In Improvised Continent, Richard Cándida Smith synthesizes over seventy years of Pan-American cultural activity in the United States and shows how Latin American artists and writers challenged U.S. citizens about their place in the world and about the kind of global relations the country's interests could allow.
Richard Candida Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of several books, including The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
"Count Richard Candida Smith among the best of those scholars doing
transnational history. Improvised Continent is a brilliant
investigation of U.S. and Latin American intellectuals and artists
who formed networks that the United States used for its cultural
diplomacy. But as Candida Smith deftly shows, there was an irony in
cultural imperialism, as these intellectuals and artists served not
only to teach U.S. audiences about the rest of the Americas. They
also served as critics of American society and offered up a
distinctly robust liberalism rooted in the utopia of
pan-Americanism."
*Andrew Hartman, author of A War for the Soul of America: A
History of the Culture Wars*
"Poets, painters, policymakers, and others wrestle over
pan-American hopes and disappointments in Richard Cándida Smith's
illuminating and thoughtful work. Spanning the twentieth century,
and ranging across diverse sources in four languages, Improvised
Continent brings new cultural and intellectual depth to the history
of Latin American and U.S. relations."
*Brooke L. Blower, Boston University*
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