Open call: Dossier “The visual cultures of development in Latin America (1920-1980)”
The concept of development, one of the most debated topics of the 20th century, has regained a central position in the research agendas of the historical discipline. Following the surge of critical studies in the 1980s and 1990s, which denounced the power asymmetries inherent in the modernizing programs of the Global North, the theme has returned with renewed vigor. New handbooks and compendiums demonstrate that, far from being relegated due to its lack of correspondence with the realities of the formerly called third world, historians have been steering the discussion in other directions. They have proposed new periodizations that trace the origins of development before the post-World War ii era, have inserted new spatial scales that highlight South-South cooperations, and have recovered the agency of local actors who contested or acclimatized Western visions of modernization. These and other perspectives continue to gain acceptance.
Within these emerging concerns, the popularization of development among millions of interlocutors—peasants, state officials, middle classes, women, students, and others—has become an expanding field of reflection. Thanks to research lines such as those related to the cultural Cold War, we now know that some of the most iconic initiatives and institutions involved in the global provision of aid, including the Marshall Plan, specialized United Nations agencies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Alliance for Progress, dedicated a significant portion of their efforts to transforming complex social engineering theories into accessible materials for broad audiences. To achieve this, they resorted to instruments of mass culture such as educational cinema, print media, traveling exhibitions, and television.
A significant area of reflection within these processes is the role of imagery in defining development and its associated concepts, such as growth, multilateralism, expertise, planning, and sustainability. Based on the premise that development possesses a visual vocabulary co-produced and negotiated by actors beyond the political or technoscientific sphere—filmmakers, advertisers, photographers, artists, among others—this dossier seeks to enrich the emerging debate on the historical construction of that vocabulary in Latin America.
We invite social science researchers to share case studies that illustrate how local and global modernization agendas employed images —both still and moving— as a productive medium through which to legitimize their visions, translate their working approaches, and, ultimately, shape abstractions of social transformation that extended beyond the technocratic circles where assistance policies were formulated.
Employing a broad temporal approach that allows for connections between the first and second halves of the 20th century, this dossier will prioritize contributions that examine visual sources as artifacts with both practical and epistemological potential. Special consideration will be given to research that explores the materiality, circulation, and operational impact of these resources in shaping the expert knowledge that structured development issues.