Heidi Tinsman

Imagining our Americas : toward a transnational frame

This rich interdisciplinary collection of essays advocates and models a hemispheric approach to the study of the Americas. Taken together, the essays examine North and South America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific as a broad region transcending both national boundaries and the dichotomy between North and South. In the volume’s substantial introduction, the editors, an anthropologist and a historian, explain the need to move beyond the paradigm of U.S. American Studies and Latin American Studies as two distinct fields. They point out the Cold War origins of area studies, and they note how many of the Americas’ most significant social formations have spanned borders if not continents: diverse and complex indigenous societies, European conquest and colonization, African slavery, Enlightenment-based independence movements, mass immigrations, and neoliberal economies. Scholars of literature, ethnic studies, and regional studies as well as of anthropology and history, the contributors focus on the Americas as a broadly conceived geographic, political, and cultural formation. Among the essays are explorations of the varied histories of African Americans’ presence in Mexican and Chicano communities, the different racial and class meanings that the Colombian musical genre cumbia assumes as it is absorbed across national borders, and the contrasting visions of anticolonial struggle embodied in the writings of two literary giants and national heroes: Jose Marti of Cuba and Jose Rizal of the Philippines. One contributor shows how a pidgin-language mixture of Japanese, Hawaiian, and English allowed second-generation Japanese immigrants to critique Hawaii’s plantation labor system as well as Japanese hierarchies of gender, generation, and race. Another examines the troubled history of U.S. gay and lesbian solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. Building on and moving beyond previous scholarship, this collection illuminates the productive intellectual and political lines of inquiry opened by a focus on the Americas. Contributors . Rachel Adams, Victor Bascara, John D. Blanco, Alyosha Goldstein, Hector Fernandez L’Hoeste, Ian Lekus, Caroline F. Levander, Susan Y. Najita, Rebecca Schreiber, Sandhya Shukla, Harilaos Stecopoulos, Michelle Stephens, Heidi Tinsman, Nick Turse, Rob Wilson

It's a Man's World? World History Meets the History of Masculinity, in Latin American Studies, for Instance

This article explores the vexed relationship between studies of gender and sexuality, especially as they relate to masculinity, and the growing field of world history. These bodies of scholarship have largely remained separate, even antagonistic, despite shared thematic concerns with transnational flows. Overall, world historians privilege political economy and global connections, while historians of gender and sexuality concern themselves with the cultural production of difference in specific locales. The case of U.S.-based Latin American studies offers ways of thinking across the culture versus economy divide; above all, it suggests that world history can usefully be narrated as a story of masculinities.

Sexuality in the Americas

Teaching about sex has always been a radical endeavor. From early demands that the personal be recognized as political to more recent proclamations about sexuality’s unstable and subversive potential, teaching about sex has offered the chance to blur boundaries and invert paradigms. It has challenged longstanding truisms about causation, inclusion, and benefit. It has redefined what constitutes “politics” and “history” and how they operate. It has made desire and coercion, agency and discipline all part of the same conversation. The two essays and syllabi included in this section offer two highly original courses on the history of sexuality in the Americas. Part of that originality lies in the fact that both authors—Sharon Block, who teaches American history at the University of California, Irvine, and Pete Sigal, who teaches Latin American history at California State University, Los Angeles—are trained as colonialists and draw much of their materials from early-modern and pre-Columbian histories and primary sources. Block and Sigal both note that university courses on sexuality overwhelmingly deal with the modern period, if not the contemporary present. This has tended to perpetuate myths about sexuality either as a timeless constant or as the end point of a linear progression from the backward and repressed sex of yore to the sexual diversity and freedom of today. Block’s course, “Early American Sexuality,” and Sigal’s course, “To Cross the Sexual Borderlands,” both challenge students to consider the great variety of sexual practices and meanings prior to the nineteenth century and, in particular, to rethink notions about evolutionary liberation. Both courses heavily emphasize the way in which European conquest and colonization disciplined sexual bodies, using sex to create new racial and class inequalities. Sigal’s

Cold War Memories

The Cold War is making a comeback. At a time when debates over Middle East crisis and globalization have relegated Latin America to the peripheries of political and academic discussion, two superb books by Greg Grandin and Steve Stern argue that the Cold War politics in Latin America profoundly shape today’s political landscape. Indeed, these works seriously question whether the Cold War was ever ‘over’, and they passionately remind us that the history of Latin America has had repercussions far beyond the Americas. Greg Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War is part political essay, part social history of twentieth-century Guatemala. The elegantly written introduction and conclusion (which stand apart as essays in their own right) present a sweeping critique of Cold War dynamics throughout Latin America as a region. The book is a story about Q’eqchi’ Maya activism in north-eastern Guatemala which culminated in a 1978 massacre by the Guatemalan army. Grandin proposes Guatemalan history as particularly exemplary of Latin America’s Cold War since, ‘Guatemala, even more than Cuba’ was the staging ground for the USA’s continental fight against communism. The 1954 US-backed military coup against the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz was long hailed by the State Department as a successful model for ‘regime change’ elsewhere; and following Ronald Reagan’s election, Guatemala, along with El Salvador and Nicaragua, became what Grandin grimly calls ‘the last killing fields’ in the final battle between the super powers. Grandin offers a powerful challenge to the ‘triumphalist view’ of the US Cold War victory which posits the United States as the ‘saviour of democracy’. He argues instead that the Cold War was a series of protracted political struggles in which the US repeatedly supported authoritarian projects, the cumulative effect of which was to shift fundamentally the meaning of democracy for the worse. Whereas in the mid-twentieth century ‘democracy’ was tied to Social History Vol. 34 No. 4 November 2009

Introduction: Histories of Latin Americanisms

Thinking in terms of “Americas”-wide projects is a long-standing intellectual and political tradition in Latin America, with roots extending back to colonial times. In the twentieth century, a Latin American sensibility—or Latinamericanismo— became especially associated with the left-leaning goals of sovereign economic development, cultural autonomy, and anti-imperialist struggle. This sensibility was distinct from (though often intimately shaped by) the emergence of Latin American studies in the United States as a disciplinary field backed by U.S. government money and focused on fighting communism and shoring up U.S. regional power. Inside Latin America, in contrast, Latinamercanismo was more firmly tied to principles of Third World solidarity and hemispheric national liberation. Although there existed multiple, competing strands of Latinamericanismo—socialist, Catholic, revolutionary, developmentalist, and so on—they often shared points of critique about the detrimental impact of U.S. (or Western) capitalism and foreign policy and/or embraced similar fantasies about the cultural commonalities that bound “Latin Americans” together. In the last decade and a half, many of the assumptions that undergirded Latinamericanismo have been called into question. The end of the cold war and the triumph of neoliberal globalization particularly contributed to this, but so have social movements and cultural paradigms that stress Latin America’s profound heterogeneity. Old questions reassert themselves: What is Latin America, or the Latin American? And what does it mean to embrace a Latin American sensibility? In the following special forum, four leading Latin American intellectuals reflect on the relevance of Latinamericanismo, both in its past and in its possible