The hemispheric muse. A conversation with Antonio Barrenechea

Abstract

Antonio Barrenechea is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he was hired to design a teaching curriculum in the Literatures of the Americas in 2005. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Yale University and is the author of various essays on both North and South American literature, and, most recently of America Unbound: Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies, his first book, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press. Professor Barrenechea, who is currently spending the year as a resident fellow at the Institut Américain Universitaire in Aix-en-Provence, France, recently gave a lecture at Sapienza University entitled “Hemispheric Studies Beyond Suspicion”. After his talk, we conversed for about an hour about some of the issues he raised in his talk, and especially about his book, which I think is one of the most interesting and effective interventions in the field of hemispheric studies, and in particular in the field of literary hemispheric studies. What follows is an edited version of the transcript of the conversation we had in my office on April 28, 2017.