In 1952, Erich Auerbach observed that all culture was “being concentrated either in European-American or Russian-Bolshevist patterns”—a contest that threatened to engulf other traditions and standardize global culture, such that “the notion of Weltliteratur would be at once realized and destroyed.” Over the following decades, some of Auerbach’s prophecy would be fulfilled, but a resistance would also take shape. As declassified archives and scholarly recovery efforts have revealed, the world’s Cold War superpowers devised and promoted rival cultural brands that attempted to control international communities of writers and artists and to re-shape the tastes of their audiences. At the same time, many writers and artists in NATO or Soviet states rebelled against the institutional politicization of their work, and new voices in the Third World insisted on their own artistic autonomy, negotiating mixed allegiances.
The interdependence of modernist experimentation, national intelligence, and post-war popular taste came to wide critical and public attention thanks to Frances Stonor Saunders’s breakthrough 1999 volume, The Cultural Cold War, which described the CIA’s strategic use of modern art and postwar intellectual culture to promote Western democratic freedom. Saunders’s work has gone on to inform the last two decades of post-war studies, though recent critics have pushed beyond or against its focus on institutional power and American culture. Penny M. Von Eschen tells the histories of rebellious “jazz ambassadors” in Satchmo Blows Up the World (2004); Andrew Rubin looks outward on the CIA’s influence over the canon of world literature in Archives of Authority (2012); Catherine Kodat considers dancers, directors, and writers who played with the metapolitics of Cold War art in Don’t Act, Just Dance (2014); and Greg Barnhisel breaks down illusions about a unified “Government” and compliant artists in Cold War Modernists (2015).
It is in this spirit that our panel convenes, to continue expanding and revising the field of Cold War studies. Marshaling methods from the recent institutional and transnational turns in literary studies, each of the prospective panelists updates and complicates existing scholarship on this political-literary history: these papers cast new light on the Cultural Cold War’s global reach, reckon with the unexpected consequences of institutional influence, and re-assess individual writers and artists as more than allies or pawns.
Kristin George Bagdanov sets the stakes of the discussion by showing that certain organizations and their affiliated poets were motivated not just by the politics of cultural crossfire, but by fears of literal crossfire. Recovering a lesser-known chapter in the history of the Beats, George Bagdanov relates how, in the face of possible nuclear war, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman turned to institutional organizing—not in service of the U.S. government, but as a bulwark against its worst impulses. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO is a paradox, aligning the Beats with some of their former enemies but also giving them a renewed purpose as antinuclear activists. Extending work by Barnhisel, George Bagdanov opens the panel by offering a provocative, nuanced take on the role of American academies and the politics of free speech in the 1970s.
Examining the Cultural Cold War from the other side of the Iron Curtain, Jessica Gokhberg studies the afterlife of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago—the novel that drew attention, ire, and acclaim from the CIA, the Swedish Academy, the KGB, and the Politburo. Gokhberg’s work reveals that cultural policies across the two Blocs did not operate in isolation, but instead evolved in reactive, competitive ways. Following Rubin’s directive to question complicity and state manipulation as a way of accounting for authorial and artistic value during the Cold War, Gokhberg traces the history of Doctor Zhivago’s reception and finds its origins in an unlikely, antagonistic set of institutional readers.
American and Soviet agencies weren’t just interested in their own writers and artists. As Peter Kalliney details in his proposed paper, the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Soviet Union’s Lotus magazine also attempted to sponsor and recruit intellectuals in Asia and Africa, including Alex La Guma, Chinua Achebe, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Kalliney argues that the work of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association (sponsored by the Soviets but run by writers with ties to the CCF) leads us to see Cold War literature as more than merely a field split in two across an ideological divide. By playing both sides, writers like La Guma and Ngugi maintained their artistic autonomy and furthered their own independent agenda: to build an international literary network of Third World writers.
By way of conclusion, Miles Osgood’s proposed talk will revisit the array of international players that have been discussed in a final, synthetic case-study: the Mexico City 1968 Cultural Olympiad. Against the backdrop of the Tlatelolco massacre, podium protests by American and Czech athletes, and a year of civil disobedience worldwide, Mexico City organized an unprecedented international arts festival, inviting artists from 97 countries to participate in a year-long celebration. The events inside and outside the stadium inspired Olympic poems from three notable visitors—Robert Graves of England, Evgeny Evtushenko of Russia, and Germán Pardo García of Colombia—and one notable absentee—Octavio Paz of the host nation. Comparing these poems and their performances as representative of the different artistic and political positions described in the panel, Osgood argues that Olympic and post-war internationalism characterizes the “world” literature of this period.