A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination by John Patrick Leary (review)

cultural history in the classical and purist sense of a “continuous systematic narrative”. Although its architecture is defined by only a rough chronology, the author uses a historicist approach in treating cultural products as a lens through which past events have been viewed. Written in the tradition of Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism, the book uncovers the ideological roots, assumptions and implications of the notion of underdevelopment (implied or explicit) as expressed in a variety of cultural discourses originating in the United States of America and dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing illustrations and evidence from a wide array of primary sources and representational media (newspaper reports, painting, photography, film, travel narratives, poetry, novels), Leary studiously examines the diverse, complementary and often competing ways in which cultural practitioners have portrayed Latin America as an object /subject of comparison with the USA. Cuba and Mexico are the main reference points for this analysis, with examples from other Latin American territories (Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Brazil) invoked at appropriate points where they serve to further strengthen or expand the book’s thesis. The areas of Latin American life and experience viewed as being characterized in terms of underdevelopment range from personality to politics, from geography to cultural habits. The analysis is driven primarily by the author’s search for what he refers to as the “moral” content of aesthetic framing, as he shows time and again that far from being transparent, cultural expressions are ideologically charged prisms whose mediating function is often to distort rather than clarify reality. Hence the reader is induced to become aware of the contradictions, ambiguities, false notions of history, and meanings that lie beneath the surface of apparently neutral or transparent renderJohn Patrick Leary, A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the U.S. Imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016, 283 pp.