Transamerican Transformations and American Literatures

Abstract

Continental Divides: Remapping Cultures of by Rachel Adams University of Chicago Press, 2009. 310 pages The turn in American Studies is often traced to early 1990s, when impact of postcolonial studies and global perspectives was being felt even within reputedly isolationist realms of American Studies. Seminal pieces such as Carolyn Porter's What We that We Don't Know and influential essays and collections by Donald Pease, Jose David Saldivar, Doris Sommer, Amy Kaplan, and John Carlos Rowe, among others, articulated growing awareness that did not stand by, or even for, itself, even if most scholars in field (at least in US) seemed to have assumed so. Decentering United States in descriptions of has of course been precisely point of much scholarly and cultural commentary across Western Hemisphere, at least since nineteenth century when US domination became increasingly palpable and inescapable. As Jose Marti famously noted, American octopus was already looming over nuestra America (Our America) by mid 1800s and showed no signs of slowing its drive for economic and political domination of continent. Well aware of these historical and political genealogies, Rachel Adams has taken up baton of comparative American Studies in a lucid and elegant book. Offering a valuable corrective to some of already-solidifying archives and habits of thought that have come to characterize emerging field of study and cultural production focusing on Americas, Adams's book announces its ambitions in a title that turns out to be impressively precise: Continental Divides: Remapping Cultures of North. America. There is nothing accidental about either Adams's emphasis on or active process of remapping, and she mines even seemingly static terms such as cultures and North America for their significance to a project that works from outset to set itself apart from mainstream of Americanist scholarship. As her introduction repeatedly notes, Adams hopes that frame of continent of will underline how nation-states, their borders, and even continent itself are imagined places: i.e., somewhat arbitrary products of a history of contingent and politically charged events and turns. In defamiliarizing continent as a figure in mapping (as opposed to perhaps more standard interrogations of in American Studies), Adams raises interesting conceptual questions that draw on an influential line of hemispheric thought including Edmundo O'Gorman on the invention of America (9) and world systems theory (10) of Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein. In setting up these various threads and sources, introduction to Continental Divides offers a comprehensive overview of transamerican thinking and indicates how history of such thinking informs more specific readings that follow. The nation provides main target of Adams's announced desire to grant new centrality to people and places that have been marginalized by official histories of conquest and nation building, thus bringing a repertoire of texts and subjects into view (7). Similar interrogations of nation-state have been, by many estimations, most transformative angle brought to American studies by transnational approaches. Adams's introduction does an admirable job of explaining how and why her continental frame shifts and critiques reliance on nation as primary rubric of literary and cultural analysis, even as she highlights neglect given to marginalized national entities--Mexico and Canada, especially in relation to one another--in most critical studies of America. The overall organization of Continental Divides thus involves a series of texts and conceptual questions that highlight ambivalent status of national borders in America, where they function as political and affective fictions and/or limits. …