Views from the South? Teaching Hemispheric American Studies

This presentation draws on my experience as a Latin American Historian working in an interdisciplinary “American Studies” program and “Transnational Studies” department.  I propose a Hemispheric Americas” course as the core offering in a program that draws on American Studies’ reinvention as a transnational discipline, but eschews a ready identification with US and the World perspectives in favor of a careful consideration of interlocking and interdisciplinary conversations between scholars of the US, Caribbean and Latin America.  By juxtaposing works that deal with transnational, borderlands, and thematic concerns at a variety of levels or scales that connect the hemispheric to a particular place or location, my proposed syllabus and course logic draws an alternative narrative and periodization of “History of the Americas” that ultimately challenges these ready made geographic categories and instead asks scholars to rethink and expand the definition of “Americanists” even as they reconsider the place of “Latin America” in traditional “American” history and “American studies” historiographies.