Latin America and the United States: Local and Transnational Histories of the Cold War

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In recent years, a large body of scholarship has revised traditional approaches to the Cold War in Latin America that had emphasized geopolitical, military, and diplomatic aspects, in a framework that highlighted binary dynamics between the United States and Latin America. Instead of a one-way relationship between the United States and Latin America, scholars have pointed out multiple areas of engagement with different actors involved in complex processes of negotiation at transnational, regional, national, and local levels. They have also explored the Cold War’s roots in local and international developments over the previous decades, incorporated the cultural field as a critical site for understanding those negotiations, and framed national and local movements in broader methodological and regional frameworks.
The different papers in this session engage directly with the new scholarship in different ways. They show that American cultural policy in the region was mediated by local concerns and interests as well as professional and strategic goals by American and Latin American intellectuals, scholars, and politicians. The cultural Cold War can be traced back to local, international, and transnational processes and relations since the 1930s and 1940s, showing the evolution, paradoxes, and contradictions of seemingly hegemonic and unilateral American cultural projects. In Argentina, American mass media and anticommunism were transformed in a political and social context polarized by the presidencies of Juan Perón in 1946-1955, whose movement, representative of Latin American populism, must be also understood as intrinsically linked to the Cold War in terms of its historical and historiographical implications.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Jorge A Nallim, University of Manitoba

Chair

• Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research

Individual Presentations

• Soft Diplomacy in Wartime: The OCIAA and Cultural Programs in Latin America, 1940-1945 - Monica A Rankin, University of Texas/Dallas

• Peronism, Populism and the Cold War - Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research

• The geopolitics of U.S. transnational media and the idea of the middle class in Argentina, 1941-1955. - Lisa A Ubelaker Andrade, Universidad De San Andres

• Anti-Peronism, Anti-Communism, and the Cultural Cold War in Argentina: the Argentine Association for Cultural Freedom (1955-1963) - Jorge A Nallim, University of Manitoba

Discussant

• Lisa A Ubelaker Andrade, Universidad De San Andres