Exile and Subversive Writing: A Fertile Soil for Critical Thinking: Encontros com a Civilização Brasileira, Cuadernos de Marcha and Controversia.
Date
2015-08-31
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Publisher
Latin American Studies Program, University of Delaware, Newark, DE
Abstract
During the seventies, many Latin American intellectuals were forced to leave their home countries and sent into exile. By analyzing three cultural journals, namely Encontros com a Civilização Brasileira (1978–82), Cuadernos de Marcha in its second series (1979–85) and Controversia (1979–83), I develop the argument that the exile in Mexico of a Latin American intelligentsia segment, in the context of the Cold War, redirected the political ponderings of dissident intellectual groups toward a course of critical revision and reorganization of both political thought and praxis. Instead of bringing about the stagnation of thought or choking off democratic resistance, the distinctive atmosphere of anxiety, bewilderment, and frantic agitation favored the accumulation of a critical mass. I notice that these journals played an important role as sociability structures in the maintenance of Latin American intellectual networks. Since I am interested in the impact caused by exile in Mexico on the ideological strata and on the political intervention strategies of dissident intellectual groups from Latin America, I analyze texts published in these three periodicals to investigate how they worked as a space for resistance and intervention within the authoritarian context produced by repressive political regimes widespread on the subcontinent during the Cold War.
Description
Keywords
Exile, Cultural Latin American journals, Intellectuals