Violence, Press and Politics in Latin America: the Public Sphere in Slavery and Cold War

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel studies violence, the press and the public sphere in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Latin Americanists have in the past decade turned to the public sphere as a means of re-energizing studies of politics and power in Latin America. Recent work has challenged some of the key assumptions regarding the public sphere, which has traditionally been framed as an arena of communication untouched by violence and inequity. This panel contributes to this discussion, taking the press as a field of power in which the effects of violence, inequity, and exclusion were both felt and contested, bringing a fresh chronological—even comparative—vantage point to bear on the question of power and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries.
One group of papers addresses the press and Atlantic slavery. They suggest that the press made slavery a constitutive feature of public life, and analyze how newspapers mediated the terms of debate around slavery and emancipation, and provided a forum for arguments for and against the institution, ultimately connecting slavery to questions of freedom, violence, and revolution. A second group of panelists interrogate the press as a nexus of power in the Cold War, investigating how the press helped structure public spheres of political debate, providing a mechanism by which a national and transnational exchange of information and ideas proliferated even under dictatorial rule. These presentations outline a connected and comparative history of the press as a crucial sphere of public debate in which power was both constructed and contested.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Celso Castilho, Vanderbilt University

Chairs

• Camilo D Trumper, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

• Celso Castilho, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• Whose News? Cuba’s 'Prensa Latina' News Agency and the Cold War Contest over Information - Renata Nicole Keller, University of Nevada, Reno

• The Politics of the Schoolhouse: Press, Violence, and Childhood in the Chilean Dictatorship - Camilo D Trumper, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

• ‘Unfaithful slaves and traitors’: El Payanés, Proslavery Activism, and Slave Politics in 1840s New Granada - Marcela Echeverri, Yale University

• Abolition, Blackness, African descent in the Argentinean press from revolution to abolition (1810-1860) - Magdalena del Corazon Candioti, CONICET/Instituto Ravignani UBA /UNL

• Bug Jargal, the Press, and an Intellectual History of Slavery: The Circulation of the Novel in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Latin America - Celso Castilho, Vanderbilt University