1. For an extended treatment of the fluid history of how continents are conceptualized, especially with reference to the American/North American continent(s), see R. Adams, “Imagining North America,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature, ed. R. M. Nischik, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. I largely follow the current usage of this term as put forward there: “During the post-World War II period the idea of North America as a continent unto itself…came to replace the prevailing conception of America as a single metageographic unit. In the 1950s the division of the Americas into North and South became the dominant convention for maps produced in the western world” (ibid., 39).
2. The term “Nuestra América” was coined by Cuban poet José Martí in his influential 1891 essay of the same title, in which he contrasts “Nuestra,” that is, “Our” (Latin or South) America with the America that “is not Ours,” that is, the United States, or North America. Ricardo L. Ortiz points out that Marti seemed to think only of the United States, ignoring Canada, when he spoke of North America at the time (R. L. Ortiz, “Hemispheric Vertigo: Cuba, Quebec, and Other Provisional Reconfigurations of ‘Our’ New America(s),” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. D. E. Pease and R. Wiegman, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 336–37).
3. In order to avoid such confusion, David Leahy consistently replaces the adjective “American” with the neologism “USian” when referring to the United States (see D. Leahy, “Countei-Worlding Alaméricanité,” in Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations, ed. W. Siemerling and S. P. Casteel, Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).
4. See also F. Fernandez-Armesto, “Americas? America?,” The Americas: A Hemispheric History, New York: Random House, 2003.
5. On the language issue in “Inter-American Studies” see E. E. Fitz, “Inter-American Studies as an Emerging Field: The Future of a Discipline,” Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 1 (2004), 14–18,
http://ejournals.library.vanderbilt.edu
/index.php/lusohispanic/article/view/3184/1374, accessed April 28, 2015.