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.
Gilbert M. Joseph is Farnam Professor of History and Director of Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University.
Catherine C. LeGrand is Associate Professor of History at McGill University.
Ricardo D. Salvatore is Professor of History at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.
Table of Contents
Foreword / Fernando Coronil ix
Preface xiii
I: Theoretical Concerns
Close Encounters: Toward a New Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations / Gilbert M. Joseph 3
The Decentered Center and the Expansionist Periphery: The Paradoxes of Foreign-Local Encounter / Steve J. Stern 47
The Enterprise of Knowledge: Representational Machines of Informal Empire / Ricardo d. Salvatore 69
II: Empirical Studies
Landscape and the Imperial Subject: U.S. Images of the Andes, 1859-1930 / Deborah Poole 107
Love in the Tropics: Marriage, Divorce, and the Construction of Benevolent Colonialism in Puerto Rico, 1898-1910 / Eileen J. Findlay 139
Mercenaries in the Theater of War: Publicity, Technology, and the Illusion of Power during the Brazilian Naval Revolt of 1893 / Steven C. Topik 173
The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism, Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926-1934 / Michael J. Schroeder 208
The Cult of the Airplane among U.S. Military men and Dominicans during the U.S. Occupation and the Trujillo Regime / Eric Paul Roorda 269
Central American Encounters with Rockefeller Public Health, 1914-1921 / Steven Palmer 311
Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a United Fruit Company Banana Enclave in Colombia / Catherine C. LeGrand 333
From Welfare Capitalism to the Free Market in Chile: Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Copper Mines / Thomas Miller Klubock 369
Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propaganda in Cold War Mexico / Seth Fein 400
Gringo Chickens with Worms: Food and Nationalism in the Dominican Republic / Lauren Derby 451
III: Final Reflections
Turning to Culture / Emily S. Rosenberg 497
Social Fields and Cultural Encounters / William Roseberry 515
From Reading to Seeing: Doing and Undoing Imperialism in the Visual Arts / Maria del Carmen Suescun Pozas 525