Session Abstract

As recent historiographical debates have suggested, the study of the Cold War in Latin America is rapidly re-defining and expanding its fields of inquiry: from new approaches to diplomatic and political narratives to the study of cultural and intellectual appropriations and hybridizations, all searching for a balance between the particular and the universal in Latin America's Cold War experiece. A crucial dimension in this new body of historical inquiry pertains to the study of the connections between national and transnational currents, ideologies and organizations. This panel intends to provide a multi-focal approach to the study of radical political mobilization in Latin America during the Cold War. The aim is to stimulate analysis of different forms of political engagement and activism at the local, national and transnational levels, by stressing the possible layered connections between the three. The papers will tackle different ways in which political entrepeneurs interacted with the political system and with other politically active entities, creating intellectual and political networks of activism that often trascend internal and international borders, with different forms of social and ideological conflict and tensions informed by the imaginaries of the Cold War.