Latin American Studies and the Cold War

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With a unique international scope, this timely text traces the impact of the ongoing Cold War on the transformation of the field of Latin American studies in the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Drawing on unpublished documents, the book highlights how the new generation of academics challenged the mainstream Cold War consensus and opened the field to progressive theoretical currents. This book provides an essential foundation for new directions in the field of Latin American studies for academics and students.

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This book is the definitive volume on the counterrevolutionary impetus behind the growth of Latin American studies in the United States as well as the more diverse roots of the discipline elsewhere. It also highlights the limits of Cold Warriors control, showing how some scholars forcefully challenged imperial doctrine. Understanding this intellectual history is vital at a time when the Cold Wars legacies continue to loom large in society, academia, and the pressand as todays Cold Warriors recklessly pound the drums for confrontation with US rivals. -- Kevin Young, editor, Making the Revolution: Histories of the Latin American Left
This new look at the Cold War and its global impact on Latin American studies goes beyond the framing of the Cuban Revolution as the singular influence on the boom of interest in Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean to suggest diverse reasons for the international focus on this region of the world. Drawn in part from the lifetime professional experiences of Ronald Chilcote, the prolific political economist and mainstay of the pioneering transnational journal Latin American Perspectives,this volume offers a multidimensional approach to understanding the upsurge of academic scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean beginning in the 1960s from diverse national vantage points. -- James N. Green, Brown University
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. * H-Net: Humanities and Social Science Reviews Online *

Author Bio

Ronald H. Chilcote is Edward A. Dickson Emeritus Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Riverside, and has served as managing editor of the academic journal Latin American Perspectives since its founding in 1974. His recent books include Intellectuals and the Search for a National Identity in Brazil and The Portuguese Revolution: State and Class in the Transition to Democracy. He is the winner of the 2022 Kalman Silvert Award.