America

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America

The term "America" first appeared in 1507 when Martin Waldseemüller designed a map depicting the New World from the European perspective. These new lands were named after Amerigo Vespucci (1451–1512), an Italian explorer who had suggested that the New World was not in East India.

The western hemisphere is divided into North and South America. However, there are also other important divisions such as Central America and the Caribbean. "Spanish America" is a term used to designate all the Spanish-speaking countries while "Latin America" is a term used to encompass all of Central and South America, including the Portuguese-speaking Brazil. In the English-speaking world, "America" is colloquially used to refer to the United States, and "American" is the adjective used for a citizen of that country.

The colonial period left imprints on the newly formed continental region that can still be seen today. For example, territorial disputes between the United Kingdom and Guatemala delayed the independence of Belize until 1981; Guyana, which became independent in 1966, has pending territorial disputes with Venezuela and Suriname. Suriname itself became independent in 1975 and French Guiana—which borders Suriname—is a territory of France. The same colonial dependency can be seen in the Caribbean region, where one can still find overseas territories of France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Cuba and Puerto Rico were the last two colonies to become independent from Spain in 1898, after the Spanish-American War. It was that same year that the United States established a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and annexed Puerto Rico as an unincorporated territory. Brazil, the most populous country in Latin America, constitutes a major political and economic force in the region, but because of linguistic (the language of Brazil is Portuguese) and cultural barriers between it and the bordering nations, it is not completely integrated with its neighbors.

The cultural, historical, ethnic, and economic heterogeneity of North and South America has generated an equally vast and heterogeneous array of academic studies in many disciplines, including American studies, gender studies, Latino/Chicano studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and subaltern studies, along with studies of visual culture. Applying multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies, which in some cases attempt to narrow the gap between the social sciences and the humanities, cultural studies typically means the study of culture in all its broad social manifestations, as distinct from art and literary culture, sometimes referred to as high culture. Current debates in cultural studies revolve around issues of globalization, postmodernity, nationalism, cultural diversity, migration, social integration, and the political remapping of the region.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Haines, Michael R., and Richard H. Stechel. A Population History of North America. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Hart, Stephen M., and Richard Young. Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies. London: Arnold, 2003.

Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Moraña, Mabel, Ed. Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina: El desafío de los estudios culturales. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio/Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000.

O'Gorman, Edmundo. The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961.

Sarto, Ana, and Alicia Ríos. The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

HÉctor Jaimes

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture