Jorge G. Castañeda. America through Foreign Eyes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. viii + 307 pp. $27.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-022449-3.
Reviewed by Kryštof Kozák (Charles University)
Published on H-Diplo (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Thinking about “America,” or, more precisely, the United States, is a favorite past-time of public intellectuals, as well as a pressing matter of global human security, so it is fortuitous that we are offered yet another perspective on the subject by a prominent author. Is the United States in an inevitable perpetual decline or is there still hope for new life in the US project? Jorge G. Castañeda’s take on these and other related question’s is highly valuable, as he is one of the most prominent public intellectuals in Mexico. Having served as the country’s foreign minister in President Vicente Fox’s administration, he also spent many years studying and teaching in the United States, so he is in a unique position to do so.
The author consciously follows the footsteps of famous America observers from the past, trying to search for patterns, interpretations, and deeper meaning of its most salient features. He himself admits that the book should not be considered as academic in the stricter sense of the word, as he is fully aware of the immense complexity and combinations of various disciplines involved in such an ambitious endeavor. Castañeda at times also acknowledges the limits of his subjective, personal perspective. Methodologically, his claims are supported by available data, which are nonetheless cherry-picked without clearer structure. The narrative is supported by personal anecdotes, which serve as an important anchor toward shared social reality, albeit from a somewhat elitist environment in this particular case.
The book thus contains key graphs, numbers, and tables, as well as results of dozens of polls, to support the main arguments in each section. The data (such as on rising inequality, prisoners by race, or gun ownership) have been analyzed in more detail elsewhere, but Castañeda is able to weave them together into more or less coherent critical narratives, without much ambition for further theoretical grounding. In that sense, the largely forgotten book by Frederick A. Mayer, Interpreting NAFTA: The Science and Art of Political Analysis (1998) comes to mind, with Castañeda leaning toward the artistic side, in the great tradition of essays in Latin American literature.
From a critical perspective, Castañeda leads the readers through topics that he himself sees as “key,” ranging from the disappearing middle class to migration, exceptionalism, culture, drugs, race relations, and religion. One of the last chapters is called “The Unforgivable: Mass Incarceration, the Death Penalty, Guns, and Intelligent Design,” which gives the idea of the scope of the book and its ambition to cover it all in 305 pages. But Castañeda is not necessarily the most modest public intellectual, given his attempted presidential run in Mexico as an independent candidate in 2006, and at times you can feel this in the book’s magisterial tone.
Following in the path of his predecessors intrigued by the “American Question” (Tocqueville, Dickens, Myrdal, and Sartre receive extensive mentions), Castañeda tackles the elusive notion of exceptionalism head-on. After revisiting various perspectives, he argues that America eventually began to realize that it had become more like other states, the exceptional status finally wearing out. At the same time, he acknowledges the continuing salience of exceptional circumstances like slavery and mass immigration on the formation of collective memory. Through that, exceptionalism is still present, shaping the public debate.
The greatest strength of the book lies in the fact that it categorizes and contextualizes current academic as well as political debates about the United States from the critical perspective of a foreigner, an outside observer. This allows Castañeda to write about the “irreparable political system,” “hypocrisy of immigration and drug policy,” or “American civilization” from a detached vantage point. Such an approach leads to broader generalizations that are at times too sweeping but often capture the relevant aspects of the American experience. The book is strongest in its chapters related to Mexico and Castañeda’s direct experiences with his US counterparts in government. The frustration of the author from the inescapable inner dynamics of the US Congress on issues ranging from immigration to gun control is vividly on display in the text. These chapters also illustrate the wider point about practically insurmountable obstacles that the US political system places in front of too many much-needed reforms. Castañeda could have also mentioned the conservative Supreme Court as the final hurdle.
Without explicitly saying so, Castañeda manages to reinvent the concept of area studies by applying his proverbial gaze to the United States, thus reversing the usual subject-object relation. Through dissecting the United States proper, he is showing the way toward a potential post-postcolonial turn in area studies, where scholars outside the United States would gather among themselves to talk about their peculiar object of inquiry in a reverse-objectification process that also changes the power dynamic in the process of knowledge production.
Castañeda acknowledges that he wrote the book primarily for a US audience and market, but he himself admits that Americans are unlikely to hear advice or analyses from strangers. Luckily, the book is very valuable for outside observers of the United States, particularly in the field of American studies. The problems, topics, and questions that Castañeda raises are often worrisome, even though at the end he, as a self-proclaimed friend of United States, sounds mildly optimistic. Given its wide-ranging scope, Castañeda’s book could well serve as springboard for wider academic endeavor related to American studies understood within the framework of area studies, as outside knowledge about the United States could be confronted with knowledge generated within in the US. By treating the US as “Other,” Castañeda opens new possibilities for discourse.
The biggest weakness of the book is connected to its biggest strength. The author presents himself as “above the fray,” as an independent observer, but he is not as foreign as the title of the book claims. His father served as foreign minister under Mexican president Jóse Lopéz Portillo's administration from 1979 to 1982. Castañeda's upbringing was thus more that of a global elite, at that time dominated by US models. Moreover, he studied and taught extensively at liberal US colleges, and his views are eerily similar to those of a rather centrist, well-educated, and well-placed US liberal who is trying to be helpful with his advice and observations. Castañeda, who is no doubt familiar with the work of Gloria Anzaldúa on the borderlands mentality, could have shown more self-consciousness over this basic premise of his work.[1] Much like the famous self-portrait of Frida Kahlo, in which she is torn between Mexico and the US, there is a lot from “El Norte” in Castañeda himself. That is why his analysis, while at times sharply critical, is not likely to cause greater controversy, as it is fairly consistent with critical liberal US literature on each topic. The influential new book by Robert Putnam, Upswing, How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020), is fairly consistent with Castañeda‘s conclusions as well as observations, even though it focuses primarily on the historical development of the middle class.
With respect to omissions, there are inevitably many, but I would highlight three: the struggle for social justice, the idea of supremacy, and the role of the military and the defense industry. Given Castañeda’s lifelong infatuation with leftist ideas (his previous books include one on Che Guevara and another titled Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War [1994]), it is curious that he did not devote more time to the plight of the US progressive Left. The demise of the concept of solidarity is effectively responsible for the rising inequality that serves as a key concern for both Castañeda and Putnam. The story of the stifling of minority and dissenting voices in the era of gigantic media corporations, with Democrats and Republicans being dependent on money from special interests, should have been interesting to a man like Castañeda, but he lets this opportunity pass. Nevertheless, the quest for social justice, motivated by a deep sense of morality, has served as an important theme throughout US history, however difficult it might be to attain in practice.
The second omission is the dangerous but seductive idea of supremacy. The fact that many Americans are convinced that their country is the “best” in the world is eventually dangerous for world peace, but it is also a salient feature for foreigners looking at United States. The idea of supremacy is also prevalent within the United States, structuring the society in economic and social hierarchies that are sugarcoated by the rhetoric of individualism and equality. Constant effort to be better than others provides for dynamism, but at the same time leads to perceived arrogance in international relations and strained relations within the society. Racial supremacy becomes just one part of this wide-ranging phenomenon, with interesting overlaps with the Mexican concept of machismo.
The third major omission concerns the role of the military and related social as well as cultural infrastructure. The fact that the US is a military superpower with annual budgets in the high hundreds of billions of dollars affects the society profoundly, and the permanent war in Afghanistan just underscored this point. It is no accident that the US military is closely connected to American football, which celebrates male aggression as well as territorial acquisition. Thinking about the United States without taking this fact into account is a significant blind spot, which is all the more surprising considering Mexico itself fell victim to US conquest.
On a discursive note, the “America” in the title of the book is problematic, and again, Castañeda should have known better, even if it was likely the publisher who came up with the final wording of the title. Using America and referring only to the United States is Western-centric, as it excludes all the other states in the Americas. This is especially ironic as Castañeda writes about the US losing its exceptional status—linguistically at least, the exception (and the entitlement that comes with it) in the title still holds.
To conclude, Castañeda has made an important contribution to the difficult genre of analyzing the United States from an outsider’s perspective. Such work is rather challenging given the size of the country and the complexity of issues it faces. Indeed, we might expect that in the future some kind of artificial intelligence with access to big data will start churning out broad generalizations and more precise analysis of the topics under discussion. But before that happens, we need to rely on people with experience, data, and intuition to present the United States to others, and hopefully, through self-reflection, also to the US itself. Looking at the most pressing challenges facing the US through Castañeda’s experienced eyes is highly recommended, especially for those interested in current debates about the country’s present and future.
Kryštof Kozák is currently deputy head of the Department of North American Studies at the Institute of International Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. He is an alumnus of the American Studies program at Charles University, but studied also at Bard College, New York, the University of California, San Diego, and Freie Universitaet Berlin. His recent book Memory in Transatlantic Relations. From the Cold War to the Global War on Terror was published by Routledge in 2019. He has also published on US-Mexican relations.
Note
[1] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
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Citation:
Kryštof Kozák. Review of Castañeda, Jorge G., America through Foreign Eyes.
H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56122
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