On March 7, S-USIH’s virtual 2020 annual meeting presented a panel, “U.S. Studies in an International Context,” featuring three scholars from Argentina, Brazil, and India discussing their research on the United States with three scholars from U.S. universities (to watch click below). Each of our guests prepared notes for a discussion we intended to be open-ended and mostly spontaneous, but organized around three big questions:
- How did you get involved in the study of life and culture in the United States? What questions did you need to answer? How has your work developed over the years? How does study of the US fit into your teaching?
- How did you become involved with the International American Studies Association? When and why was it formed?
- What new ways of thinking about the US would Americanists within the US have to deal with if they paid more attention to scholars outside the US working on the US?
Naturally, many interesting points never made their way into the spoken discussion. Reading the written notes our three guest scholars prepared beforehand, I thought that the texts, while not formal papers in any sense, might still be interesting to readers of the S-USIH blog. I made a few minor changes to the panelists’ texts for clarity and I adjusted punctuation to conform to U.S. standards.
To find out more about foreign scholars and their work on the United States, go to the website for the International Forum for U.S. Studies at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (https://ifuss.illinois.edu). Our other two panelists, Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Dominguez, founded and have led IFUSS. Since 2006, the International American Studies Association publishes RIAS, Review of International American Studies, an open-access on-line journal. The entire run of issues can be found at https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/issue/archive.
Ricardo D. Salvatore is Plenary Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires. He specializes in the economic, social and cultural history of Argentina, as well as the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. He is the author of ten books, including Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 (2018) and co-editor of Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (1998). For my review of Disciplinary Conquest on the S-USIH book review page, go to https://s-usih.org/2019/03/review-of-disciplinary-conquest-u-s-scholars-in-south-america-1900-1945/.
- How did you get involved in the study of life and culture in the United States? What questions did you need to answer?
In 1995, I was a fellow at the Program of Agrarian Studies, at Yale University, when Gilbert Joseph and Catherine LeGrand talked to me about a project they were planning. They wanted to do a conference on the impact that Post-colonial Theory, Gender Studies, Race Studies, and other novelties of the times for revising the very old question of Imperialism and Dependency in the American continent. I joined the discussion, and we put together one of the most vibrant conferences I have attended. From that conference, connecting scholars at the time rethinking the neocolonial encounter, came the edited volume Close Encounters of Empire, which has had wide readership.
Gil Joseph asked me to write a “theory paper.” Gil had written a brilliant summary and criticism of the literature on the history of Inter-American Relations and proposed a new perspective that was a real bombshell in the 1990s: that the history of inter-American relations should consider the multiple encounters carried out by different people in different geographies; that they should abandoned the fiction of nations as individuals and look for a multitude of actors not considered until then as makers of inter-American relations. All of these actors, Gil claimed produced enunciations about Hegemony and Cooperation, propositions about mutual recognition, dismissal, subalternization, collaboration, exchange, etc. Scholars who followed this line of thought would then look at military, diplomatic, and economic spheres of collaboration and hegemony, as only a minimal part of a giant cake. There was a multiplicity of “outsiders” and “insiders” that needed to be included in the new narrative of inter-American relations, particularly with the regard to the crucial issue of producing and circulating subjectivities and ideologies. The first move, then would be to de-center the history of inter-American relations into these multiple micro-encounters, eroding in the process the centrality of diplomatic, military and economic history.
Steve Stern wrote about the surprising novelty of a Center whose consciousness and knowledge were in the process of de-centering; and of a Latin American periphery that was expanding in knowledge and influence. My paper went into a different direction. I read tons of new stuff about postcolonial theory and tried to make sense of what united these micro-encounters of empire (hegemony-cooperation). Was it language, was it gender, class, race, or other of these big signifiers? Or did each micro-encounter (each outsider-insider encounter) construct its own “soft machine” of representing the mission, the territory, and the subject. I decided for the latter. I introduced two leading ideas: that each encounter—let’s us say, a Protestant missionary reporting about Indian life in the Chaco region—had to build a “representational machine” that made readable and understandable, at least for the US public, what was being reported and done on a particular “field.” The key idea as I wrote it then:
“For analytical purposes we may thing of this representational machine as composed of three departments, each in charge of a particular function. The first served to construct the nature of the expansionist project, that is to present to North American visitors to South America a coherent interpretation of what they (the visitors) were doing “down there”. I include here a series of enunciations that competed to legitimize the presence of North Americans and the extension of US business to the region. In scientific reports, photograph albums, addresses to businessmen, or novels we can separate a distinctive set of arguments and images locating the North American (the representative of peace, commerce, progress, modernity, masculinity, etc.) in a foreign territory. A second department served to construct the nature of “South America”. A series of representational practices (sketching, painting, photography, surveying, reporting, and collecting natural specimens, among others) translated the impressions or observations of the regional’s natural resources, inhabitants, customs, institutions, and beliefs into simplified enunciations, texts and images about “South America.” A third department made texts and images about South America reach the North American public. How the constructs about the other and the mission were received by US science and the North American public depended crucially on the institutions and practices organizing the circulation and display of these texts and images. Museums, world fairs, and photographic exhibits—what Tony Bennet calls the “exhibitionary complex”—together with illustrated magazines, travel books, maps and handbooks, served to circulate the representational harvest of imperial engagement, conveniently tailoring it for an expanding North American public.” [Ricardo Salvatore, “Representational Machines,” Close Encounters of Empire, 74-75]
The second key proposition was that all that was produced and circulated in these micro-encounters of Empire were representations. And every representation was produced by the impulse and binding force of Knowledge. As I argue, behind each representational product of the neo-colonial encounter was itself the product of “the will to know”. A curiosity that produced millions of representations that accumulated in US libraries, archives, exhibits, university classrooms, and Spanish clubs about thousands of questions that kept the search for information and knowledge going. So, I call this vast collection of initiatives, texts, and ideologies “the Enterprise of Knowledge”. This was my way of saying that the focus had to shift towards the analysis of representations and knowledge projects, rather than following the paths of diplomacy, the Navy, and the various branches of the US capital overseas (commercial ships, bank loans, or foreign direct investment). Neo-colonizing a country in South America implied the construction of knowledge about the natives and its territory, a project that was both representational and about knowledge, and only tangentially related to the establishment of “hard power” (military, economy, and diplomacy).
1-b) How has your work developed over the years?
I continued to study the issue of Empire and representations of “South America,” publishing multiple papers and a short book, titled Imagenes de un imperio (“Images of an Empire,” 2006). I developed the proposition presented in “Representational Machines” by arguing that U.S. presence in South America was accompanied by an “avalanche of representations about the Southern part of the Continent. I explored the diversity and the content of these representations and what they said about the land “South of Panama” recently re-discovered by US prospectors, scientists, churchmen, investors, merchants, and professionals. In this short book, in some ways a long essay, I tried to deal with a vast enterprise of re-discovery, a process of neo-colonization that is useful to think of as a massive collective act of representation.
Then my interest shifted to the question of Empire and Knowledge. In particular, I focused on disciplinary and scientific knowledge. In 2016 my book Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900-1945 was published. There I studied the efforts of five U.S. scholars to apprehend the realities of South America: a historian; an archaeologist; a geographer; a sociologist; and a political scientist [editor’s note: all, such as E. A. Ross, have long been canonical figures in their disciplines and in U.S. intellectual history more generally]. The book argues that these scholars tried to produce the most accurate description of the sub-continent, molded by the methods of their disciplines and their personal interests and motivations. And that these renderings contained interesting revelations that we may consider truthful. Scholars went South to discover the situation and potentialities of a continent that, since the fall of the Spanish empire, remained “dormant” and “unknown” to most people in the United States. Hence, a new knowledge had been produced. The renderings and summaries of these scholars at times contradicted each other, yet interestingly some of them (the geographer Bowman and the sociologist Ross) contributed criticism of the advance of American capital and technology. Bowman argued that the geography of the continent would be an obstacle to the modern corporation, while Ross pointed to the continuity of feudalism and poverty (evidence of the “non-progress” of the continent) among Indigenous peoples, anticipating some Latin American criticism of the 1960s and 1970s. Except for a few progressive nations (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile), at the beginning of the 20th century South America was a sea of widespread poverty and ignorance. The Republican experiments having failed to elevate the standards of life of the indigenous masses. In short Disciplinary Conquest deals with the relationship between knowledge, imperial visibility, and U.S. foreign policy in ways that I consider novel. (I use the term “the imperiality of knowledge” for example.)
More recently, I have been working on a collection of old and new essays that will be titled Imperial Mechanics: Essays on the Cultural Politics of U.S. Pan-Americanism. Some of these essays insist that U.S. pan-Americanism was an organized mechanism of cooperation, that the U.S. hegemonic project consisted on the building of a cooperative alliance or organization that was to promote peace, multilateral commerce, the arbitration of disputes and cultural exchange between the United States and Latin America. This was a sort of “soft machine” taken probably from the experience of business schools or mainstream politics: that if you organized well and did sufficient work of persuasion you can build a supra-national form of governance in which nobody would feel invaded or intervened. The Pan-American Union and its heir, the Organization of American States were the legacy of such a thought and efforts of disseminating U.S. pan-Americanism. The book contains essays on Practical versus Cultural Pan-Americanism, on Gringo Advertising, on Pan-American Day, on the building of Pan-American Railroads and the emergence of Pan-Am Airways.
Over time, in my repeated travels to the United States, I came to be convinced that U.S. pan-Americanism, a benevolent sort of hegemony built to endure, was no longer alive. During and particularly after the Cold War, the United States had abandoned Latin America as a jumping point to global governance. The repeated failures of development in Latin America and the persistent anti-U.S. feelings have forced U.S. diplomacy to abandon Latin America as a key arena for dealing with questions of global development, order, and security. Americans in the 1930s and 1940s went out to the streets to celebrate “continental solidarity”—many of them wearing Latin American costumes and learning Spanish. That is no longer the case. China and India, Russia, the Middle East, Oceania and Africa are more important than Latin America. From a preferred continent, Latin America has become an “abandoned region” of the world. Hence, U.S. interventions and imperialism had diminished due to the Hegemon’s lack of interest. Colombia and Mexico, and to a certain extent Brazil, remain salient exceptions to this rule.
1-c) How does study of the US fit into your teaching?
At Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, I teach a graduate seminar on U.S.-Latin American Relations focused on Empire, knowledge, and representations. I present students with the big program posed by Close Encounters, and show them how new publications have vastly expanded the field of inquiry. I try to make them think of the old issues (Nuestra América, José Martí and José Ingenieros on americanismo vs U.S.-built Pan-America and the Organization of American States) in relation to the micro-encounters of Empire and the questions of knowledge and representation. Yet, students continued to choose old issues for the term papers—Argentinian relations with the United States, the Cuban Revolution, great Latino anti-imperialists, U.S. participation in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, or the relationship between the Carter administration and Human Rights during the military dictatorship. Almost nobody chooses the issues dealt in the seminar to write their Master or Doctoral thesis.
Outside of the crystal tower (the university), political life seems undisturbed by new intellectual approaches and the various kinds of “turns” in the US academy. In the discourse of the Argentinian Left and in Populist Radicalism (Kirchnerismo), the old anti-Imperialism and the old theory of Dependency reign supreme, as if we lived in the 1970s. The so-called “social movements” (the unemployed and the poor) carry banners against US imperialism, populist and leftist politicians blame the IMF for all sorts of things, and it has become a national pastime to burn a MacDonald’s store to ashes. Imperialism is a dead horse that people continued to kick, even though it no longer exists in the form they imagine it. Argentina, formerly, one of the sites of the Latin American intelligentsia, is now a land of incredible poverty and cultural barbarism (the unwillingness to learn, to educate themselves). The teachings of el Papa Francisco (an Argentine) that it is better if we all are poor but solidarious, and the teachings of Peronist Kirchnerismo that it is better to increase poverty for this generates more votes and keeps the hatred against the rich alive—and worse still, the idea that it is better to receive a government subsidy or to become a criminal than to hold an honest job—are destroying a once rich and educated country. Hence, my concern with U.S. imperialism, pan-Americanism, and the transfer of knowledge and values from the United States to Latin America is no longer at the center of my preoccupations. I am now working on issues of human welfare, measuring statures of soldiers to generate indicators of “biological well-being”. And re-thinking the possibilities of speaking for economic development, education and science, and equality of opportunities at a time in which Left Populism has dynamited the field of politics and social protest, turning all us back to the 19th century, when all there was were Caudillos and Peasants (now Dictators and the Poor) and democracy and human rights were violated and impoverished on a daily basis.
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Ana Maria Mauad is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, where she has been for many years a leading figure working in her university’s Laboratory for Visual and Oral History. She is the author of Poses e Flagrantes: ensaios sobre História e fotografias (“Poses and Snapshots: Essays on History and Photography,” 2008) and many research articles on the social history of photography, public history, oral history, and the history of memory. She is the editor of the volume Fotograficamente Rio, a cidade e seus temas (“Photographically Rio, the City and Its Subject Matter,” 2016). She is currently writing a monograph on the U.S. photographer Genevieve Naylor.
- How did you get involved in the study of life and culture in the United States? What questions did you need to answer? How has your work developed over the years? How does study of the United States fit into your teaching?
I developed my connections with US scholars on two different platforms: oral history and studies in cultural history.
In 1998 Brazilian Oral History Association organized at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio the Tenth International Oral History Conference, which had the theme “Oral History: Challenges for the 21st Century.” I was on the organizing committee, in charge of welcoming our guests, and I organized a roundtable on Oral History and photography. This gave me the opportunity to meet Alicia Rouverol, who was then at the University of North Carolina but now is in Manchester, England, and also Michael Frisch from the University of Buffalo. Michael Frisch’s book Portraits in the Steel, combining interviews of steelworkers with Milton Rogovin’s photographs of a community changing as steel plants closed, really impressed me. Alicia’s Rouverol book I Was Content and Not Content: The Story of Linda Lord and the Closing of Penobscot Poultry, written in association with the photographer Cedric N. Chatterley, was equally powerful. Both books documented the process of de-industrialization in the United States during the 1990s, with interviews showing how working-class Americans understood this process that the photographers were documenting over the years with images. These two books books combining oral history and photography to examine working-class history were very powerful models for the work on history of memory that my university’s research group, the Laboratory of Oral History and the Image, had begun documenting popular memory in our part of Brazil. In 1999 I went to Buffalo, New York, to participate in an American Oral History conference. There I met Richard Cándida Smith, who was also on the panel where I presented my findings. I was meeting colleagues whose work connecting oral and visual sources was important for debates over memory engaging historians in Brazil.
From the epistemological perspective, despite the many debates regarding the status of interviews as historical evidence, our conversations helped Brazilian and U.S. scholars how to analyze popular memory of social transformation found in oral history interviews and visual documents. I participated in the summer seminars that Richard organized at the Oral History Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, which offered a structured opportunity for us to compare our projects and the methodologies used at the two universities. It was a great moment for me to think about the differences in the craft of public history in both countries. At this time, public history was being practiced in Brazil without any label. Over the last ten years, public history has become a large movement connecting work done in all parts of Brazil.
The second platform began with an academic agreement that our group of researchers made with the Department of History at the University of Maryland at College Park. We were visiting scholars there in April 2001, invited by the historians Daryle Williams and Barbara Weinstein. I remember clearly, that our discussions were the first time I was confronted with the question, during a round-table organized for all the students of the department—the auditorium was full—why were all the scholars in the Brazilian group white? A simple question that required a complex answer connecting our two countries’ common histories of slavery, but the civil rights movements in the United States has made a great difference. U.S. universities had begun to be more racially mixed in ways that had not happened in Brazil. That was 20 years ago. In Brazil, after Lula da Silva of the Workers Party was elected president of the country in 2002, we began a period in Brazilian history of great and important social changes, among them, opening up universities to students who had been excluded before.
This academic agreement had a significant impact on the development of the studies on Slavery and the Atlantic Diaspora, by creating a network debating the social history of Brazil after the abolition of slavery in 1888, connected to social history of labor and the study of how inequalities developed in Brazil.
We came back from the United States determined to be more connected to U.S. history and the impact U.S. cultural foreign relations had on our own cultural history. Paulo Knauss developed a line of research about the history of art exhibitions and the creation of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio during the Good Neighborhood policy. I discovered the American photographer Genevieve Naylor, who worked in Rio de Janeiro between 1940 and 1942, commissioned by the Office of Inter-American Affairs to take picturesque photographs from Brazilians and depict beautiful landscapes from the country, but working within the framework of social documentary photography developed in the United States during the Depression, she instead used her camera to explore social relations in Brazil.
Our projects led us to the Brazilian American Studies Association, which was our first step towards becoming involved with the International American Studies Association. Our participation in the International American Studies Association opened a new perspective for the development of interdisciplinary approaches, as this Association brings together scholars from different parts of the world. In 2011 we hosted IASA’s Fifth World Congress in Rio de Janeiro. We had an opportunity to raise the discussion about “America/Americas,”- the plurality of this continent. Decentralizing the U.S. point of view was central for the development of new approaches to studying the United States and its place in the world.
Finally, about the questions I was challenged to give a proper response, besides those which have to do with more political issues, I think questioning historical material is a process that suffers variations in time. In my research with the photographs of U.S. photographer Genevieve Naylor that I have been developing since 2003, questions have shifted significantly. At first, my questions were such as: why was Brazil a topic of interest for U.S. foreign affairs during the Second World War? Why did the OCIAA hire a photographer to come to Brazil to take pictures of its people as “good neighbors”? Why was industrial mass-media culture so heavily invested in tropical stereotypes such as imposed on the singer Carmen Miranda?
In my current studies, my new questions focus on problems related to practices of looking, public photography, racism, and the distinct roles played by public and private archives in producing visual historical knowledge. Why did Genevieve Naylor make black Brazilians the primary protagonist of photographs that valorize her subjects’ power as individuals? Why in her photos do we receive a clear impression of Brazil as a place of democratically shared public spaces bringing together black and white people? Why did her photographs reproduce the rhetoric of “racial democracy”?
I recognize that the differences between U.S. and Brazilian academic traditions are closely related to the distinct ways in which research and teaching are organized at universities in our countries. This has not been not an obstacle for collaborative research. Above all, differences in the research that we do arise more out of the very different political cultures of our two countries. Initially, the high levels of funding for research in the United States during the cold war brought about the hegemony of specialists – Brazilianists, Latinamericanists, etc. The strong, detailed studies scholars from the United States produced sometimes overshadowed our own work. From an epistemological perspective, we, Latin American scholars were trained to see ourselves and our countries as if from the outside.
U.S. Brazilianists did some important work, especially those who took an important role in writing about authoritarian periods, such as Thomas Skidmore. But overall, the connections between the U.S. and Brazilian academic worlds transformed during the government of the Workers Party. Brazilian universities received more funding from the federal government to participate in a broader range of international networks. In connecting with scholars from every part of the world, we recognize epistemological differences but also have seen important connections that have affected how research around the world on issues such as slavery and the Atlantic Diaspora. Brazilian research has had an impact on slavery studies internationally.
Investments in scholarship from the Brazilian government created new conditions for us to conduct research in U.S. archives, making possible for us to develop original approaches for American studies in Brazil. During this process, we have debated the political bias of epistemological perspectives. We now dare to analyze American history from the outside, on our terms.
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Manpreet Kaur Kang is professor of English and Women’s Studies at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University in New Delhi. She is the author of four books, including Seeking a Female Identity: Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton (2008) and research papers on Oprah’s Book Club, feminism in the United States and South Asia, and the cultural production of the South Asian diaspora in North America. She is the editor of the journal Melus-Melow. She is the current President of IASA (International American Studies Association) and Secretary of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
What are the topics that led you into the study of life and culture in the United States?
Women’s poetry, particularly the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Anne Sexton, led me into American studies. I needed to understand the socio-cultural and political realities of the United States in order to understand the position of women in America. I was also interested in comparing the situation of women in America and India. Additionally I looked at the position of Diasporic women in the United States, particularly women of Indian origin. Democracy and issues of the majority vs the minority are of particular interest to Indians as these issues are common to both countries. Most Indian scholars understand the current crisis in America—and in other parts of the world, including India—as born out of a fake, narrow, rigid Nationalism. In the United States, this crisis has been reflected in the antagonism against immigrants and the “wall/border” debates.
What do your students know about the United States when they take classes or begin working on a project?
The students who come to us at the Masters level have sketchy information about American literature and history. Most have read one or two novels at the Bachelors and School levels so they know a little bit through their readings. If the novel they’ve read is by an African-American then they know a little bit about slavery in America. They do know a lot more about America through television (sitcoms), films, music, and advertisements. From such forums and social media platforms they think of the United States as a land of possibilities and dreams, a land of plenty.
Tell us a little about the International American Studies Association.
The International American Studies Association (IASA) was founded in Bellagio, Italy, in 2000 by twenty-two scholars from around the world who wanted regular interdisciplinary dialogues about American culture and society through international exchanges of teachers and students, generating debates, publications, and conferences. Since then IASA has held an meeting every two years. To keep IASA non-U.S. centric, the conferences rotate through the continents. The most recent venues: 2013, Poland; 2015, Seoul; 2017, Laredo, Texas; 2019, Alcalá, Spain. The next conference, our tenth, was to be held in March 2021 in India, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. In addition to the conferences, IASA publishes a journal. Acceptance, openness, and fairplay are always conducive to productive work.
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