Néstor Kohan, Hegemony and culture in times of “soft” counterinsurgency

Abstract

The words of two intellectuals disappeared by the Argentine dictatorship serve as a preamble to the book by Néstor Kohan, Hegemony and culture in times of “soft” counterinsurgency, published by Editorial Ocean Sur in 2021. They are Daniel Hopen and Haroldo Conti who, in their respective texts, denounce the interference of the United States of America in the cultural and academic world of Latin America and the Caribbean in times of the Cold War, through the economic recruitment of intellectuals, academics and any movement likely to be financed by the "generosity" of American foundations. Either by denouncing the role of these mechanisms and their structural functioning, as is the case with Hopen, or by expressing the reasons for his resignation from one of the Guggenheim Foundation grants, as Conti writes, both emphasize the impossibility to receive money from these organizations without being instrumentalized by them. Both texts serve, therefore, as the perfect appetizer to introduce a work that delves into, precisely, those strategies of US imperialism, giving them a historical context, but also showing some lines of continuity that reach the present day.