Patrick Iber: The Many Meanings of Freedom in the Cultural Cold War

“Freedom” was one of the key words of the cultural Cold War. Anti-Communism worked to claim it, finding its opposite in Stalinism and never letting go of the association. Freedom became, in other words, both an ethical ideal and a piece of propaganda. But did “Cold War freedom” really have a stable meaning as it moved throughout the globe? In his lecture, Iber explores debates about artistic and political freedom in the early years of the cultural Cold War in Latin America, where the meaning of freedom shifted and bent across national spaces. Political conflict overtook freedom as an ethical ideal: freedom and its antithesis were available, but, as Iber will argue, the Cold War made their synthesis impossible for much of the world.

Part of the conference Freedom in the Bush of Ghosts