| Review of: | Imágenes de un imperio: Estados Unidos y las formas de representación de América Latina. [Images of an empire: The United States and the forms of representation of Latin America.] by Ricardo D. Salvatore |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Max Paul Friedman |
| Reviewed in: | Diplomatic History |
| Date accepted online: | 10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 31, Issue 05, Pages 939-943 |
Book Review: A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing
What do a petroleum geologist from Standard Oil, a market researcher from the J. Walter Thompson Company,
Mark Berger made a similar argument, showing how the ideology of liberalism in Latin American studies complemented U.S. interventions, especially in Central America. [1]Going beyond Berger, who did not assign to scholarship a causal role, Salvatore sees the knowledge industry driving the creation of hegemony. He is interested not only in academics but in the many sectors of U.S. society involved in collecting, interpreting, and distributing representations of Latin America. Applying theories drawn from Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, and others, Salvatore examines the discursive construction of South America by U.S. citizens. Like many Latin Americanists from North and South working today, Salvatore finds dependency theory and nationalistic narratives portraying Latin Americans as perpetual victims too limited, ignoring the rich potential of cultural analyses and ignoring Latin American agency. [2] The reductionist focus on the pursuit of profit at the heart of some revisionist interpretations presented a one-way movement of capital, technology, merchandise, and military force from the North American center into the Latin American periphery. Salvatore believes this approach leaves out the information produced and disseminated by travel writers, journalists, museum curators, scientists, and scholars.
The title refers to Latin America, but the emphasis here is quite deliberately on South America, in order to distinguish the processes involved in creating an informal empire of knowledge (a phrase Salvatore prefers to the Gramscian term "hegemony") from more direct forms of imperial control through military invasion and occupation or coarse economic exploitation typically found in the circum-Caribbean. Chronologically the focus is on 1890-1945, a time when interest in South America grew as fast as its image evolved, and the United States extended its "informal empire" to the southern continent
Salvatore demonstrates how an early view of South Americans as backward, incapable of self-government, and marginal to economic development grew outdated. The nineteenth-century view is neatly illustrated with two photographs from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. One shows the Argentine exhibit, displaying hanging skins and leather hides. The French exhibit is a neat library of books on science and the arts. The message about levels of civilization is unavoidable, and in harmony with South America's role as a source of raw materials and agricultural products.
At the turn of the century, U.S. observers began to shed their blanket stereotypes of South Americans because this clashed too strongly with observations of booming cities like Buenos Aires, with its ferocious traffic, subway lines, and shopping centers modeled on the great department stores of Paris. Now they began to discriminate among South American regions, acknowledging the possibility of "progress" in the Southern Cone-on North American terms, of course, and ideally on a path to integration into U.S. consumption circuits-while applying the trope of Indianization to the poorer Andean nations. Yale University's Peruvian Expedition, organized by Hiram Bingham in 1911, caused a sensation with its reports on Machu Picchu. Salvatore presents evidence of the new hierarchy based on distance from indigenous origins and perceived position on a scale of technology, supporting Michael Adas's insights. [3] Photographs of giant machinery cutting railways through jungle were visual reinforcements of this new standard. Indigenous workers toting heavy sacks past Incan ruins suggested an ancient continuity to the division of labor, and could simultaneously be read as invitations for U.S. reformers and capitalists to intervene for the general good. [4]
Deeply implicated in this process were scholarly efforts to acquire, preserve, and disseminate knowledge about Latin America. Collections grew at the Bancroft Library, the Pan American Union's Columbus Library, the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, and universities. Bibliographers, including Hanke during his tenure at the Library of Congress, were central figures, "helping to make South America (in reality, all of Latin America) 'visible' to readers and to the North American public" (p. 62). Photography also played an important role, especially when it was combined with the new technology of aviation. Salvatore points out how aerial photographs of mountain ranges sometimes were framed by the airplane's wings and struts, thereby producing a sharp visual contrast between technological civilization and the natural world. The more North Americans grew accustomed to such representations of South America as the photographs were disseminated by wire services and popular magazines, the more firmly fixed were assumptions of inherent superiority based on the "neutral" value of technological progress.
So if petroleum geologists, market researchers, and Lewis Hanke all had something in common, are the differences in their aims and practices significant as well? Hanke may not have been able to comprehend why some Latin Americans were so angry they would spit on Vice President Richard Nixon, but he did seek to include the voices of Latin Americans such as Germán Arciniegas and Edmundo O'Gorman in his edited collections. [5] While this can be seen as a further case of the seizure and distribution of specimens, so to speak, from the Latin American republic of letters, others might see it as an opportunity for the circulation of representations to flow in the other direction. In this connection, one could fruitfully problematize the practice of translation, an exploitive industry in many ways, in which the intellectual yield of Latin American civilization is mined, processed, and resold at a profit. Yet that extraordinarily successful extractive industry has probably done more to bring Latin American representations of Latin America to the U.S. public than anything else, providing a counterpoint to the process Salvatore describes.
If it was possible for the first revisionists to become reductionist in applying a theory of one-way economic imperialism, perhaps we should be on our guard against new totalizing claims. Foucault recognized that the interrelation of knowledge and power does not prevent dissidents from wielding both. Some of the scholars, journalists, and others deployed representations of Latin America in opposition to the project of U.S. hegemony. The progressive journalist Carleton Beals, for example, gets an approving footnote. So does Samuel Guy Inman, even though he worked as a missionary and State Department adviser. [6]
Revealing the role of knowledge production and dissemination in the construction of hegemony, then, does not bring the simple corollary that less knowledge in the North would be better for Latin America. (Nor does Salvatore make that claim. He is expertly analytical here, not prescriptive.) It is no coincidence that the best-informed U.S. diplomats on Latin America sought a less domineering foreign policy (even if, like Sumner Welles on Cuba, they were capable of backsliding). If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, less knowledge can be worse. Just consider what happened to a few areas of the world to which the North American knowledge industry paid scant attention, that went straight from terra incognita to household names like Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. Whether more knowledge might have led to different policies is, of course, disputable.
Perhaps the discrepancy between the intentions of some Latin Americanists and their participation in the production of neo-imperial discourses lies in the distortion of their findings in the process of mass dissemination. Salvatore notes that journalists have an institutional imperative to simplify and condense through stereotype and caricature. That may be why, long after Salvatore's periodization would tell us that racist depictions of Latin Americans as childlike and inferior gave way to more sophisticated discourses, John Foster Dulles could still say, "You have to pat them on the head and make them think that you are fond of them." [7]
The maximum claim in this book that "any North American intervention in South America seemed justified by the business of knowledge" (p. 179) may be leavened by some flexibility to consider the more conventional economic and security concerns behind the collection of debts, the construction of air bases, support for military regimes, and the energetic quest for markets. Not every reader will agree that intervention in the search for knowledge was "the most enduring ideological construct of that empire" (p. 176), as opposed to a tenacious belief in Latin American inferiority, a long-standing claim of predominance under the Monroe Doctrine, or modernization theory and its recent neo-liberal variant. But to debate the maximum claims would be to squander the subtle and sophisticated observations that lead up to them. [8]
[1]Mark T. Berger,
[2]For a milestone along this path, see Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds.,
[3]Michael Adas,
[4]See Deborah Poole,
[5]See Benjamin Keen's obituary of Hanke, "Lewis Hanke (1905-1993),"
[6]More recently, it is probably safe to include the majority of the North American membership of the Latin American Studies Association among those who devote their knowledge production and representational efforts to investigating, criticizing, and opposing the kind of hegemony that Salvatore describes.
[7]David F. Schmitz,
[8]Salvatore is working on an English-language manuscript entitled "Imperial Knowledge: U.S. Strategies for Knowing Latin America, 1890-1945," which if comparable to this book should prove useful to upper-division and graduate courses on U.S.-Latin American relations. Those who do not read Spanish can get a foretaste of Salvatore's recent scholarship in his excellent related article, "Imperial Mechanics: South America's Hemispheric Integration in the Machine Age,"