Content area
Full Text
Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S. -Latin American Relations. Ed. by Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xvi, 575 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8223-2085-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8223-2099-1.)
The studies included in Close Encounters of Empire explain both postcolonial theory approaches and postmodernist interpretations of international relations, at the same time as they explore the possibilities of applying the "cultural turn" to historic relations between the United States and Latin America. The point of departure is the insufficiency of preceding paradigms. Neither realist approaches nor any other theory related to modernization, dependency, imperialism, or world-system perspectives has been able to tackle satisfactorily the complex and varied interaction between the United States and Latin America during the postcolonial centuries. Continental relations cannot be reduced to strict economic and political explanations. Cultural history provides new prospects of knowledge and new ways to analyze a changeable reality full of mutual influences.
These premises are introduced through several theory essays. They explain the new possibilities of a cultural history of United StatesLatin American relations in contrast to other paradigms (Gilbert M. Joseph); the paradoxes of foreign-local encounter are underlined...