Imperial geography is, as Peter Hulme suggests, a discursive and ideological act.1 Decolonizing processes thus necessarily involve a decolonized cartography, though such re-mappings, if you will, continue to elude postcolonial studies, particularly in the context of the "American" hemisphere. Whether we are referring to the "Americas" in the plural sense of a divided continent, or "America" in the singular sense of the United States' self-image at the hegemonic epicentre of a continental history and identity, we partake of a rather unsavoury consumption of the idea of this hemisphere as a mutilated geography, carved up into three if not four distinct solitudes, including North America, South America, Central America and the Caribbean region. Moreover, the gradual distantiation between the northern and southern hemispheres of the continent came about, as Walter Mignolo attests, not simply as a geographic splitting but also as a hierarchical division between Anglo and Latin America, or "Anglicidad" and "Latinidad."
