Is Brazil part of Latin America or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra America: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think. This book charts Brazil's evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic Jose Enrique Rodo, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes, and Sergio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazil's preeminent historians. The author argues that Brazil plays a necessary--and necessarily problematic--role in the intellectual construction of "Latin America." Nossa and Nuestra America will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian literature and ideas, and to anyone interested in rethinking comparative approaches to literary texts written in Portuguese and Spanish.