{"id":1580,"date":"2018-01-11T07:45:27","date_gmt":"2018-01-11T12:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/?page_id=1580"},"modified":"2018-01-12T06:16:44","modified_gmt":"2018-01-12T11:16:44","slug":"book-review-barrenechea-antonio-america-unbound-encyclopedic-literature-and-hemispheric-studies","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/previous-issues\/impact-winter-2018\/book-review-barrenechea-antonio-america-unbound-encyclopedic-literature-and-hemispheric-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Barrenechea, Antonio. America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Micah Donohue, Eastern New Mexico University<\/h5>\n

In \u201cGood Neighbor\/Bad Neighbor: Boltonian Americanism and Hemispheric Studies\u201d (2009), Antonio Barrenechea challenged inter-American, hemispheric, and comparative American scholars to take a \u201cmodified\u201d Boltonian approach to studying the literatures of the Americas. Barrenechea invokes the US historian Herbert E. Bolton, an important precursor to borderlands and hemispheric American studies in the United States. Addressing the American Historical Association in 1932, Bolton famously argued in \u201cThe Epic of Greater America\u201d that a \u201csynthetic view\u201d of the hemisphere, one that focused on \u201cinter-American relations,\u201d is essential to a better understanding of the constituent nations of North and South America, their entwined histories, and, by extension, their overlapping literatures (448). While Barrenechea acknowledges the shortcomings of Bolton\u2019s inter-American thesis, notably the Mexican philosopher Edmundo O\u2019Gorman\u2019s contention that it symptomatically reproduces US American imperial oversight, he still claims that Bolton\u2019s \u201ccomparative and historically grounded […] methodology\u201d can serve as the foundation for a genuinely \u201ctransamerican studies project\u201d (\u201cGood Neighbor\u201d 240). Such a project would form part\u2014and itself be an example\u2014of the \u201cmultinational and multilingual field\u201d of comparative American studies (240).<\/p>\n

America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies <\/i>adopts (and adapts) Bolton\u2019s methodology for its own \u201ctransamerican studies project.\u201d Barrenechea provides a comparative, inter-American rereading of four encyclopedic novels: Herman Melville\u2019s Moby Dick <\/i>(1851), Carlos Fuentes\u2019s Terra Nostra<\/i> (1975), Jacques Poulin\u2019s Volkswagen Blues<\/i> (1984), and Leslie Marmon Silko\u2019s Almanac of the Dead<\/i> (1991). America Unbound <\/i>reveals how each of these canonical texts\u2014Barrenechea calls them \u201chemispheric masterworks\u201d\u2014constitutes its own \u201cmultinational and multilingual field\u201d that poetically entangles the languages, histories, and literatures of the New World. As Barrenechea explains, \u201cone of the aims of America Unbound <\/i>will be to bring a non-Eurocentric and more self-aware form of the Bolton thesis to bear on four of the most important novels from the Americas, and also to uncover the legacies of contact, conquest, and colonization that structure that trilingual literary corpus\u201d (Unbound <\/i>8). In this compound goal that coordinates US American, Native American, Mexican, and Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise literatures, Barrenechea unquestionably succeeds. America Unbound <\/i>provides eloquent and convincing accounts of \u201chow each of these works self-consciously aspires to be a summa americana, i.e., a Greater American Novel about what Bolton calls \u2018Greater America\u2019\u201d (10).<\/p>\n

Barrenechea begins America Unbound <\/i>with a short preface in which he claims that \u201cAmerican literature is a de facto comparative literature\u201d (xi). By adopting a comparative perspective, Barrenechea hopes first to unsettle \u201cwhat is currently a US-led hemispherism\u201d and, second, to accommodate methodologically the inter-American sprawl of the narratives that he is studying\u2014novels \u201cguided by a shared sense that American parts live in a complex relation to the hemispheric whole\u201d (xi). The remainder of America Unbound<\/i> is divided into five chapters plus notes, a bibliography, and an index. In Chapter 1, \u201cThe Great(er) American Paradigm: Moby Dick <\/i>and the Summa Americana\u201d (1\u201337), Barrenechea turns to Melville\u2019s encyclopedic \u201cmasterwork.\u201d After lengthy discussion of his neo-Boltonian position that would have been more effective in a standalone introduction, Barrenechea reaches the true subject matter of the chapter: a hemispheric reorientation of scholarly approaches to Moby Dick<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Barrenechea rereads Melville as a \u201cNew World writer who extends, in transgressive ways, the colonial legacy of the entire Americas\u201d (13). The transamerican and global trajectory of Moby Dick<\/i>, simultaneously a reworking of American and world literatures, allows Barrenechea to demonstrate that \u201ca connection exists between the encyclopedic novel [of which, for Barrenechea, Moby Dick <\/i>is prototypical] and a Greater American archive that is central to understanding its origins and significance as a New World variant of the genre\u201d (14). In other words, encyclopedic American novels are always reconfigurations of a time- and geography-spanning \u201cGreater American archive,\u201d in the double sense of reconfiguration as a different assemblage and as a re-\u201cfiguring\u201d or troping differently. This intertextual play of repetitions and differences, a defining characteristic of \u201cGreater American\u201d literature, is particularly evident in Fuentes\u2019s Terra Nostra<\/i>, which Barrenechea discusses in Chapter 2.<\/p>\n

In \u201cFrom Terra Incognita to Terra Nostra<\/i>: Carlos Fuentes\u2019s Reinvention of America\u201d (38\u201371), Barrenechea claims that the Mexican author of Terra Nostra <\/i>accomplishes a neo-baroque \u201creinvention\u201d of \u201ca tripartite globalism with colonial violence as a constant, a connection that exemplifies the subversive coupling of the encyclopedic novel with the New World archive\u201d (39). Fuentes\u2019s novel voraciously consumes centuries\u2019 worth of histories and literatures from throughout the Americas and around the world in the inter-American tradition of cannibalisme <\/i>and antropofagia <\/i>to (re)construct an encyclopedic and neo-baroque retelling of those stories that is simultaneously an act of resistance against the colonial violence signaled by Barrenechea. Barrenechea leaps from Mexico to French Canada in Chapter 3, \u201cJacques Poulin\u2019s Archival Pathways: Volkswagen Blues <\/i>as Discovery Chronicle\u201d (72\u2013103). As Barrenechea notes, studies of Canadian, and even more so of French Canadian, literature are frequently absent from discussions of inter-American, hemispheric, and comparative American literature (72). (These omissions are also true of Brazilian and, to a lesser extent, Caribbean literatures\u2014both of which are noticeably absent in America Unbound<\/i>.) Barrenechea reads Volkswagen Blues <\/i>not only as another \u201creinvention\u201d of \u201carchival materials that predate and\/or undermine American national borders,\u201d but \u201cas a blueprint for the hemispheric study of Canadian literatures\u201d that could also serve as a model for reorienting comparative American studies to use Canadian and Qu\u00e9b\u00e9coise literatures as conceptual foci (74).<\/p>\n

Chapter 4, \u201cLeslie Marmon Silko\u2019s Council Book: Hemispheric Forces in Almanac of the Dead<\/i>\u201d (104\u2013138), locates Almanac of the Dead <\/i>within \u201cits proper hemispheric and historical context as an indigenous summa Americana\u201d (105). By studying the transamerican narratives that Silko interweaves throughout Almanac<\/i>, precolonial and post-contact stories that predate, enfold, and in some cases predict an end to the histories of conquest and colonialism that repeat in encyclopedic \u201cGreater American\u201d novels, Barrenechea demonstrates how Almanac <\/i>constitutes a transformative \u201cintersection,\u201d a textual knotting together \u201cof Latino, Latin American, Native American, ethnic, and border identities\u201d (135). In the final chapter, \u201cGreater America in the Classroom: Comparative Literature, Theory, and Praxis\u201d (139\u2013173), Barrenechea switches from hermeneutics to pedagogy. The chapter exemplifies how the same neo-Boltonian approach to interpreting works of hemispheric American literature can be used in teaching them, and Barrenechea \u201cinvite[s] scholars working in all fields of American studies to embrace a more comparative framework in the classroom\u201d (145). Barrenechea offers his own model of such a framework: a three semester class sequence that moves from \u201cNew World Writing in the Colonial Period\u201d through \u201cLiterature and Nation-Building in the Americas\u201d to \u201cHemispheric Fiction of the Global Age.\u201d Each class, in much the same way as the novels analyzed by Barrenechea, aspires to be a \u201csumma americana\u201d that reincorporates the multiple languages and histories that stitch together the hemispheric fabric of American literature.<\/p>\n

The comparatist Earl E. Fitz, like Bolton a guiding light of Barrenechea\u2019s, claimed in the 1990s that \u201cthere is something to be gained by showing how the canonical works of New World literature reflect themes or ideas that are themselves fundamental to our better understanding of the entire inter-American experience\u201d (Rediscovering <\/i>xii). A quarter-century later, America Unbound <\/i>picks up certain of those themes and ideas to show how the encyclopedic novels of Melville, Fuentes, Poulin, and Silko are reflections and prismatic refractions of the \u201centire inter-American experience\u201d of what Bolton called \u201cGreater America.\u201d In that hemispheric and comparative light, Barrenechea\u2019s work unquestionably constitutes a gain for scholars working across time periods, borders, and languages in the Americas.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/b><\/h5>\n

Barrenechea, Antonio. \u201cGood Neighbor\/Bad Neighbor: Boltonian Americanism and Hemispheric Studies.\u201d Comparative Literature <\/i>61.3 (2009): 231\u201343.<\/p>\n

Bolton, Herbert E. \u201cThe Epic of Greater America.\u201d The American Historical Review <\/i>38.3 (1933): 448\u201374.<\/p>\n

Fitz, Earl E. Rediscovering the New World: Inter-American Literature in a Comparative Context<\/i>. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Micah Donohue, Eastern New Mexico University In \u201cGood Neighbor\/Bad Neighbor: Boltonian Americanism and Hemispheric Studies\u201d (2009), Antonio Barrenechea challenged inter-American, hemispheric, and comparative American scholars to take a \u201cmodified\u201d Boltonian approach to studying the literatures of the Americas. Barrenechea invokes the US historian Herbert E. Bolton, an important precursor to borderlands and hemispheric […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1528,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1580"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1621,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1580\/revisions\/1621"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}