Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (review)

Adams, Rachel. Continental Divides: Remapping Cultures of North America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 310 pp.More than half century after La invencion de America, Edmundo O'Gorman's insistence that we attend ideological consequences of geographical categories continues be salient. Rachel Adams contributes discourse O'Gorman founded by exploring genealogy of narrower imagined contruct of North America. Continental Divides complements recent works like Walter Mignolo's The Idea of America, though its agenda - to introduce continent as heuristic frame for comparative cultural (23) - is considerably less prescriptive than Mignolo's.Adams argues in her cogent introduction that unlike its equally fictive Latin counterpart, of unitary North America emerged in early 1940s and gained traction as reigning metageographic concept (12) of US diplomacy during Cold War, in some ways superseding worn-out hemispheric ideal. Slippery from outset, term sometimes gestured at presumed AngloAmerican solidarity between US and Canada, though extent which this cloaks US-centric worldview is tellingly revealed by virtual synonymity of norteamericano and estadounidense in American usage, as she notes. A selection of alternatives that dominant geopolitical mapping is also reproduced here, ranging from Chicano Movement's reclaimed Aztlan Utopian, alarmist, and satirical visions of continental order. The passage of North American Free Trade Agreement was obviously watershed in genealogy of concept, and Adams carefully separates herself from any celebratory notion of cultural and political unity between Canada, Mexico, and US that is inevitably projected by that regional imaginary. Instead, she takes pains show the implausibility ofthat project (17). Yet when critically applied, she argues, this continental optic can reveal unequal economic and political relations that NAFTA elides, and thus can be revealing than more geographically inchoate rubrics such as globalization or diaspora (7). For her, frame of North America becomes device bring into view alternate histories and cultural formations that might be obscured by an exclusive emphasis on nation-state, or by too-close attention any one region (246).Continental Divides takes aim at less balanced comparative studies built around spatial constructs like border or hemisphere, contending that U.S.-based Americanists have shown considerable in Mexico, but typically ignore Canada or treat it as an extension of United States, while those scholars of Mexico and Canada who have written comparatively about United States rarely take one another as objects of critical interest (6-7). She challenges American and Latina/o studies scholars assume, instead, a genuinely comparative view of North American borders that locates them in relation one another and borders in other parts of world (21). Her archive, while clearly tipped toward English-language materials, achieves that sense of relation.Because of its refusal impose false sense of coherence upon fictive construct of continent, Adams's study wisely does not pretend historical or regional completeness. Its coherence derives instead from total effect of loosely connected case studies that make up book's six chapters. While main focus is on works of fiction, each chapter also offers adroit readings of other forms of cultural expression: plays, photographs, documentary films, and conceptual art, nodding toward Diana Taylor's enlarged notion of what might comprise archive of Americas. This amplitude of selection risks seeming diffuse, yet many of chapters are so lively and thoughtfully conceived that one wishes they had grown into separate book-length studies of their own. …

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