The history of communication studies across the Americas: A view from the United States

Abstract

This essay reflects on the potential for scholarship that sensitively treats the histories of media and communication research across the Americas. Writing from the contexts of U.S. communication studies, we begin by reflexively considering some of the bases of U.S. hegemony within the history and historiography of the field. We suggest the importance of work that provincializes and decenters the U.S. and also traces transnational flows and cross-regional dynamics that have constituted communication studies in all its versions across the Americas. We then illustrate what a transnational history of U.S.-Latin American entanglements might resemble, offering a provisional periodization from the early twentieth century to the present.