Decolonizing the Cold War

Abstract

he controlling metaphors in Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War come right out of the Cold War imaginary. Popescu aims to reveal the “watermark” left by the Iron Curtain on the field of African literatures (2, 11, 26) and compares taking a Cold War view of postcolonial literary studies to applying heat or a chemical treatment to invisible ink (27, 94). These images evoke tradecraft: secret codes and hidden messages, evidence of authenticity against a background of suspicion and uncertainty. But they are also liquid metaphors and, in this sense, they aptly illuminate Popescu’s approach to her subject. In At Penpoint, the rigid binary oppositions of the Cold War period become fluid, flow in unexpected directions, and even dissolve as Popescu pursues them into the archives and texts of African literatures and literary criticism from the 1950s to the 2000s. Popescu’s biggest contribution here is historiographical: not only does she historicize African literary production during the Cold War, she also reveals the lasting effects of the Cold War on today’s intellectual concepts and commitments. The book’s structure mirrors this twostep approach to Cold War literary historiography. The first section examines African literary debates in the context of the overt cultural diplomacy and covert sponsorship programs set E M I L Y H Y D E