Latin American Studies and the Cold War, a book edited by Ronald H, Chilcote, reviewed by Juan Poblete

 

Greetings Paulo Roberto Almeida, A new Review has been posted in H-LatAm. Poblete on Chilcote, 'Latin American Studies and the Cold War' Chilcote, Ronald H., ed..  Latin American Studies and the Cold War. Latin American Perspectives in the Classroom Series. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022. viii + 271 pp. $39.00 (paper), ISBN 9781538141595.$94.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781538141588.  Reviewed by Juan Poblete (University of California Santa Cruz) Published on H-LatAm (August, 2023) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=59037 In his introduction, Ronald H. Chilcote defines, with concision and clarity, the scope of this collection: "This volume examines how Latin Americanists were impacted by and engaged with the Cold War and provides a unique international overview of how the weight of the Cold War affected Latin American studies and the region not only from the United States but from Europe to the Soviet Union and China to Cuba as scholarship in each country evolved in the context of its own position in the global political struggle" (p. 16). The volume includes, in addition to a foreword (by Gilbert M. Joseph) and an afterword (by Judith Adler Hellman), eight chapters covering Latin American studies in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. The book aims to be both historical and pedagogical by providing a genealogy of the development of Latin American studies during the Cold War and its aftermath and a useful foundation for students interested in doing research in and on the area. In this short review, rather than going into the specifics of each country-based chapter, I will concentrate on highlighting some of the main arguments the volume as a whole contributes to the analysis and history of Latin American studies. I will do so by paying attention to Joseph's foreword, the three framing texts Chilcote himself contributes to the book, and Hellman's afterword. Joseph highlights the value of the oftentimes personal recollections and reflections of the contributors in providing a deeper history of the field's connections with Cold War dynamics (in which the US plays a leading role) and a global and de-provincializing broader perspective, capable of encompassing developments in Europe, Latin America, and China. As he has done in the last few years in a number of connected pieces, Joseph also provides an excellent state of the art review of Cold War studies, including an emphasis on the role played by culture (of and in the Cold War and in the resistances to it) and the alternative solidarity and academic spaces that emerged in their wake, such as the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) Report on the Americas, the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), and the Latin American Perspectives journal, where Chilcote has been the editor for almost half a century.[1] Chilcote begins his own chapter, "The Cold War and the Transformation of Latin American Studies in the United States," by saying that the Cold War has been "essential to the development of Latin American studies in the United States" in at least two ways: first, because the field was created by a "university-government-foundation nexus" whose goals were defined by Cold War state interests; and second, because those origins immediately created a dissenting and radical response from within the field, which included academics who aligned their intellectual production and university labor with community work and solidarity efforts to support "radical and revolutionary social struggles both domestically and around the world" (pp. 33, 34). In particular, Chilcote wants to "fill a gap" in the scholarly literature that "does not adequately recognize the West Coast contribution to the transformation of the field." He aims to "highlight the major role played by a significant nucleus of academics based in California, many as graduate students at Stanford University or as young professors at other universities, in confronting Cold War influences and opening the field to progressive analysis, including Marxism" (p. 33). Chilcote's short concluding piece for this volume reproduces a critique of LASA that he published in a newsletter "just prior to the third LASA conference in Madison in May 1973" to show "the generational conflict among Latin Americanists and the changes since 1966 that were [then] shaping LASA" (p. 249). The piece illustrates Chilcote's thesis that the field was then bifurcating into mainstream and radical wings when it came to the politics of knowledge and the responsibilities of the academic intellectual. Those of us who have been members of LASA for some time will recognize in Chilcote's original list of issues some perennials in the association's life: the participation of Latin America-based academics in the leadership of LASA, its "apathy to issues of research and pedagogy within the profession and of politics both within and outside the United States," the alleged identification of LASA with the interests of the United States instead of those of Latin America, and the need to have a journal of opinion in addition to the Latin American Research Review (p. 251). In her afterword, Hellman develops her critical position that Latin American studies had both widely recognized Cold War origins, centered on the tensions between the USSR and the United States, and less acknowledged global reactions to human rights violations and US interventions in Latin American countries. The latter was particularly the case, according to Hellman, in Mexico, "the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, West Germany, and Canada," and this volume's respective chapters on the field in those nations significantly back her up (p. 240). She then develops the Canadian case in more detail to show how the combination of US imperialism in Latin America and the early political decision by Canadian authorities maintaining that their country "should never be regarded as a tool of U.S. foreign policy or a willing collaborator in punitive actions directed by the U.S. state department against other countries" established the basis for supporting Latin American studies in the aforementioned countries (p. 243). In sum, Chilcote has edited a very useful volume that combines a historical effort at contextualizing the emergence and evolution of what could be called mainstream and critical Latin American studies, with close attention to individual country cases and reports from the field by long-time participants in its development. The book is particularly helpful in assessing the twin sources, US national and Cold War-centered and global or anti-imperialist and human rights-centered, of the field. Note [1]. Gilbert M. Joseph, "Border Crossings and the Remaking of Latin American Cold War Studies," Cold War History 19, no. 1 (2019): 141-70; Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Citation: Juan Poblete. Review of Chilcote, Ronald H., ed.. Latin American Studies and the Cold War. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. August, 2023. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59037 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.