The Limits of the Americas: Form and Inequality, Emilio Sauri
For nearly three decades, Americanist criticism has insisted on the need to read literature and visual art through the complex histories of hemispheric connections. But where the comparative approaches that this hemispheric turn inspired have succeed in highlighting the transnational scope of literature and culture, that success has been attendant on a vision of the Americas largely divorced from the more rigidly structural forms of inequality that have long defined the relationship between the United States and Latin American countries like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba. This paper considers the ways in which contemporary works of fiction and photography act as a corrective to this vision by conceiving of aesthetic form as a means to visualize both the structure that demands such inequality and its limits.