Dr. Thiago Prates

The People’s Republic of China in left wing Latin American intellectual representations (1949 - 2020)

Keywords:    

• Leftist Intellectuals in Latin America

• Latin-American left(s) and repertoires of dissent in the second half of the 21st century

• Chinese Revolution in Latin America

• Latin American – Sino Relations

• Circulation and appropriation of ideas in the Global South

The victory of the Chinese revolutionaries in 1949 and the development of the People’s Republic of China had a huge impact in Latin America’s politics. This new political actor sought to build political and economic ties and after some initial skepticism the relations with Latin America became increasingly important. The Chinese engaged in official commerce and diplomatic issues in the region, created cultural initiatives to bring countries closer and established contacts with regional Communist Parties defying not only United States hegemony in the Americas, but also the primacy of the Soviet Union leadership over the communist movement.        

Many leftist militants in Latin America saw that experience as an inspiration for their respective countries based on the perception that an agrarian society such as the Chinese could succeed in a revolutionary process and that its peasant army was able to defeat its enemies. A decade later, during the 1960s, several communists created Maoist groups all over the continent China, alongside Cuba, represented an alternative to Latin American revolutionaries, different from the Soviet Union, closer to what was believed to be the region’s agrarian and dependent reality, an ally of the so-called Third World against imperialism until the late 1970s.

The influence of the Chinese experience was not restricted only to communist cadres involved directly on the political work, it was also received and elaborated by Latin American intellectuals affiliated to the Left or that sympathized with its causes. As soon as the Revolution was victorious renowned writers such as Pablo Neruda, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Bernardo Kordon, Jorge Amado, Nicolás Guillén, Lygia Fagundes Telles and Eduardo Galeano rushed into the country to inform their readers about the socialist regime. Cultural magazines and leftist newspapers were filled with images and texts that tried to understand and explain the importance of this new power and to relate it to their own reality.

The Chinese also sought to consolidate their position as an alternative by establishing cultural networks with Latin America. They sent delegates and artists, wrote articles and manifests in said magazines/newspapers, created institutions like the Chinese-Latin American Friendship Association (Asociación de Amistad entre China y América Latina, 1960) and published its very own bulletin, Beijing Informs (Pekin Informa, 1963). In a certain way, the intellectuals responsible for such endeavors not only initiated some sort of cultural diplomacy in a moment that the Chinese had no agents in Latin America, but they also created theories and reverberated political views that drew closer (or, in some cases, distanced) the destiny of the Chinese Revolution to that of Latin America’s.

The images and narratives created to represent the People’s Republic of China changed through time accordingly to Chinese internal or foreign politics, but they also depended on the historical dynamics of the diverse left in Latin America: leftist intellectuals did not receive passively the discourses and directives formulated in Beijing as mere Chinese agents in the region, instead they shaped their own narratives based on their agendas and ideologies. Those narratives were produced according to each individual or group political conceptions, cultural backgrounds, as well as access to information, and they served as the foundation for political and economic actions.

I propose to research the images and representations that left-wing Latin American intellectuals constructed about China from 1949 to nowadays in selected books, cultural magazines, and newspapers, many of which imagined a common place in the World Order for the people in the margins of Eurocentric society. This intellectual exchange between Asia and Latin American initially had a political objective, but soon allowed fruitful considerations about cultural diversity that started to shift cultural and political standards from Europe and the USA to the peripheries, bolstering south-south dialogues and, later, questioning if Sino-Latin American relations were indeed symmetric and if those two regions shared a common interest.

Therefore, I propose to analyze these representations as decolonial discourses produced by different individuals and groups that challenged global narratives conceived by hegemonical historical actors. How did Latin Americans perceive the Chinese political agency? What was China’s and Latin America’s common role in the resistance against the capitalist order? Were there any disagreements and doubts? How did those representations change through time? Who were the people and groups responsible for creating said representations? How did political and cultural formations and intellectual networks influence the production of these discourses? How did those narratives take form and how did they circulate? 

Research

• Latin American Contemporary History
• Intellectual History and transnational intellectual networks
• Cultural Cold War
• Latin American Left

Academic Training

2016 -2021: PHD in History at the Minas Gerais Federal University (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Dissertation: Uma Guerrilha Revisionista: intelectuais, revisionismo e políticas da história nas Ediciones de Crisis (Argentina, 1973-1976) – [A Revisionist Guerilla: intellectuals, revisionismo and politics of history in Ediciones de Crisis (Argentina, 1973-1976) ].

2013-2015: MA in History at the Minas Gerais Federal University (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG) , Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Thesis: O mundo não acaba no Malecón: exílio, intelectuais e dissidência política nas revistas Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana e Revista Hispano-Cubana – ]The world doesn’t end at the Malecón: exiles, intellectuals and political dissidence in the cultural magazines Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana and Revista Hispano-Cubana]

2008-2012: Graduate in History at the Minas Gerais Federal University (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG) ,
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Senior thesis: O exílio e o intelectual cubano na revista Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana – ] Cuban exiles and intellectuals in the cultural magazine Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana]

Academic Career

2021:  Research Associate , Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, University of Hamburg, Germany. Member of the Research Project “World Order Narratives of the Global South” (WONAGO).

07/2020 – 09/2021: Professor at the Minas Gerais State University (Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais-UEMG)
Courses taught: Contemporary History 1 (História Contemporânea 1); Contemporary History 2 (História Contemporânea 2); History of (Pre)Colonial Americas (História da América Pré-Colonial e Colonial); History of Contemporary Americas (História da América Contemporânea); Contemporary Historiography (Historiografia Contemporânea); Social and Historical Formation of Brazil (Formação Sócio-Histórica do Brasil); Economic History (História Econômica Geral); Methodology in History Teaching (Metodologia do Ensino de História); Military Dictatorships in the Southern Cone (Ditaduras Militares no Cone Sul); Iconography and Arts in History Teaching (Iconografia e Artes no Ensino de História)

03/2018-07/2018: Postgraduate teaching assistant at the Minas Gerais Federal University (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG)
Course taught: History of Peronism (História do Peronismo)

04/2016-04/2017: Editor of the history journal Temporalidades (ISSN: 1984-6150)

08/2013-12/2013: Postgraduate teaching assistant at the Minas Gerais Federal University (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais – UFMG)
Course taught: Intellectuals and revolutions in Latin America (Intelectuais e Revolução na América Latina)

2012: Student exchange program at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA

Articles

Prates, Thiago. “Revolution from the margins: Uruguayan New Left narratives on the People’s Republic of China (1950s-1960s)”. Antíteses, v.16, n. 31, jan-jun. 2023, 58-081.  DOI: 10.5433/1984-3356.2023v16n31p023-081.

Prates, Thiago; Rocha, Igor. "Revisionismos, negacionismos e usos políticos do passado: uma apresentação". Cadernos De Pesquisa do CDHIS, 34(2), 2021, 3–14. https://doi.org/10.14393/cdhis.v34n2.2021.64840.

Prates, Thiago; Rocha, Igor. "Entrevista com o Professor Gabriel Costa Ávila". Cadernos De Pesquisa do CDHIS, 34(2), 2021, 15–25. https://doi.org/10.14393/cdhis.v34n2.2021.64791.

Prates, Thiago H. O.. Peronismo e revolução: as revistas montoneras. REVISTA ELETRÔNICA DA ANPHLAC, v. 1, p. 303-311, 2018.

Prates, Thiago H. O.. A história falsificada: nacionalismos e revisionismos históricos na Argentina. HISTÓRIA DA HISTORIOGRAFIA, v. 1, 163-170, 2017.

Meira Carvalho, Marina Helena ; Prates, Thiago H. O. . Para além das fronteiras: histórias transnacionais, conectadas, cruzadas e comparadas.. TEMPORALIDADES, v. 8, 4-21, 2016.

 2014 - Coelho Neto, R. ; Prates, Thiago H. O. . Revistas de intelectuais exilados como objeto de pesquisa: o caso de Araucaria de Chile e Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana. FACES DA HISTÓRIA, v. 1, 124-146, 2014.

Books

Prates, Thiago H. O.. O mundo não acaba no Malecón: exílio, intelectuais e dissidência política nas revistas Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana e Revista Hispano-Cubana (1996-2002). 1. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Grupo Multifoco, 2018. v. 1. 350p.

Book chapters

Prates, Thiago H. O.. O fardo do passado: cultura política comunista e história na obra de Eduardo Galeano. In: SILVEIRA, Diego Omar; LEITE, Isabel Cristina; AYALA, Mario.. (Org.). Questões de América Latina Contemporânea: novos objetos, novas dimensões, novas temporalidades. 1ed.Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2016, v. , 261-274.

Other publications

Prates, Thiago H. O.. Interesses que moldam uma obra maiúscula. O Tempo, Belo Horizonte, p. 2 - 2, 11 ago. 2018. (Article in a local newspaper).

Organized the thematic dossier “Beyond the national borders: histoire croisée, transnational/connected/ comparative histories” in the academic journal TEMPORALIDADES (https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/temporalidades/issue/view/1984615021).