Roundtable on Bhakti Shringapure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (New York and London, Routledge, 2020, 218 pages, ISBN 9780367670900)

Abstract

Cold War Assemblages: Decolonisation to Digital (Shringarpure 2020) is an incisive response to the paucity of sustained engagement with the legacies of the Cold War in postcolonial literary and cultural studies despite the stark historical reality that the iron curtain was partly sustained by turning the Third World into a battlefield where “proxy wars, coups, assassinations, weapons flooding, installation of dictators, and massive cultural interventions became commonplace” (110). This richly textured intervention insists that, contrary to perceptions of European colonialism and the Cold War as disparate epochs in postcolonial experience, the Cold War overlapped with the decolonisation project in the Third World, plunging these nations into cycles of chaos that persist to date, conventionally described in the short-hand of endemic violence, fallen revolutionaries and failed states. Temporality has been a highly charged vector in postcolonial studies, as exemplified by works such as David Scott’s (2013) rethinking of the Grenada revolution; Keguro Macharia’s (2020) notion of belatedness as a discursive frame that maps colonial modernity’s delegitimisations of Africans; and Andrew van der Vlies’ (2017) reflection on the ostensible collapse of time in post-apartheid South Africa; or, to paraphrase Scott (2004), what happens when the futures once imagined now lie behind us, with their promises undelivered. Cold War Assemblages extends these explorations, by asking: “how does one theorise the ontology of a nation from whom time itself was stolen?” (17). The book is framed in two parts: the first explores the question of violence through leader-thinker figures of revolution – Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba – each of whom variously grappled with colonial violence and the challenge of nation formation in the era of decolonisation. On Fanon and Gandhi, Shringarpure is interested in the challenges emerging from their attempts to simultaneously theorise and lead anticolonial movements in their respective contexts of India and Algeria; and the contradictions resulting from these competing demands for objective theorisation and pragmatic interventions in anticolonial revolutions. In its discussion of the systematic assassinations of three major revolutionary leaders in Africa – Sankara, Lumumba and Cabral – Cold War Assemblages contests arguments about the failures of the postcolonial Marxist left, by excavating the Cold War’s