Decolonization and the Cold War: What Can They Teach Modernist Studies?

Decolonization and the Cold War:What Can They Teach Modernist Studies? Peter Kalliney Eurasia without Borders: The Dream of a Leftist Literary Commons, 1919–1943. Katerina Clark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 464 Pp. $51.00 (cloth). From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds. Rossen Djagalov. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2020. 328 Pp. $140.00 (cloth); $44.95 (paper). At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War. Monica Popescu. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 272 Pp. 102.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper). Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. Jini Kim Watson. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 272 Pp. $105.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature. Duncan M. Yoon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 280 Pp. $110.00 (cloth); $82.99 (eBook). [End Page 633] For decades, literary scholars regarded the Cold War and decolonization as contemporaneous but relatively distinct historical episodes and political processes. Cold War literary studies were dominated by treatments of the superpowers and their irreconcilable aesthetic practices. Ideological differences and competing value systems had distinct literary manifestations, often rendered in shorthand as a contest between modernist experimentalism against socialist realism, expressive freedoms against totalitarian control of aesthetic production, or from another perspective as the choice between social responsibility and narcissistic self-indulgence. By contrast, postcolonial literary studies, which came of age during the latter part of the global anticolonial movements, operated with a different set of concerns. If the world was locked in Manichean struggle, it was between metropolitan and colonial cultures. As postcolonial studies developed, its practitioners sought to identify forms oppression and resistance, to understand antiracist mobilization in the context of White supremacy, to debate the relative merits of imported languages against their indigenous counterparts, and to document the persistence of autochthony amidst increasing cultural hybridity. Scholars of the twentieth century came to regard the Cold War and decolonization not merely as distinct historical contexts, but as different conceptual territories, each with specialized terms of analysis. In the last two decades, two significant trends have made it possible to question the conceptual separation of decolonization and the Cold War. First, influential historians such as Mary L. Dudziak, Penny M. Von Eschen, Christopher J. Lee, Vijay Prashad, and Odd Arne Westad began to explore the relationship between decolonization, global civil rights movements, and the jockeying of the Cold War superpowers.1 Documenting in rich detail how anticolonial revolutions, civil rights struggles, and Third World solidarity movements negotiated the bipolar geopolitical standoff—sometimes leveraging Cold War rivalries to fight for political concessions, while at other times striking a more defensive posture in pleas for noninterference—these historians made it more difficult to cordon off the superpowers from the many conflicts in which they intervened in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Likewise, this work encourages scholars interested in the global south to reevaluate the centrality of the colonizer-colonized relationship. What if, as Alioune Diop argues in his opening editorial statement of Présence Africaine in 1947, the anticolonial movements have less to fear from an exhausted, war-torn Europe than they do from the new imperialisms of the Soviet Union and the United States, vying for territory, resources, and influence?2 It would require postcolonial studies to rethink some of its founding heuristic principles, especially the terms of domination, resistance, and complicity. Second, the resurgence of archival work in modernist studies and adjacent fields, combined with a wider reinvestment in doing literary history on a global scale, encouraged scholars to reexamine the theoretical methods that helped postcolonial studies get off the ground. Marxism, New Historicism, and continental philosophy have all left sizable imprints on the field in its early years, but those approaches have been supplemented by research that privileges archival data and institutional histories. As scholars documented the cultural networks through which late colonial and postcolonial intellectuals moved—the systems of education, patronage, gate-keeping, and cultural production, distribution, and consumption—it quickly became apparent that figures who circulated internationally during the second half of the twentieth century had extensive dealings with the cultural diplomacy programs that flourished during the Cold...

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