Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations

Description

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period.Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development. Contents Foreword Preface I: Theoretical Concerns Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of US.-Latin American Relations The Decentered Center and the Expansionist Periphery: The Paradoxes of Foreign-Local Encounter The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire II: Empirical Studies Landscape and the Imperial Subject: US. Images of the Andes, 1859-1930 Love in the Tropics: Marriage, Divorce, and the Construction of Benevolent Colonialism in Puerto Rico, 1898-1910 Mercenaries in the Theater of War: Publicity, Technology, and the Illusion of Power during the Brazilian Naval Revolt of 1893 The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism, Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926-1934 The Cult of the Airplane among US. Military Men and Dominicans during the US. Occupation and the Trujillo Regime Central American Encounters with Rockefeller Public Health, 1914-1921 Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit Company Banana Enclave in Colombia From Welfare Capitalism to the Free Market in Chile: Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Copper Mines Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: US. Film Propaganda in Cold War Mexico Gringo Chickens with Worms: Food and Nationalism in the Dominican Republic III: Final Reflections Turning to Culture Social Fields and Cultural Encounters From Reading to Seeing: Doing and Undoing Imperialism in the Visual Arts Contributors Index