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

by Gilbert M. Joseph (Editor)

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.

Back Jacket

Close Encounters" is an unusual achievement, especially for a collection of essays. Not only does it offer an innovative, imaginative, insightful interrogation of relations between Latin America and the U.S.A., regarded through the lens of the most contemporary of theoretical discourses--it also delivers on a much more difficult objective: to open up a new, critically nuanced perspective on colonialism and postcoloniality, sui generis. A well-balanced mix of the epistemic and the empirical, of conceptual argument and case study, it demands attention from anyone interested in the Americas, anyone concerned with colonialism, anyone preoccupied with postcolonial politics, economy, and culture--anywhere."--John Comaroff, University of Chicago

Author Biography

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.