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America, América in the Crosshairs
April 22 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
CSAAD Africa~Diaspora Forum Series
Dr. Greg Grandin
Yale University
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm
20 Cooper SQ, 5th FL Room 503
New York City, NY 10003
Zoom link: https://nyu.zoom.us/j/92032892806
Please join CSAAD for our lecture discussion with Dr. Greg Grandin. This talk will examine the Trump administration’s recent adventures in Latin America and his revival of the Monroe Doctrine in light of his broader foreign policy, arguing that the administration has stripped the Doctrine of its remaining pretensions to legal or moral legitimacy and redeployed it as a blunt instrument of hemispheric dominance — from extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean to regime change in Venezuela to the siege of Cuba. It situates this Western Hemisphere policy within Trump’s broader escalatory logic, in which the spectacle of coercion must be constantly repeated and amplified, a dynamic that helps explain the rapid pivot from Venezuela to open war with Iran. It concludes by asking whether we are witnessing not merely a revival of an old American tradition but its transformation into something new and more dangerous: a Monroe Doctrine for the entire world, unbound by law, and increasingly clothed in the language of divine mandate.
For accommodations, please contact the Assistant Director for the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora at ac8829@nyu.edu.
Watch Recording Here
Bio:
Greg Grandin is the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of a number of prize-winning books, including The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The End of the Myth won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the prize in History. Other books include Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic, first published in 2005 and significantly revised and expanded in 2021, and Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman. He is also the author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Toni Morrison called this book “scholarship at its best,” a “deft penetration into the marrow of the slave industry… brilliant.” His book Fordlandia, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. His most recent book, America, América: A New History of the New World is a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Cundill Prize (longlisted), and the Kirkus Prize. It won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. Grandin is also the author of The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America During the Cold War and The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation, which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Bryce Wood Award for the best book published on Latin America in any discipline. With Gil Joseph, Grandin co-edited A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War. A former consultant to the United Nations truth commission on Guatemala, Grandin is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written for various journals, including The Nation, The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, The London Review of Books, Jacobin, and The Intercept. For The Nation, he has written obituaries for Gabriel García Márquez, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Cormac McCarthy, Henry Kissinger, and George H.W. Bush.