Central American Revolutions Research Articles

The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: U.S. Protest and Central American Revolution

Nick Witham makes an important contribution to our understanding of American political culture in the 1980s. He examines a group of intellectuals, journalists, and filmmakers who, deeply critical of Ronald Reagan's policies in Central America, sought to inform and mobilize a complacent public. Witham's main argument is that these cultural producers not only reflected a politics of opposition but also helped shape “the political processes” of that opposition (p. 4). Witham joins a growing number of scholars in challenging prevailing interpretations of the 1980s as defined disproportionately by Reagan. Americans experienced the so-called age of Reagan primarily as an age of crisis at home (homelessness, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, farm foreclosures, Superfund legislation, and factory shutdowns) and on the foreign policy front, regarding not only the Soviet Union and the Middle East but also, as Witham shows so effectively, Central America. Witham makes a solid if uneven case for the importance of this 1980s cultural front. He is not always successful in fulfilling his promise to demonstrate “the vital importance of a ‘cultural left’ to any movement for political and social change” because he too infrequently shows the impact of these cultural producers on the movements (p. 6). Even so, Witham does well in reminding us of a vibrant and important culture of opposition.

NickWitham. The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

NickWitham. The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015.

The cultural Left and the Reagan era: US protest and the Central American revolution

The cultural Left and the Reagan era: US protest and the Central American revolution

Review of 'Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution''

Review of 'Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution''

La recreación de un clásico en América Latina: Antonio Gramsci en el pensamiento de Pablo González Casanova

El artículo se compone de tres partes en las que se reconstruye la trayectoria teórico-política del intelectual mexicano Pablo González Casanova en tanto que reelaboración de la reflexión gramsciana para pensar la lucha democrática en América Latina y se muestra su esfuerzo por argumentar la especificidad de la cuestión democrática latinoamericana como parte de un camino históricamente determinado hacia el socialismo. Primero, se recupera su reflexión acerca del nacionalismo revolucionario mexicano. Segundo, se reflexiona sobre la articulación que hace González Casanova entre la lucha democrática y la lucha por la liberación nacional. Tercero, se aborda la reelaboración creativa del autor sobre el concepto gramsciano de hegemonía como práctica política, con base en las “masas populares” centroamericanas que, en la lucha por su liberación, lograron la síntesis y superación de la dicotomía democracia-socialismo.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman. Austin: University of Texas Press, I990. xvi. 252 pp. $27.50 (cloth), $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0-292-74672-5, ISBN 0-292-74666-0.

The Aids Pandemic in Latin America

In an engagingly written book, Shawn Smallman explores the idea that to understand AIDS in Latin America we must place the disease within a broader international context. In other words, it is necessary to frame the evolution of the disease in the region as part of a larger geo-political phenomena, such as the drug trade, migration and war. Furthermore, one must consider the specific nature of the NGOs, the Church and private organisations when analysing what type of educational or preventive programmes have been implemented. The author starts by succinctly tracing the arc of HIV transmission in Latin America from confusion to hysteria to culturally specific solutions. The disease was initially interpreted as a reflection of the excess and moral decadence of the USA and many believed that ‘morally superior’ Latin America would be immune to the ravages of the illness. Moreover, the first cases in the early 1980s coincided with staunch anti-Americanism fuelled by President Ronald Reagan's military intervention in Central American revolutions and, hence, it reinforced politically charged claims of American imperialism. The fleeting accusation that the disease was nothing more than ‘an invention by Ronald Reagan to control our sexuality’ (p. 117) gave way instead to the certainty that the disease was frighteningly real.

Subalternity and representation: arguments in cultural theory

John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. xii+202 pages. John Beverley, one of the founding members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, is also an undisputed authority on Latin American testimonio and is well known for his unflagging involvement in Central American solidarity politics. His most recent collection of essays, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory, further solidifies his already substantial contributions to the critical projection of subalternity into the field of Latin American studies. Further -more, this book also participates in the trend of self-reflexive questioning shared in recent years by those scholars of Latin American literatures and searching for new, self-critical ways of envisioning the project of the left in the conditions of globalization and postmodernity (3). Within this self-reflective vein that investigates the pitfalls of reading Latin American discourses from the perspective of the North American academy-and represented by books such as Roman de la Campa's Latin Americanism and Neil Larsen's Reading North by South: On Latin American Culture and Politics-Beverley's study stands out as a very personal-- yet not narcissistic-testimony, which often turns into a painfully frank engagement with the political and ethical dilemmas of his own critical agenda. Beverley explains, for example, that the origins of Subalternity and Representation are in defeat and failure, both collective and individual: the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua and the scholarly and commercial failure of a book, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, which Beverley coauthored with Marc Zimmerman in the late 1980s (3). Beverley's savvy style of arguing, which blends erudition with personal anecdotes and confessions, storytelling with arcane theoretical terminology, sweeping conclusions with witty textual insights, should engage a variety of readers in a meditation on such complex issues of Latin Americanist thought as Angel Rama's conceptualizations of lettered city and narrative transculturation (chapter ii, Transculturation and Subaltern-Lity: The `Lettered City' and the Tupac Amaru Rebellion), Nestor Garcia Canclini's notion of hybrid cultures (chapter v, Civil Society, Hybridity, and the 'Political' Aspect of Cultural Studies. On Canclini) and Antonio Cornejo Polar's heterogeneity. Beverley's impressive grasp of these questions, combined with his uncanny ability to interweave them with theories generated outside of Latin America (Homi Bhabha, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others), gives the volume its overall coherence. …

Central America

As McDonald's plants its golden arches in Managua next to one of President Alemain's new traffic circles, it seems a good time to reassess the meaning of the Central American revolutions. Out of the ashes of the wars that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more, new banks and shopping centers and hotels are sprouting up, alongside the fire-eaters and windshield-swabbing children at stop lights and the other visible signs of worsening poverty. The razzle-dazzle of electoral politics is replacing the rattle of the machine gun. The convenient shorthand label postconflict Central America needs to be replaced by a more nuanced analysis of the new dimensions of conflict beyond the armed struggle for state power that dominated the long decade from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Women's Participation in Central American Revolutions

Evidence from Nicaragua and El Salvador indicates that substantial numbers of women from humble backgrounds have participated in those nations' guerrilla armies, and not simply in support roles but as combat soldiers as well. This article analyzes the dynamics of societal change by which nonelite women are mobilized for participation in guerrilla insurgencies. The rapid social, economic, and demographic changes that accompany dependent modes of development erode the stability of rural social structures and contribute to male spouse abandonment of the family. Impoverished female heads of households have become involved in grass roots organizations whose programs address their immediate economic distress and mobilize them for collective action in support of economic and political reforms. When the regime represses this political activism, it seldom discriminates between males and females in the application of repression. Faced with the threat of violence, women have joined insurgent organizations that promise, if nothing else, security from state repression.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions:Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions:Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions.

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and politics in the Central American revolutions

Literature and politics in the Central American revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions

Religious Faith and Political Praxis in the Americas by Michael Gismondi* Sanctuary: The New Underground Railway. Renny Golden and Michael McConnell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1986) 214 pp. Guerrillas of Peace: Liberation Theology and the Central American Revolution. Blase Bonpane (Boston: South End Press, 1985) 119 pp

Religious Faith and Political Praxis in the Americas by Michael Gismondi* Sanctuary: The New Underground Railway. Renny Golden and Michael McConnell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1986) 214 pp. Guerrillas of Peace: Liberation Theology and the Central American Revolution. Blase Bonpane (Boston: South End Press, 1985) 119 pp

Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Central American Revolutions

Can Governments Learn? American Foreign Policy and Central American Revolutions

LIBERATION THEOLOGY AND "THE RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF REBELLION"

Abstract : This article traces the evolution of liberation theology in this revolutionary setting, beginning with a summary of the movement's rise and some of its basic tenets. After considering the reaction of the church hierarchy in Latin America and Rome, attention is given to Phillip Berryman's The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions, which details church involvement in the violence of this turbulent region. The article concludes with an assessment of the implications of liberation theology for US policy.

BOOK NOTICES

BOOK NOTICES Get access The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions. By Phillip Berryman. Orbis Books, 1984. 452 pages. $19.95. Nicholas Piediscalzi Nicholas Piediscalzi Wright State University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LIV, Issue 2, Summer 1986, Pages 369-a–369, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LIV.2.369-a Published: 01 July 1986