The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Paperback)

Description

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa Asia and the Caribbean How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response many writers from Africa Asia and the Caribbean–such as Chinua Achebe Mulk Raj Anand Eileen Chang C.L.R. James Alex La Guma Doris Lessing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong o and Wole Soyinka–carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment imagining a different and freer future for their work. Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union in an effort to court writers funded international conferences arts centers book and magazine publishing literary prizes and radio programming. International spy networks however subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements tapping their phones reading their mail and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions deportations imprisonment and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature Kalliney s extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police. A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.