A Cultural History of Underdevelopment explores the changing place of Latin America in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent U.S.-Cuba detente. In doing so, it uncovers the complex ways in which Americans have imagined the global geography of poverty and progress, as the hemispheric imperialism of the nineteenth century yielded to the Cold War discourse of -underdevelopment.- John Patrick Leary examines representations of uneven development in Latin America across a variety of genres and media, from canonical fiction and poetry to cinema, photography,...

In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina CEsaire, Maryse CondE, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these latae-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization--the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based...

Crossing the Line examines a group of early nineteenth-century novels by white creoles, writers whose identities and perspectives were shaped by their experiences in Britain's Caribbean colonies. Colonial subjects residing in the West Indian colonies "beyond the line," these writers were perceived by their metropolitan contemporaries as far removed--geographically and morally--from Britain and "true" Britons. Routinely portrayed as single-minded in their pursuit of money and irredeemably corrupted by their investment in slavery, white creoles faced a considerable challenge in...