Robert D. Aguirre, a professor of English at Wayne State University, has written an incisive cultural history of US and British perceptions of nineteenth-century Panama. Drawing principally on close readings of travel writers, poets, and photographers, he examines how Anglo-American assumptions about the isthmus permeated popular discourse. Such assumptions supported US and British neocolonial policies that commodified Panama and reduced it to a conduit through which to reduce travel within each country’s empire. Aguirre maintains that these writings defined “pre-canal Panama as a site of traversal, a location between [that] laid the discursive ground for its incorporation into a world transport system whose centers of command lay elsewhere” (5). This frame of reference about Panama would be the foundation on which twentieth-century justifications for the Panama Canal and the US-controlled Canal Zone would rest.

中文翻译：

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巴拿马 - 流动性和现代性：19 世纪英美想象中的巴拿马。罗伯特·D·阿吉雷 (Robert D. Aguirre)。哥伦布：俄亥俄州立大学出版社，2017 年。Pp。232. 67.95 美元的布料。

韦恩州立大学英语教授罗伯特·D·阿吉雷 (Robert D. Aguirre) 撰写了一部关于美国和英国对 19 世纪巴拿马的看法的精辟文化史。他主要通过对旅行作家、诗人和摄影师的仔细阅读，研究英美关于地峡的假设如何渗透到大众话语中。这些假设支持了美国和英国的新殖民政策，这些政策使巴拿马商品化，并将其缩小为减少每个国家帝国内部旅行的渠道。阿吉雷坚持认为，这些著作将“运河前的巴拿马定义为一个穿越地点，[该]之间的一个位置奠定了将其纳入世界交通系统的话语基础，而该系统的指挥中心位于其他地方”（5）。