| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Anna Brickhouse. Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 145.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 329. $70.00.

This book changes everything in the practice of comparative American Studies. First, it demonstrates that historically focused, illuminating scholarship can be written by a single author on works in anglophone, hispanophone, and francophone literatures in the Americas. Of course, such work requires an extraordinary, polyglot scholar able to do her own translations as well as interpretations of literary, historical, political, and economic entanglements in the Americas between 1826 and 1856. Anna Brickhouse's "transamerican renaissance" is an intertextual tour-de-force, in which distinct nations—the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic—take shape in relation to their complex intercultural and postcolonial interrelations. Cuban exiles in New York and Philadelphia, Haitian émigrés in Paris and New Orleans, and U.S. travelers to Cuba and Mexico dramatize the richly transnational and cosmopolitan features of the Western Hemisphere. Brickhouse's argument replaces what she terms "the occlusive nature of nationalism vis-à-vis literary-historical understanding" (p. 256) with an enlightening comparative approach to the intersections of different cultural realities in the Americas from the Congress of Panama (1826) to 1856, when David Walker failed to occupy Nicaragua and three Latin American nations signed the Continental Treaty identifying the United States as "the primary threat to the wider Americas" (p. 8).

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