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Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures, and Cultures. Austin: U of Texas P, 2009. 291 pp.
Although the title, Dividing the Isthmus, might allude to the division of the Federal Republic of Central American States into five countries (1823-1838), Ana Patricia Rodriguez focuses on the subtitle; exposing an assortment of texts that reflect Central America's transnational histories, literatures, and cultures. A wide array of cultural production - one that includes novels, testimonies, short stories, poetry, film, painting, performance, newspapers, music, food, etc - is framed by the context of US empire-building as defined by the years of 1899 to 2007. While it could be argued that this era of consolidation and of transnational narratives in Central America developed much earlier, the author begins her study in 1899, marking the establishment of the United Fruit Company and ending in 2007, the year that sealed the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the reticent signing of the Costa Rican government. This juncture aims to reckon with the discursive imaginarles of the "banana republics." In seven chapters and an epilogue, the author seeks to link the cultural texts mentioned above to the material productions of their context, ranging from banana to coffee and cacao, to canal-making, to indigo, to wars, to trans-migrant laborers, and finally to waste. By connecting cultural and symbolic texts with their site of material production, the author reads Central American texts in relation to globalizing tendencies and local specificities.
Taking its point of departure from the geographical contingency of Central America as an inter-continental and inter-oceanic crossroad, the book sets out to provide a spatial-cultural reading of Central American literary and cultural production, defining the isthmus as an in-between discursive space. Based on Frederic Jameson's notion of periodization, and Homi Bhabha's ideas of the interstitial and liminalilty, Rodriguez offers the term transisthmus as: " - an imaginary yet material space - as a spatial periodization term and as a 'cultural provision' for reading...