The School of Advanced Study is delighted to make a clarion call to scholars everywhere to gather in London to consider the key place of Latin America in the connected making of the postcolonial world. Although Latin America clearly was a vanguard of global decolonization in the modern age, this deep historical fact is largely ignored or downplayed in the Anglophone world, where decolonization is provincially understood to be a post-war, twentieth-century phenomenon. Our collective conference task is to map not only the ways and means by which Latin American and Caribbean decolonization was critical to the making of the contemporary world, but also to ask why the region’s key place in global history has been denied or ignored. Besides putting Latin America and the Iberian world back on the global map of decolonization, we also seek to go beyond the academic and ideological trenches dug in recent years by the bearers of ‘postcolonial,’ ‘anti-colonial,’ and ‘decolonial’ banners and critical positions. We believe that a retrospective and ecumenical encounter with the connected histories of decolonization enables such a ‘going beyond,’ in part because its vicissitudes anticipated the contours of current debates.

The Institute for Latin American Studies, University of London intends to publish a concise edited volume of selected conference papers with an eye to the classroom. Please submit title and 100-word abstract of your proposed paper plus a one-page CV by December 1 to the convenor: Dr. Mark Thurner (mark.thurner@sas.ac.uk)

KEYNOTES: Benedict Anderson, Cornell University (tbc), Frederick Cooper, New York University, Andres Guerrero, FLACSO-Ecuador, Barbara Weinstein, New York University