“Peculiar and enabling”: cold war paradigms and paradoxes

Abstract

The period of the Cold War has generated a significant amount of scholarship, especially in relation to the place of Africa after World War II. This period encapsulates a very intriguing political time, in which a new global order sought to re-configure the world after the war. While Europe was going back into reconstruction, its colonies were emerging as sites of a new political order, new nation states emerging onto the world stage on the back of anti-colonial movements during the first half of the twentieth century. It was a period that inevitably brought together anti-colonialism of the first half of the century, anti-fascist movements that culminated in World War II, the fight for civil rights in the US after the period of reconstruction, and the beginnings of decolonisation in the postcolonial world. These intersections signalled the coming together, the coalition of minority and minoritised communities of the old imperial order and more specifically what nowadays goes by various names: the “global south;” the “South Atlantic;” the “Black Atlantic” amongst others. Africa and Asia were at the heart of these formulations, in relation to the Caribbean as well as to the African American world. The Cold War arrived to intervene in this new order, to confront, appropriate and disrupt it, for its own uses. The Cold War – this Orwellian formulation – came to define this period as overdetermined by the threat of nuclear warfare. The “coldness” of this war – its ideological imperium – belied its ripple effect in many parts of the world: espionage, regime changes, political assassinations, cultural patronage and the general effort to undermine the sovereignty of newly independent nations. Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonizaton to Digital (2020) contributes towards the idea of examining this “war” as specifically intervening in the postcolonial world. Shringarpure’s book is part of recent studies that return to the Cold War, to look at how it shaped cultural production, as well as the intellectual categories that emerged to define ways in which this production was studied (Kalliney 2015; Popescu 2020). Most of these studies can be classified in three dimensions: firstly, how the Cold War created conditions for late modern and modernist cultural production and intellectual work within postcolonial societies (Benson 1986; Kalliney 2015; Bulson 2017; Popescu 2020). Secondly how Cold War cultural patronage began to generate the category “World Literature” (Rubin 2012; Bulson 2017) and thirdly within the sites of Africa and Asia, Cold War influence on postcolonial studies (Popescu 2020; Shringarpure 2020). Shringarpure’s particular intervention speaks to how “this history of postcoloniality” is yoked “with that of the Cold War” (3) and therefore how postcolonial studies/ theory/criticism was produced through what she calls “The Cold War paradigm” (134).