A Radical Americas special issue.
This special issue brings together seven papers that use the genre of life history to explore cultures of militancy during Latin America’s Cold War. Instead of treating militancy as simply a means to a (political or ideological) end, contributors will approach the experience of militancy – the adventure it promised, the stress and joy it created, the dilemmas it presented – as a dynamic cultural field. The life-history approach allows researchers to describe that field from the inside. Writing about militants from Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, and Chile, and active between the 1950s and early 2000s, contributors pay special attention to how militants made sense of a tension that characterized their experience across different national and transnational contexts.
On the one hand, Latin American militants were driven by a sense of vanguardism that isolated them from the social world on whose behalf they were claiming to act. This isolation was often heightened by the necessity to operate clandestinely, creating closed spaces in which hierarchies could form along axes of gender, class, ethnicity, and ideology. On the other hand, however, militants were driven by a search for new forms of belonging and solidarity. Some militants were inspired by emancipatory understandings of Christianity, others by the writings of Che Guevara, but in each case militants attempted to remake their personal relations in the image of a world that would express their fraternal values. It was from the interaction of those two imperatives, and from the contradictions between them, that a militant culture emerged in Cold-War Latin America.
Publication date: Articles are being published as and when ready on an on-going basis and will appear below.
Dr Jacob Blanc, Department of History and Classical Studies, McGill University, Canada
Dr Timo Schaefer, School of of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, UK
Articles will be listed here upon publication.
Authors: Timo Schaefer and Jacob Blanc
Published: 12 October 2023
Author: Lucía Rayas
Published: 12 October 2023
Author: Rafael Pedemonte
Publication date: 10 May 2023
Author: Rodrigo Véliz Estrada
Publication date: 26 April 2023
Author: Jeffrey W. Rubin
Published: 12 October 2023
Author: Michael Rom
Publication date: 22 March 2023
Author: Tanya Harmer
Published: 12 October 2023
Main image credit: | © 2023 Radical Americas |
Background image credit: | © 2023 UCL Press |
ScienceOpen disciplines: | Sociology, Political science, Anglo-American studies, Americas, Cultural studies, History |
Keywords: | Latin America, Cold-War, Militancy, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil, Chile, life-history |
DOI: | 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-HIST.CL4CFJ3.v1 |