Kerry Bystrom “Reading the South Atlantic: Southern Africa, Latin America and the Cold War.”

A talk by Kerry Bystrom, Bard Faculty Representative to Bard College Berlin & Associate Professor of English and Human Rights, Bard College.

Using Mark Behr’s controversial novel The Smell of Apples (1995) as a springboard, this paper both examines the psychological dimensions of repression in apartheid South Africa and explores largely uncharted military connections between the apartheid government and dictatorial regimes in Argentina, Chile and other South American states.  It ultimately suggests that reading across the South Atlantic ocean–and through frames including the (failed) South Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as those of national and transnational liberation movements–can help to decenter Cold War historiography and open up understandings of cultural and political flows across the Global South.