists have historically tended to think from a colonial
discourse that emerges from and all too often depends upon histories of
conquest and colonization. The historic complaints by Latin Americanists
that the U.S. has appropriated the name ‘America’ to refer to itself as a
country and in so doing has marginalized Latin America, for example,
insufficiently capture the sometimes shared and sometimes conflict-ridden
colonial histories that shaped the Americas. Precisely because colonialism has
not been the sole province of the United States, efforts to invert the naturalized
view of the Americas, with the South occupying a more privileged position,
ultimately only changes the content, but not the terms of the conversation,
as Mignolo has pointed out. In short, such an approach finally proves an
inadequate response to the historical processes that have yielded the ideas
of nation and hemisphere in the first place. Because area studies typically
emphasize space (or geographical locale) over time, it has tended to uphold
a constant, crystallized idea of national identity. Once we recognize that
the nation is not the realization of an original essence but a historical
configuration designed to include certain groups and exclude others, we
are able to see the nation as a relational identity that emerges through
constant collaboration, dialogue, and dissension. Such a relational approach
to national identity attends to the uneven power relations that form and
are too often erased within concepts of national unity.
In summary, a hemispheric approach shifts the critical focus from the
terms under which various constituencies are included or excluded within
an already established U.S. governing body to how those seemingly other
constituencies actually operate as dynamic parts of multiple nations, some
of which deny their presence. Such an approach, not surprisingly, also acts
as a corrective to critical endeavors to understand geographic encounters
in the hemisphere in terms of a developing US-centered world system,
because it suggests the importance of doing literary and cultural history
from the vantage point of a polycentric American hemisphere with no
dominant center. Studies that focus on a US-centered system carrying
out imperial designs in different geographic locales have made U.S.
nation-building the default center of comparativist analysis, often in
unhelpful ways. Similarly, scholarship focusing on Latin American cultures
has tended to reinforce the fixed boundaries demarcating nations. Yet, the
nation is not a unit that travels very well in the American hemisphere, as
Sara Castro-Klarén has pointed out. Unlike the nineteenth-century U.S.,
states often preceded nations in Latin America, and Latin American

communities often remained ‘states in search of nationhood’ precisely because
the colonization of Latin America brought together diverse racial groups, each
of which was riven internally by ethnic diversity. Recognizing the productive
tensions resulting from these asymmetries creates the opportunity for
charting the convergences – rather than divergences – that sustain seemingly
autonomous geopolitical structures within the American hemisphere. Shifting
the analytical axis along which traditional national literary genealogies
generally operate, while relinquishing what can sometimes be the blinding
imperatives of the ‘new’, can enable us to remember what we may have
known but have tended to forget (in the wake of the ever present new)
in order to rethink the contours, boundaries, and contexts of American
literary and cultural studies.
Pedagogy
While outstanding universities and scholars are producing innovative and
paradigm-shifting research, and new journals provide critical venues for
article-length scholarship that captures this shift in intellectual perspective,
there remains limited attention to pedagogical issues resulting from the
growth of inter-American, or American Hemispheric Studies. Current
developments in scholarship wrestle with the nature and meaning, the
content and theoretical arrangements, marking the tension between nation
and hemisphere. And, courses are developed within new programs that
highlight hemispheric study. Still what remains largely unconsidered are
such questions as: How does attention to the American Hemisphere as an
overarching conceptual framework, and the comparative and connective
analysis such a framework encourages, effect issues of pedagogy? How
does one teach the Americas? Individual courses are being developed but
to date there has been no consideration of the fundamental challenges that
a hemispheric studies perspective raises. Exploring the critical dimensions
of these very questions is necessary for students and faculty working in
traditional disciplines and wanting to chart the new possibilities for
Americanist study opened up when ‘America’ is understood not as a
synonym for an isolated United States but as a network of cultural influences
that have extended across the hemisphere from the period of colonization
to the present.
College and graduate students often enter higher education with notions
of knowledge that are based upon the very paradigms of nation challenged
by hemispheric approaches. Mindful of this, teaching the Americas within
high school and college curriculum necessitates new methodological
approaches that approach specific disciplines from non-traditional vantage
points. A hemispheric approach to the cornerstone disciplines of religion,
literature, history, and sociology raises challenging questions that will
reshape pedagogy within and across university curricula over the next
decade: How do courses with traditional U.S. foci (U.S. Literature Survey
and the U.S. History Survey, for example) ‘include’ other, often lost or
marginalized stories? What different methods of analysis are needed when
these stories become part of our teaching toolbox? How do teachers address
the challenges of multi-lingualism that an Americas approach raises? Is it
possible to teach the more complex, multilayered, and often obscured
literary, religious, social, and religious histories of the Americas within
existing curricular constraints? If so, what effective strategies have teachers
developed to meet the very real demands of adding more material in
already existing syllabi?
A two-pronged approach that develops innovative Americas coursework
within individual departments and existing majors while reaching across
geographic divides can produce exciting pedagogic opportunities. A survey
of 19th-century American literature, for example, can adopt such an
approach. Pairing slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Cuban writer
Juan Francisco Manzano sheds new light on a form – the slave narrative
– that we tend to think of as a primarily U.S. genre. Manzano’s is one of
the only extant South American slave narratives, and it was written in
1840 at the request of British abolitionist and Cuban resident Richard
Madden. Madden’s translation was the first and for many decades the only
published version of the narrative, and the text circulated widely throughout
Britain (as British abolitionist propaganda) long before it was available in
Cuba or the United States. Indeed it is quite possible that Douglass read
Manzano’s narrative during one of his trips to England. Even this very
brief summary of the textual circulation of a Cuban slave narrative illustrates
how geographic boundaries are always already crossed – how literary forms
and genealogies are inextricably interwoven and interdependent rather than
highly differentiated. Finally, reading Manzano and Douglass with and
against each other takes seriously Janice Radway’s challenge that literary
scholars resist taking ‘America’ as a default term for the United States.
In the social sciences, a sociology course on Urban Life and Systems,
for example, suggests the utility of this approach for empirically based
social science disciplines. In such a course students can be assigned a local
neighborhood to study and write ethnographies. Students can be located
in neighborhoods filled with people from different parts of the Americas,
and when needed Spanish speakers can be included in the students’ study
teams. Students spend a semester not only getting classroom instruction
on urban life, but being part of their assigned neighborhoods – attending
houses of worship, working as volunteers in schools, attending community
meetings, and so on. As these brief examples suggest, a hemispheric rather
than nation-bound approach can enrich and transform humanities and
social science education for those teaching and studying traditional
Americanist fields.
Developing a multicourse Hemispheric Studies research program out of
such individual courses requires students to develop multidisciplinary
research skill sets. Therefore Hemispheric Studies coursework should

collectively aim at helping students acquire deep knowledge in the particular
disciplines necessary for writing genuinely comparative, thoroughly researched
papers and dissertations. For example, a student writing a dissertation on
North American missionary women’s work in Central and South America
would need training in multiple histories, as well as in the language and
cultural practices of multiple geographic areas. A hemispheric studies
curriculum engages cognate disciplines to equip students with the appropriate
disciplinary tools for projects that chart the overlapping and mutually
informing cultures and histories of the hemisphere. Practically speaking,
a Ph.D. in Hemispheric Studies could be hired into any traditional
department – a history department, for example, organized around geographic
areas such as Brazil, the U.S. South, and Latin America – and would
create points of intellectual contact and collaboration among specialists
within such a department as well as creating new intellectual convergences
between disciplines.
The transition from a national to a hemispheric American Studies is
both exciting and daunting. On the one hand, it promises to reinvigorate
existing fields. On the other, it poses a serious challenge to received models
of intellectual training, research, evaluation, and curricular development.
Although many now recognize the importance of this transformation,
there is scant institutional support for those teachers who want to reconceive
their coursework within the rubric of this new research area. As a result,
faculty interested in reinventing existing coursework do so without the benefit
of senior mentors, dialogue, or curricular models. Therefore developing a
coherent Hemispheric Studies initiative requires that institutions actively
promote scholarly analysis of the American Hemisphere (North, Central,
and South) by bringing leading scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate
students from a variety of fields into rich and productive collaboration.
Research Tools and Methods

For many decades, the study of history and literature has been partitioned
into national categories, a division that is most evident in English and History
departments, where faculty subfields typically emphasize two distinct British
and American tracks. Recently the field has undergone a profound
transformation in which these more traditional divisions have given way
to other organizational models such as histories and literatures in English,
regional, world, and global contexts. Innovative geographic models have
provided one of the most important sources for such reconfiguration,
replacing categories of national literature and history with transnational
rubrics such as the Pacific Rim, the transatlantic, the formerly colonized
world, the Caribbean, or the Black Atlantic. Yet the question remains:
what new research models are needed when scholars undertake to explore
the new possibilities for Americanist study opened up when America is
understood not as a synonym for an isolated United States but a network

of cultural filiations that have extended across the hemisphere from the
period of colonization to the present? A new, hemispheric approach to
the past, in sum, necessitates new research tools and requires new methods
of historical and literary analysis.
One such tool can be found in the recent emergence of digital archives.
From its inception in the fifteenth century, the history of print has been
in close relationship with the history of capitalism, and the history of
nationalism in Western culture. At least since the eighteenth century, Western
print culture has therefore traditionally reinforced the importance of the
nation-state as the default frame of literary and historical reference. Still today,
widely disseminated historical collections and literary anthologies, published
for profit under the economic pressures of the highly capital-intensive print
business, tend to include those materials that uphold, rather than complicate,
national paradigms. The digital archive, by contrast, can offer new
opportunities for rethinking the nation-state as the organizing rubric for
literary and cultural history of the Americas. Its digital medium offers
unique opportunities for a hemispheric approach to historical and literary
analysis in two important ways. First, because digital archives like University
of Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) and the plethora of
digital archives undertaken by University of Virginia are published not for
profit but rather for open access, they are free to bring together materials
from throughout the Americas, including but not limited to the U.S.
American nation state, as well as rare texts and texts in the original language
that offer a new level of access for research and pedagogy. The second key
advantage of the digital over the print medium is its potential for
international access and scholarly collaboration as well as editorial partnership.
Through its dissemination on the World Wide Web, a digital archive can
reach an international audience of scholars, researchers, and students who
may not otherwise have access to documents housed in U.S. archives.
Moreover, no single archive has all the materials that scholars might require
in their research and teaching. Unlike the print medium, the digital
medium makes possible an unprecedented level of editorial collaboration
through hyper-textual cross-referencing in cyber space. Because digital
archives make available materials that are dispersed in different geographic
locations, they facilitate collaboration and intellectual exchange among an
international audience. In short, the digital medium offers rich opportunities
for transnational exchange and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric
approach to history.
In addition to new digital archives, new research communities are springing
up to meet the needs of this emerging field of inquiry. The National
Endowment for the Humanities sponsors faculty seminars such as ‘Toward
a Hemispheric American Literature’; ‘Globalizing the Americas’ has become
the topic of conferences and seminars at institutions like the National
Humanities Center, University of Toronto, and Indiana University; and book
series and journals are being created to disseminate the newest research in
this emerging scholarly field. Finally, new methods of doing research are
emerging that address the challenges of hemispheric studies research.
More courses are being co-taught by specialists in diverse aspects of a given
seminar’s topic. The traditional humanities research model of single-author
books is giving way to collaborative research, that is being undertaken by
scholars who recognize that hemispheric studies work requires diverse fields
of expertise. Increasingly, multiauthor books and articles as well as grant
proposals by scholars working in this interdisciplinary field are challenging
longstanding models of academic achievement. These collaborative teaching
and research ventures are slowly transforming humanities assessment tools for
promotion and tenure. In the next decade more new communities, methods,
and tools are sure to emerge to meet the challenges and opportunities
that a hemispheric studies approach affords.
Short Biography
Caroline Levander is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities
Research Center at Rice University. She is co-editor of a new book series,
Imagining the Americas, with Oxford University Press, co-founder of the
Americas Colloquium at Rice University, and has developed the Rice
Americas Archive <http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~americas/archive>. In collabora-
tion with University of Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive, the
Americas Archive has generated the Our Americas Archive Partnership
<http://carolinelevander.rice.edu/Americas%20Archive%20partnership.html>.
In 2007, she was awarded an NEH grant to co-teach an NEH Summer
Seminar, ‘Towards a Hemispheric American Literature’ and was invited to
lead a National Humanities Center Dupont Seminar on ‘The Globalization
of American Literary Studies’. She has recently co-edited with Robert
Levine Hemispheric American Studies (Rutgers UP) and a special issue of
American Literary History, ‘Hemispheric American Literary History’, 18.3
(Summer 2006). Her research begins with the acknowledgment that literary
production, social theory and political cultures were integrally blended in
the pre-20th-century U.S. Her research therefore considers the dual questions
of American literature’s political impact and American political culture’s
literary effects. Most broadly, her work explores the combined cultural impact
of political, social, and literary discourses on historically disenfranchised
groups including women, children, and racial others. Voices of the Nation:
Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature
(Cambridge UP, 1998), for example, focuses on women and public life,
while Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas
Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois (Duke UP, 2006) explores the child’s obscured
links to the racial politics governing U.S. national culture. In order to
bring literary and political texts into the most richly productive play, she
focuses on diverse archival sources as well as a wide range of literary
sources to show how political representation in the U.S. emerges and

continues to be shaped by the ‘fact’ of gender and racial identity.
Notes
Correspondence address: Humanities Research Center MS 620, Rice University, 6100 Main
St., Houston, TX 77005, USA. Email: clevande@rice.edu.
1
Walt Whitman, ‘The Spanish Element in Our Nationality’, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose.
Ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1146–8.
2
Carolyn Porter, ‘What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary
Studies’, American Literary History 6 (1994): 467–526, 470.
3
Susan Gillman, ‘The New, Newest Thing: Have American Studies Gone Imperial?’, American
Literary History 17 (2005): 196–214, 196.
4
Janice Radway, ‘What’s in a Name?: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,
November 20, 1998’, American Quarterly 51 (1999): 10, 15.
5
Qtd. In Alberto Morerias, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural
Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 2.
Works Cited
Bauer, Ralph. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Brickhouse, Anna. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Gillman, Susan. ‘The New, Newest Thing: Have American Studies Gone Imperial?’, American
Literary History 17 (2005): 196–214.
Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
Lazo, Rodrigo. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Porter, Carolyn. ‘What We Know that We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies’.
American Literary History 6 (1994): 467–526.
Radway, Janice. ‘What’s in a Name?: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,
November 20, 1998’. American Quarterly 51 (1999): 10–15.
Whitman, Walt. ‘The Spanish Element in Our Nationality’, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose.
Ed. Justin Kaplan, (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1146–8.


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Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 435–447, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00532.

Hemispheric American Studies: Preliminary

historically evolving and contingent – rather than already formed – revise

Mapping New Directions in American Studies

American Literary Studies’ accused U.S. Americanists of failing to question

that America was not a continent waiting to be discovered but rather an

U.S. Americanists either as naïve expansionists or cosmopolitan humanists

states often preceded nations in Latin America, and Latin American

research skill sets. Therefore Hemispheric Studies coursework should

Research Tools and Methods

understood not as a synonym for an isolated United States but a network

sources to show how political representation in the U.S. emerges and

© 2008 The Author Literature Compass 5/3 (2008): 435–447, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00532.x

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