America Imagined

Perception studies may no longer be the hottest game in town, but the volume put together by Axel Körner, Nicola Miller, and Adam I. P. Smith advances our knowledge about how images of the United States shaped the transatlantic world during the second half of the nineteenth-century. America Imagined looks at how the nation functioned as a billboard for the hopes, fears, and prejudices of societies undergoing rapid modernization. Individual essays are organized around topics rather than regional cultures or specific actors. This approach has the advantage of highlighting crucial similarities and differences in how America was envisioned across political and geographical boundaries. A minor drawback, though, is that the authors' focus on and their framing of big themes privileges elite voices. The views of ordinary people remain somewhat hazy and underexplored. The first two chapters scrutinize social and political ideas. Smith compares responses in countries ranging from Germany to Argentina to the claim that the United States offered unrivaled social mobility. Kate Ferris addresses different perceptions of U.S. models of republicanism and constitutionalism. Although her discussions of myths such as “the land of opportunity” or negative stereotypes that equate the United States with unbridled capitalism cover familiar territory, they bring European and Latin American perspectives into a fruitful conversation. This commitment to mapping a wider transatlantic cultural space is arguably the volume's greatest strength. In her piece on women and domestic life, Miller identifies two models of femininity associated with the United States: the educated and reform-oriented “philanthropic woman” and the materialistic “cosmetic woman” (p. 84). Miller astutely emphasizes that images of American women represented both the best and worst of modernity and that ideas of modernity were clearly gendered. Körner's chapter is a lucid commentary on the politics of nineteenth-century anti-Americanism. Preoccupied with reforming their societies, European and Latin American critics depicted the United States as the epitome of barbarism and degeneracy to discourage emigration and dignify their own nation-building projects. The article by Maike Thier explains how nineteenth-century intellectuals crafted racially charged discourses of “Latinity” and “Anglo-Saxonism” to make sense of diverging paths to modernity in the Americas (p. 164). Slavery and abolition are the topics of the final chapter. Weaving together responses to U.S. emancipation in the slaveholding societies of Brazil, Cuba, and Spain, Natalia Bas, Ferris, and Miller conclude that American abolitionism offered only limited guidance to antislavery activists in these countries because of the bloody legacy of the American Civil War

Elite · Framing (construction · Latin Americans · Miller · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law

• America in Italian Culture

  Guido Bonsaver•America in Italian Culture•2023

  Add to list