Seminars
Latin America
Year Founded 1971
Seminar # 515
StatusActive
This seminar is devoted to developing a better understanding of the region, presenting current research and thinking in disciplines that range from anthropology to economics, history, human rights, political science, religion, literature, and the arts. In addition to scholars affiliated with the academic community, speakers are invited from the private sector, international organizations, and governments. The seminar, whose membership also reflects a broad range of disciplines, offers the framework for a lively exchange of ideas on Latin America, its past, present, and future.
Chair/s
Rapporteur/s
Victoria Korzin
External Website
Conference Registration
Meeting Schedule
Scheduled
Faculty House
No End in Sight: The Unwinding and Afterlife of the Latin American Cold War
Speaker/s
Gilbert M. Joseph, Yale University, Emeritus
Abstract
Professor Joseph’s presentation draws upon a sustained collaboration among Latin American, North American, and European scholars that reassesses the end of the Cold War from a Latin American perspective. Too often this “end” has been framed by global events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union—or in Latin America, limited ‘transitions to democracy’ brokered by national elites. Instead of a single episode or rupture marking the triumph of U.S.-led liberal democracy, the present collaboration explores how the Cold War’s conclusion in the region was neither top-down nor uniform, and certainly not complete. The project grapples with pressing historical questions that continue to resonate in the present day: How should we understand the Cold War’s conclusion in a region where violence and repression permeate everyday life? How did struggles for democracy, burdened by Cold War legacies, nevertheless open new political possibilities? And what does it mean to speak of an “end” when viewed from Latin America—especially as China’s growing influence and current U.S. policy have fueled talk of a “new Cold War”? The presentation introduces exciting collaborative work in progress, as the organizers plan a cutting-edge international conference at Yale and Fairfield Universities next October with a view to producing a substantial edited volume. This collection, which will be published by Duke University Press, will constitute the third work in a Latin American Cold War trilogy. The two previous volumes, In from the Cold (2008) and A Century of Revolution (2010), redefined understandings of the conflict’s origins and process; the proposed new collection, No End in Sight, will turn to the Cold War’s unwinding and afterlives, which remain seriously understudied dimensions of Latin America’s recent past.
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Past Meetings
Scheduled
Faculty House
Serpentine Memory: Andean Visions of Tupac Amaru and Tupaj Katari, 18th to 21st Centuries
Speaker/s
Sinclair Thomson, New York University
Abstract
The presentation will offer a long-term history of memory in the Andean region, focussing on the meanings of the Andean Revolution of the early 1780s for subsequent political actors, intellectuals, artists, social movements, and national narratives. It will include comments on the study of history, memory, and myth as well as a survey of visual representations of Tupac Amaru and Tupaj Katari, who were outstanding leaders of the massive Andean insurrection.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Immigration and U.S. Imperialism: Notes on Recent Venezuelan and Cuban Immigration
Speaker/s
Julia Preston, Journalist and Author
Abstract
In the aftermath of President Trump’s military assault on Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro, this talk will look at the dynamics of immigration to the United States from Venezuela and Cuba, from President Biden’s administration to the present. It will consider how immigration from those countries affected the exercise of U.S. power in the region as well as domestic politics in the United States.
Scheduled
Faculty House
Forensic Identification and Error in Chile’s Democratic Transition
Speaker/s
Eden Medina, MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Abstract
In this talk I share research from my current book manuscript on the history of government efforts to identify human remains exhumed from Patio 29, the largest anonymous burial site used by the Pinochet dictatorship to conceal those it executed and disappeared. By 2002, government scientists had identified 96 sets of remains and returned them to families for burial. Yet in 2006 it emerged that at least half of these identifications were incorrect. The talk examines how these settled truths of identification unraveled and connects them to Chile's process of democratic transition.
Scheduled
Faculty House
“We Touched the Monster. Now the Monster Is Fighting Back.” Anti-Impunity Efforts in Post-Genocide Guatemala
Speaker/s
Jo-Marie Burt, Princeton University, and George Mason University
Abstract
For many years, Guatemala was in the international spotlight for its successful campaign against impunity. This campaign included cases of grand corruption and organized crime as well as serious human rights violations during the internal armed conflict (1960-1996), which left 200,000 dead and missing and more than one million displaced. Today, that campaign against impunity has been resoundingly defeated, even after the 2023 victory of anti-corruption candidate Bernardo Arévalo, who promised to restore good governance and resume anti-impunity efforts. Academic and journalist writing on Guatemala’s anti-impunity efforts have focused on its anti-corruption work. For the past ten years, I have led a project monitoring war crimes trials in Guatemala. In this presentation, I will examine Guatemala’s efforts to pursue accountability for wartime atrocities and how a coalition of far-right politicians, old guard military officials, and economic elites have worked to obstruct these efforts, and how survivor groups are fighting back.
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