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In the history of the early twentieth-century Americas, visions of hemispheric unity flourished, and the notion of a transnational American identity was embraced by artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. In The Pan American Imagination, Stephen Park explores the work of several Pan American modernists who challenged the body of knowledge being produced about Latin America, crossing the disciplinary boundaries of academia as well as the formal boundaries of artistic expression—from literary texts and travel writing to photography, painting, and dance. Park invests in an interdisciplinary approach, which he frames as a politically resistant intellectual practice, using it not only to examine the historical phenomenon of Pan Americanism but also to explore the implications for current transnational scholarship.
Reviews:
The Pan American Imagination is an insightful book that contributes unique, critical, and sound observations to the fields of American studies, intellectual history, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. It is well written, engaging, intellectually stimulating, and theoretically relevant to contemporary academic discourse on American identity, representation, and knowledge systems within the transnational arena. The Pan American Imagination is an exciting and timely contribution to hemispheric studies. Its beautifully layered readings of visual, fictional, and historical texts break apart old canons and outline new currents of twentieth-century transnationalist thought. The Pan American Imagination is a rich and wide-ranging study of hemispheric modernism—one that also has much to tell us about transnational American studies today. Stephen Park offers here a model of truly interdisciplinary scholarship.
Stephen M. Park is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Brownsville.
