Work in Progress


Abstract: Latin American Studies (LAS) in Anglophone countries has often been described as a child of the Cold War, shaped by geopolitical priorities that influenced what knowledge was produced, circulated, and legitimised, as well as who were legitimate interlocutors. We address the question of how the field has evolved since the 1990s, and whether any fundamental changes took place, through an analysis of publications in leading LAS journals. We examine both articles and book reviews across two periods—1982–2003 and 2004–2024—taking the late 1990s as a critical threshold. This moment, which we call the areastreiten or Area Studies crisis, brought together funding cuts linked to neoliberalisation and the end of the Cold War with an epistemological rupture marked by postmodern critiques of knowledge production and its entanglements with the state. We ask how LAS reconfigured itself in this context. Our study draws on two original databases: one containing all articles published in three LAS journals between 1982 and 2024, and another covering book reviews in seven journals from 1975 to 2025 (with uneven coverage). We apply network analysis, topic modelling and other methods to trace continuities and transformations, with particular attention to disciplinary positioning and authorship/citing patterns. We argue that LAS has undergone an assimilationist consolidation. The field is now institutionally recognisable, with core LAS journals occupying central positions in disciplinary networks and acting as bridges across fields. Yet this consolidation has reinforced hierarchies privileging Anglophone academic norms. Journals based in Latin America, once central, have been marginalised. The share of Latin American authors has grown, but their profiles converge towards Northern standards. Book reviewing remains overwhelmingly restricted to English-language titles, with a stable proportion of about 85%. In short, LAS has stabilised as a field, but largely through assimilation into Anglophone academic hierarchies rather than through genuine pluralisation.

     

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