The imperialism of liberty: Intellectuals and the politics of culture in Cold War Latin America.

摘要

This dissertation is an historical analysis of the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America, set alongside histories of its rivals and competitors, the Soviet-sponsored World Peace Council and, after the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution, the Casa de las Americas. Each movement sought to buttress a political project with the cultural and intellectual structure that would give it substance and direction. But, this dissertation argues, the cultural Cold War in Latin America generally---and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in particular, sponsored as it was by the Central Intelligence Agency---contributed to polarization on the political left, thus helping to justify political violence in the name of both revolution and counter-revolution.;This dissertation argues that the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Latin America can be written as a history of unintended consequences, and was, in the ways that mattered most, a dramatic failure, because its actions and its nature undermined its goals. There were three principal failures: that of the 1950s prior to the Cuban Revolution in which it failed to distinguish itself from right-wing anti-Communism, that of the Cuban Revolution and the first few years thereafter, in which a Revolution it had supported became its more important regional opponent, and that of the early 1960s to end of the Congress in Latin America, when, in spite of its limited ability to control events or even its members, its existence was used as an argument for anti-imperialist violence.;This dissertation also argues that periodization of the Cold War needs to move along multiple "tracks," and that the "cultural Cold War" began in the 1930s, before the diplomatic Cold War. It argues against the puppet-on-a-string idea of "fronts" that comes from the Cold War era, showing instead that fronts that were successful were so because they grew from or responded to real injustices, and that multiple logics operated wherever collective action was taken. Finally, this dissertation argues that current explanations of the failure of democracy in Cold War Latin America are asking the wrong question, and give insufficient attention to internal and external contradictions in the construction of democracy.