The Reordering of Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood

Ronald N. Harpelle is an assistant professor of history at Lakehead
University.

This collection of papers from the annual meeting of the Canadian
Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies offers a broad
overview of some trends in the evolution of cultural identities among
Latin American and Caribbean peoples at home, in Canada, and in the
United States. The book’s eight chapters deal with a wide range of
cultural expressions. Those papers by contributors who no longer live in
Latin America or the Caribbean provide insights into the ways in which
expatriates look back upon their culture of origin or view themselves as
foreign-born Canadians. The result is a book that tends to reflect the
modern immigrant experience in Canada.

The Reordering of Culture is a difficult book to use in most classroom
settings because it is very broad in theme and requires a solid
understanding of literature, diaspora studies, history, and
postmodernism. Nevertheless, the book does make an important
contribution to our knowledge of intellectual adaptations to Cana-dian
society in the late 20th century.