Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis

Laffey, Mark; Weldes, Jutta

Abstract

Postcolonial scholars show how knowledge practices participate in the production and reproduction of international hierarchy. A common effect of such practices is to marginalize Third World and other subaltern points of view. For three decades, analysis of the Cuban missile crisis was dominated by a discursive framing produced in the ExComm, one in which Cuba was invisible. The effort to produce a critical oral history enabled Cuban voices—long excluded from interpretive debates about the events of October 1962—to challenge the myth of the crisis as a superpower affair. Despite the oral history project's postcolonial intervention, however, and greater attention to Cuba's role in the crisis, this framing persists and is reproduced in the micro-practices of scholarship. Decolonizing the crisis, and by extension the discipline itself, is not easy to do.

Citation

Laffey, M., & Weldes, J. (2008). Decolonizing the Cuban Missile Crisis. International Studies Quarterly, 52(3), 555-577. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00515.x

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Mar 31, 2008
• Journal: International Studies Quarterly
• Print ISSN: 0020-8833
• Electronic ISSN: 1468-2478
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 555-577
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2008.00515.x