“América First” explores the varied and formative roles the Americas–from Greenland to Patagonia–played, and continue to play, in the construction of US global power, from the nineteenth century to the present. Presentations will address the dependency between political, economic, racial, gender, and ethnic formations between North and Latin America, and how they are mediated through cross-regional migration of people, ideas, commodities. Our aim, amid the rise of a hemispheric right-wing coalition and left-wing resistance, is to address the continuities and ruptures, the historical presence, of the Monroe Doctrine across continental politics.
There is a live Zoom option for those who are unable to attend the Friday panels in person, please reach out to javier.porrasmadero@yale.edu to receive the link.
PROGRAM
Thursday, April 9, HQ 131
5:00-6:30 pm – Keynote
● Greg Grandin
Friday, April 10, HQ 276
9:00-10:15 am - Empires of Liberty and Slavery (1820s-1890s)
● Matthew Karp and Isadora Moura Mota, moderated by Gabriel Rivera Cotto
10:30-11:45 am - The Rosy Dawn of the ‘American Century’ (1890s-1930s)
● Charisse Burden-Stelly and Christina Heatherton, moderated by Steven D. Cohen
1:00-2:15 pm - The Labyrinth of the Good Neighbor Ends in the Cold War (1930s-1960s)
● Alexander Aviña and Javier Puente, moderated by Javier Porras Madero
2:30-3:45 pm - Lives and Afterlives of Neoliberalism (1970s-2000s)
● Jorge Cuéllar, Geo Maher, and Melanie Yazzie, moderated by Jess Cruz
4:15 pm - Roundtable: Latin America, so far from God, so close to the United States
● Alvita Akiboh, Anne Eller, Manu Karuka, Aziz Rana, moderated by Marcela Echeverri
SPONSORS
Edward J. and Dorothy Clark Kempf Memorial Fund
Black Studies Department
Yale Graduate Dean’s Fund
Yale History Department’s Mellon Fund
Yale Group for the Study of Native America
Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition
