Solidarity, Empire and Pan-Americanism: Bruce Cockburn’s Reagan-Era Human Rights Music

This article examines how Canadian musician Bruce Cockburn’s song ‘If I Had a Rocket Launcher’, along with several others on his 1984 album Stealing Fire, embodied the contradictory politics of Pan-American solidarity in the 1980s. Drawing on Cockburn’s experiences of an Oxfam-sponsored trip to Central America, it explores how the era’s human rights discourse reshaped ideas of hemispheric connection. While Cockburn and the Central America solidarity movement articulated a transnational politics that challenged Cold War binaries and emphasized shared humanity across the Americas, their border-crossing political imaginaries simultaneously reinforced asymmetrical power relations between North and South. Through close analysis of documents from Cockburn’s personal archive alongside his lyrics, musical arrangements and cultural reception, the article shows how the emotional and sensory dimensions of human rights activism could simultaneously mobilize political opposition to violent and repressive policies in Central America and reproduce imperial dynamics that centered North American experiences while marginalizing Central American political agency. In making these arguments, the article contributes to historiographies of Pan-Americanism, human rights and 1980s solidarity movements by demonstrating how popular music mediated transnational political encounters through affect and sensation.