points to a prehistory of postcolonial literature that is almost never discussed in the field."-Nivedita Majumdar, Catalyst "A wonderful addition to the reevaluation of mid-century literary products."-A. "Kalliney’s book is an intriguing read for those interested in understanding the Cold War and situating the relationship between the state and anticolonial writers."-Christina Obolenskaya, LSE Review of Books Ideas Podcast: The Aesthetic Cold War An excerpt from The Aesthetic Cold War Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police.Ī revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century. 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.
Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. 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. 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. 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. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean-such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R.
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.
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