The Monroe Doctrine (hereafter the “MD”) that divides the world into two hemispheres, first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, has continually been updated with flexibility even after the 20th century as needed by changes in foreign policies. It is through these series of applications that the United States has secured its global hegemony up to the present while regulating its propensity toward unilateralism. On the other hand, as a response to such U.S.-led globalization, American literary studies have been urged into parting with disciplinary isolationism. There is a great demand for new approaches that allow us to question the word “American” by moving it beyond the nation state.

In light of recent hemispheric studies with a critical perspective toward the imperialistic MD, this essay explores three novels from the 1980s by considering the relation between the U.S. and Latin America: the former’s control of the latter under the pretense of protecting the Western Hemisphere. As an implication of the way in which cultural representations of drugs can be used in explaining the war on drugs targeted at Bolivia in the Reagan Era, I shall first examine Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) to reveal the shades of Latin America behind the domestic story set in New York. In particular, the rhetoric of family values in President Reagan’s anti-drug campaign in partnership with the First Lady will contribute to a better analysis of the easily-overlooked images of Latin America that feature in the opening scene, which unfolds into the protagonist’s self-exiled trip induced by cocaine abuse.

The second exemplification of Latin American representation can be found in Continental Drift (1985) by Russell Banks, partly set in the Caribbean sea which has been an informal part of the U.S. since MD. This “crossroads narrative” alternates between the perspectives of a typical middle-class American man and a Haitian proletarian woman, but of particular relevance here is the dominating meta-narrative over the two, where the narrator situates both human migration and the Earth’s crustal movement in one cooperative system- a planet. A close analysis of this “spheric” vision inspired by the theory of continental drift, will provide a framework for re-examining MD’s “hemi”-spheric division.

More radically connected with the questioning of America is Steve Erickson’s Rubicon Beach (1986) in asserting that the idea of the American Dream should be re-examined in a wider geographical setting, covering not only South America but also the Eastern Hemisphere-the Old World as the point of origin for the New World. It is at this moment that the demarcation of MD is open for discussion with reference to the origin, beginning and ending of the American dream. Here, the shades of Latin America are shown in the indigenous girl’s navigating waters in order for American males to cross the border. In addition, when we focus on the fact that the narrative of magical realism, which characterizes this North American novel, originated in Latin America, here emerges another issue: the redefinition of literary magical realism in a hemispheric context.