The Hemispheric Frame: The Early Nineteenth-Century Traveler in Latin America

With the inception of the struggles for independence in Spanish-America, U.S.-based writers articulated a notion of the Western hemisphere as a space of affiliation and identification. The following reading of American travel reports will focus on the specificities of the discourse of the Western hemisphere, and the meaning and functions of this particular ‘transnational’ space in the period preceding the rise of the cultural discourse of the Monroe Doctrine that has been so convincingly outlined and analyzed by Gretchen Murphy (2005). Similar to the post-Independence appropriation of the Old World/New World dichotomy, other geographically and racially contoured regions such as