During the 1960s and 1970s, when writers such as Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa entered the international literary mainstream, Cold War cultural politics played an active role in disseminating their work in the United States. Deborah Cohn documents how U.S. universities, book and journal publishers, philanthropic organisations, cultural centres, and authors co-ordinated their efforts to bring Latin American literature to a U.S. reading public during this period, when interest in the region was heightened by the Cuban Revolution. She also traces the connections between the endeavours of private organisations and official foreign policy goals. The high level of interest in Latin America paradoxically led the U.S. government to restrict these authors' physical presence in the United States through the McCarran-Walter Act's immigration blacklist, even as cultural organisations cultivated the exchange of ideas with writers and sought to market translations of their work for the U.S. market.

During the 1960s and 1970s, when writers such as Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa entered the international literary mainstream, Cold War cultural politics played an active role in disseminating their work in the United States. Deborah Cohn documents how U.S. universities, book and journal publishers, philanthropic organisations, cultural centres, and authors co-ordinated their efforts to bring Latin American literature to a U.S. reading public during this period, when interest in the region was heightened by the Cuban Revolution. She also traces the connections between the endeavours of private organisations and official foreign policy goals. The high level of interest in Latin America paradoxically led the U.S. government to restrict these authors' physical presence in the United States through the McCarran-Walter Act's immigration blacklist, even as cultural organisations cultivated the exchange of ideas with writers and sought to market translations of their work for the U.S. market.

Look Away! considers the U.S. South in relation to Latin America and the Caribbean. Given that some of the major characteristics that mark the South as exceptional within the United States-including the legacies of a plantation economy and slave trade-are common to most of the Americas, Look Away! points to postcolonial studies as perhaps the best perspective from which to comprehend the U.S. South. At the same time it shows how, as part of the United States, the South-both center and margin, victor and defeated, and empire and colony-complicates ideas of the postcolonial. The twenty-two essays in this comparative, interdisciplinary collection rethink southern U.S. identity, race, and the differences and commonalities between the cultural productions and imagined communities of the U.S. South and Latin America. Look Away! presents work by respected scholars in comparative literature, American studies, and Latin American studies. The contributors analyze how writers-including the Martinican Edouard Glissant, the Cuban-American Gustavo Perez Firmat, and the Trinidad-born, British V. S. Naipaul-have engaged with the southern United States. They explore William Faulkner's role in Latin American thought and consider his work in relation to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges. Many essays re-examine major topics in southern U.S. culture-such as race, slavery, slave resistance, and the legacies of the past-through the lens of postcolonial theory and postmodern geography. Others discuss the South in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border. Throughout the volume, the contributors consistently reconceptualize U.S. southern culture in a way that acknowledges its postcolonial status without diminishing its distinctiveness. Contributors. Jesse Aleman, Bob Brinkmeyer, Debra Cohen, Deborah Cohn, Michael Dash, Leigh Anne Duck, Wendy Faris, Earl Fitz, George Handley, Steve Hunsaker, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Dane Johnson, Richard King, Jane Landers, John T. Matthews, Stephanie Merrim, Helen Oakley, Vincent Perez, John-Michael Rivera, Scott Romine, Jon Smith, Ilan Stavans, Philip Weinstein, Lois Parkinson Zamora