Teaching and Studying the Americas: Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Prompted by the success of European institutes such as Oxford University's Rothermere and Freie Universität Berlin's JFK, the editors of Teaching and Studying the Americas, all of whom teach at Rice University (of the sixteen contributors, seven are based there), are now attempting to launch American studies beyond the usual framework of postnational, transnational, trans-American, inter-American, and comparative American studies into a single hemispheric imaginary. [...]while its authors offer eloquent critiques of disciplinary boundaries, one inescapable flaw of this volume is its inability to deliver the very "nuts-and-bolts realities of actually implementingâ[euro] (5) the shortfalls it is meant to redress. Though the various essays provide some interesting ideas as to how to transition the debate from a national to a hemispheric approach - and are unarguably engrossing in terms of subject matter - the structure of the book shifts incoherently from pedagogy to race to "the role of smallpox in the Demographic Collapse of Mesoamericaâ[euro] (164).