Popularising Dependency Theory in Latin America: Hour of the Furnaces and Open Veins of Latin America Revisited

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the widespread impact of dependency theory in Latin America during the 1960s by exploring two important cultural productions from the period: Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s film Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and Eduardo Galeano’s book Open Veins of Latin America (1971). The article seeks to understand how ideas of an unequal world brought about by dependency analysis in the 1960s structured the arguments found in both the film and the book. It aims to clarify what ideas from dependency analysis were adopted by Solanas, Getino and Galeano and how these were ‘translated’ into a language accessible to the general public. Although neither the book nor the film employed the term ‘global inequality’ explicitly, much of the language used in these cultural productions is thematically linked to the idea of global inequality. This article thus aims to shed a new light on the intellectual history of global inequality at a time of high contestation of inequality in Latin America.