Summary/Abstract |
President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy emerged as a non-aggressive form of cultural diplomacy and emphasized mutual understanding among the nations in the Western Hemisphere through a substantial diffusion of books, music and movies. Though Roosevelt’s foreign policy has been widely discussed in general terms, there is still a lack of studies on the cultural-geographic dimension of this initiative, especially on the production of geographic images and stereotypes. The aim of this paper is to present an analysis of a popular picture book series (Pictured Geography) from the 1940s that introduces, depicts and describes Latin American countries for the broader public in the United States. The reading between the lines of the stories and pictures reveals a moral geography of the region from an American viewpoint and opens up a debate on the impacts of images and discourse on the shaping of worldviews and understanding of different cultures.
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