Description:
The cultural reverberations of Central America's failed revolutions on US intellectual thought
The thwarted Central American revolutions during the latter half of the twentieth century marked a watershed in what had become a global anti-imperialist movement striving for a more egalitarian future. Examining a range of documentary, literary, and artistic works, States of Defeat looks at how left-wing intellectuals in the United States reckoned with the fallout from these defeats through wide-ranging creative expressions of indignation, cynicism, and grief.As he argues for the historical significance of Central America in the transition out of the Cold War, Eric A. Vázquez shows how the unfulfilled revolutionary ambitions in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala prompted intellectuals in the United States to reexamine their desires for radical transformation. Analyzing novels, memoirs, anthropological writings, documentary film, and archival materials from the 1980s and 1990s, he demonstrates how these texts prefigured later anxieties about secrecy and securitization, the rise of nongovernmental organizational forms, and state failure.
Examining the legacies of unfulfilled anti-imperialist political ideals and their implications for the global left in the twenty-first century, States of Defeat offers a renewed perspective on the function of Central America in the US imagination. Amid a resurgence of crackdowns on public protest and a rise in virulent anti-immigrant campaigns throughout the United States and globally, Vázquez presents urgent and valuable insights into the viability of political solidarity and state power.
Review Quotes:
"Insightful and brilliant, States of Defeat uses the defeat of the Central American revolutionaries by US-backed, brutal right-wing militaries to analyze the meaning of revolutionary failure for the United States. Eric A. Vázquez expertly uses these failed revolutions to explore the contiguity between Central American and US politics: the rise of the surveillance state, incarceration, and the radical right."--María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States
"This riveting and carefully argued book analyzes the complex politics of US solidarity with Central America in the 1980s. Centering people in the Central American diaspora for their work as artists and activists, Eric A. Vázquez asks hard questions about what is at stake, who benefits, and what matters in the making of alliances across borders. Every chapter is rich with a nuanced account of anti-imperialist creativity and commitment."--Melani McAlister, author of Promises, Then the Storm: Notes on Memory, Protest, and the Israel-Gaza War