Issue 100: Fall 2009

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(Theorizing the) Americas

By Ana María Dopico on October 30, 2009
Abstract: As SOCIAL TEXT published its first essays on Latin America, the Americas were living the disastrous consequences of a hemispheric cold war in the forms of dictatorships, military rule, and brutal state violence; confronting popular and institutionalized revolutions; and suffering U.S. interventions in open or secret civil wars that would kill millions and devastate civil society through the end of the century. The engagements of the essays in SOCIAL TEXT's first hundred issues offer an instructive map of engagements with Latin America and a history of critical movements in the U.S. academic Left across the last thirty years. SOCIAL TEXT's attention to the long cold wars in the Americas shifted in the late eighties as writers traced new ideological positions and discourses, struggling over the meaning of the Americas amid the culture wars of the Reagan-Bush years, engaging the politics of multiculturalism, border studies, and Latino cultures in the United States. Contributors read the queer voices and homophobic paranoia of patriotic discourse--founding new disciplines that deconstructed the gendered authority of the state and established a new archive of queer poetics across the Americas. Across the nineties and into the new century, writers turned to the new subjects of globalization, questioning the logic and markets of development, and the new discourses of neoliberalism in the hemisphere. In more recent years, contributors explored the cultural archives of diaspora, the local lifeworld and geopolitical consequences of slum cities and unplanned urbanization, and the contentious afterlives of the foundational ideas of Latin American modernity.
America is saving herself from all her dangers. Over some republics the 
octopus sleeps still, but by the law of equilibrium other republics are 
running into the sea to recover the lost centuries with mad and sublime 
swiftness. 
 -- José Martí, "Our America," 20 January 1891 

Theorizing the Americas is a long tradition in the United States and not always a felicitous practice. When José Martí's 1891 essay "Our America" was published in Mexico City in 1891, the United States had been publicly debating the annexation of Cuba for a half century. The Americas, having cast off one empire, had suffered nearly a century of imperialist theorizing, beginning with the articulation of the Monroe Doctrine and culminating with the seizure of half of Mexico's territory following the Mexican-American War. But during the neoimperial campaigns of the Spanish American War, a reinvigorated opposition to empire had reached a new crisis, and a resistant critique denouncing U.S. imperialism was being voiced not only by revolutionaries like Martí, but by U.S. citizens in the Anti-Imperialist League, the first national peace movement mobilized in response to a foreign war. In the league's platform, they wrote: 


We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends 
toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We 
regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln 
to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness. We maintain that governments derive their 
just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation 
of any people is "criminal aggression" and open disloyalty to the distinctive 
principles of our Government. 

 

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