Dr. David Sheinin has been awarded The Arthur P. Whitaker Award by the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies for Best Book in 2011 or 2012. The award is for Consent of the Damned: Ordinary Argentinians and the Dirty War (University Press of Florida, 2012).
Consent of the Damned prompts a dramatic rethinking of human rights, violence, and international affairs in Argentina. Fast moving and drawing on a range of newly described human rights-related cases, the book challenges readers’ assumptions on Argentine governance and policy making. After 1975, the military dictatorship played a key role in defining, horrifically what people understood as human rights (and their abuse); it did so not apart from, but in multifaceted interaction with Argentines and others – in conflict with opponents, through propaganda, and in the successful promulgation of a consumer culture among middle class Argentines. The military manufactured the fantasy of a pro-human rights dictatorship. When the dictatorship fell in 1983, the new democracy set human rights as a policy priority. Despite vital successes, the new government quickly found itself grappling with many of the same problems faced by the dictatorship including a deluge of foreign criticisms over unsolved murders and even the defense of judicial precedent from the period of military rule.
Consent of the Damned prompts a dramatic rethinking of human rights, violence, and international affairs in Argentina. Fast moving and drawing on a range of newly described human rights-related cases, the book challenges readers’ assumptions on Argentine governance and policy making. After 1975, the military dictatorship played a key role in defining, horrifically what people understood as human rights (and their abuse); it did so not apart from, but in multifaceted interaction with Argentines and others – in conflict with opponents, through propaganda, and in the successful promulgation of a consumer culture among middle class Argentines. The military manufactured the fantasy of a pro-human rights dictatorship. When the dictatorship fell in 1983, the new democracy set human rights as a policy priority. Despite vital successes, the new government quickly found itself grappling with many of the same problems faced by the dictatorship including a deluge of foreign criticisms over unsolved murders and even the defense of judicial precedent from the period of military rule.
The Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies is a major, United States-based international organization of academics, government officials, NGO workers, teachers, and other professionals from throughout the Americas, dedicated to the study of Latin America across the disciplines.
Prof. Sheinin teaches History at Trent University and one of his specialties is Argentinian history. In 2005, Prof. Sheinin was appointed a member of the Argentine National Academy of History (the first and only Canadian ever designated). In 2011, he was named "Amigo de Eloisa" by Eloisa Cartonera. Prof. Sheinin held the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History (Library of Congress/American Historical Association), and in 2008 was named Edward Larocque Tinker Visiting Professor in Latin American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Posted on Friday, March 15, 2013.