Expanding Paradigms, Redesigning Frontiers: American Cultural Diplomacy and the Quest for an Inter-American Community of Scholars

Abstract

Within the frame of a policy for hegemonic leadership in post-World War II, the U. S. started to display initiatives aimed at the Latin American academic and cultural fields with the goal of attracting those intellectuals and elites toward its strategic thought and project. The process of the Cold War accelerated the emergence of the field of cultural diplomacy as an axis parallel to and complementary with traditional diplomacy, to which it was subordinated although with its own specific methods, dynamics, and goals. Diverse programs and activities, such as exchange of students, intellectuals, and leaders; intelligence, informational, military, and technical assistance; promotion of the teaching of English as well as of the TV and Hollywood industries, among others, sought to “win the minds and hearts” of the local societies. As a steady axis of this political projection, the U. S. cultural diplomacy recurred to federal agencies, universities, and philanthropic societies to support cultural initiatives that, beyond expanding scientific and artistic paradigms, also constituted the export of an ideology: the promotion of the American dream The arrival of these institutions, programs, and officials organized and financed by the U. S. promoted the creation in the local field of a local elite network constituted by institutions, programs, and professionals with better conditions of production and a strong articulation within the American academic field of reference. The link of this sector to the “more modern” American scientific paradigms, as well as the immediate association of those disciplinary differences to Cold War, local and international political conflicts—a less than surprising fact given the reduced autonomy of the local cultural field with respect to national politics—contributed to the deep division within this field. However, the emergence of these transnational “sites of contact,” far from having homogenous consequences, opened a dynamic process of cultural exchange that went beyond the U. S. foreign policy goals. These “sites of contact” of the American cultural expansion constitute a fertile area not only for the study of imperial policies but also of the multiple agents, institutions, and ideas, national as well as trans-national, that met each other through this process.