Neocolonial Fictions Of The Global Cold War

Bringing together noted scholars in the fields of literary, cultural, gender, and race studies, this edited volume challenges us to reconsider our understanding of the Cold War, revealing it to be a global phenomenon rather than just a binary conflict between U.S. and Soviet forces. Shining a spotlight on writers from the war’s numerous fronts and applying lenses of race, gender, and decolonization, the essayists present several new angles from which to view the tense global showdown that lasted roughly a half-century. Ultimately, they reframe the Cold War not merely as a divide between the Soviet Union and the United States, but between nations rich and poor, and mostly white and mostly not. By emphasizing the global dimensions of the Cold War, this innovative collection reveals emergent forms of post-WWII empire that continue to shape our world today, thereby raising the question of whether the Cold War has ever fully ended.

This book offers a comprehensive guide to global literary engagement with the Cold War. Eschewing the common focus on national cultures, the collection defines Cold War literature as an international current focused on the military and ideological conflicts of the age and characterised by styles and approaches that transcended national borders. Drawing on specialists from across the world, the volume analyses the period’s fiction, poetry, drama and autobiographical writings in three sections: dominant concerns (socialism, decolonisation, nuclearism, propaganda, censorship, espionage), common genres (postmodernism, socialism realism, dystopianism, migrant poetry, science fiction, testimonial writing) and regional cultures (Asia, Africa, Oceania, Europe and the Americas). In doing so, the volume forms a landmark contribution to Cold War literary studies which will appeal to all those working on literature of the 1945-1989 period, including specialists in comparative literature, postcolonial literature, contemporary literature and regional literature.

Telling America's Story to the World argues that state and state-affiliated cultural diplomacy contributed to the making of postwar US literature. Highlighting the role of liberal internationalism in US cultural outreach, Harilaos Stecopoulos contends that the state mainly sent authors like Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Maxine Hong Kingston overseas not just to demonstrate the achievements of US civilization but also to broadcast an American commitment to international cross-cultural connection. Those writers-cum-ambassadors may not have helped the state achieve its propaganda goals-indeed, this rarely proved the case-but they did find their assignments an opportunity to ponder the international meanings and possibilities of US literature. For many of those figures, courting foreign publics inspired a reevaluation of the scope and form of their own literary projects. Testifying to the inadvertent yet integral role of cultural diplomacy in the worlding of US letters, works like The Mansion (1959), Life Studies (1959), "Cultural Exchange" (1961, 1967), Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), and Three Days Before the Shooting... (2010) reimagine US literature in a mobile, global, and distinctly political register.

This timely volume focuses on the period of decolonization and the Cold War as the backdrop to the emergence of new and diverse literary aesthetics that accompanied anti-imperialist commitments and Afro-Asian solidarity. Competing internationalist frameworks produced a flurry of writings that made Asian, African and other world literatures visible to each other for the first time. The book’s essays examine a host of print culture formats (magazines, newspapers, manifestos, conference proceedings, ephemera, etc.) and modes of cultural mediation and transnational exchange that enabled the construction of a variously inflected Third-World culture which played a determining role throughout the Cold War. The essays in this collection focus on locations as diverse as Morocco, Tunisia, South Asia, China, Spain, and Italy, and on texts in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, Italian, and Spanish. In doing so, they highlight the combination of local debates and struggles, and internationalist networks and aspirations that found expression in essays, novels, travelogues, translations, reviews, reportages and other literary forms. With its comparative study of print cultures with a focus on decolonization and the Cold War, the volume makes a major contribution both to studies of postcolonial literary and print cultures, and to cultural Cold War studies in multilingual and non-Western contexts, and will be of interest to historians and literary scholars alike.

The Cold War was an era of surprising connections between American and Czech literary cultures. Major writers met behind the Iron Curtain, while others smuggled, translated, and adapted works from the other side. Brian K. Goodman explores the artistic and political consequences, arguing that the movement of literature inspired new forms of dissent.

Congo, a former Belgian colony, at the beginning of the independence of the territory, a brave and dedicated leader, Patrice Emery Lumumba, won the election and was appointed Prime Minister. As the first Prime Minister of a democratic Congo, the newly elected representative of the country filled with devotion had in mind to providing Congolese with a better future. He therefore fought on behalf of Congolese. His methods were disliked by the former colonizers for whom he became a danger to their interests in Congo after his speech on independence day, on June 30, 1960. Since then, various plots were arranged against him to be killed. Those conspiracies never succeeded against him since they were unfortunately aborted for the most. The country fell into a state of incredible disrepair due to recurrent oppositions since September 14 of that year. Soon, Mobutu's forces backed by the CIA arrested Lumumba, on December 1, 1960 and he was guarded by the UN troops. Later, Lumumba was sent to Elizabethville, in the Katanga, the territory of his rival Moïse Tshombe. At his arrival, he was beaten by both Katanga's and Belgians' forces to death. On January 17, 1960, Patrice Emery Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo was assassinated in cold blood by various perpetrators. After 61 years in Belgium the remaining teeth were sent back the the DRC for burial on June 30, 2022.

Introduction -- "Stick to Her Farms and Farmer Folk": World War I and the Origins of Combat Gnosticism -- "Tell It Like It Was": World War II and the Institutional Curation of Memory -- "You Had to Be There": Vietnam and the Veteran's Consolidation of Authority -- "You Don't Have to Be a Veteran": The All-Volunteer Force and the Dispersion of Authority -- "The New Battle": The Civil-Military Gap and the Shock of Coming Home -- "The Other Side of COIN": Counterinsurgency and the Ethics of Memory -- "You Volunteered to Get Screwed": Public Trust and the Literary Representation of the Professional Military -- Appendix: The American Novels of Iraq and Afghanistan through 2020.

This book features 27 integrated essays that offer access to the art, life, and legacy of one of the world's most influential artists.