Decolonial opacities: Cold War Assemblages

Abstract

Bhakti Shringarpure’s important and groundbreaking Cold War Assemblages (2020) is timely for varied reasons, and a welcome addition to the politics of decolonisation in these parts of the world where the Cold War was hot. The scope of the book is staggering, covering India and North Africa, Lusophone and Francophone Africa, the United States and Europe. Shringarpure weaves her methodology of “assemblages” with admirable ease in a language that is at once accessible and intellectually rigorous, making it a valued resource for expert and novice alike. She assembles material cultures from little magazines, letters, speeches, essays, telegram, film, and, most impressively in my view, CIA files, and how they ascribe and mark for assassination both the corporeality of anti-colonial leaders and the bodies of knowledge proliferated by the academy. The book in an enlightening and magnificent way recasts the idea of the Cold War University, the institutions of museum, scholarships and foundations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the United States Information Agency, digital platforms such as Amazon, Wikipedia, and Google as historical enterprises shaped by the US-USSR political clashes. It becomes very clear through the convincing illustrations of these processes how we are all implicated and inscribed by the worldmaking force of the Cold War. It is a spectre that haunts our contemporary moment, intellectually, politically, socially, culturally and otherwise. I was in fact slightly traumatised by the lucidity with which the book shows that I am a Cold War ruin. I will return to this point later. The central argument of the book is that “the Cold War has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the postcolonial world by bridging the gap between what are seen as two distinct histories: one of the long durée of European colonialism and the other of the 45 year long ideological, intellectual and geopolitical US-USSR rivalry between US and the USSR” (2); that the Cold War “continued the dynamic of European colonialism,” furthering “imperial agendas in a post-World War II universe relying precisely on relationships established by Europe in the previously colonized world” (2). With that, Shringarpure charts new paths of scholarship by exploring “the inherent connectedness between the emergence of the two superpowers and decolonizing Third World,” and addressing “trajectories, linkages, echoes, hauntings and residues” that show the Cold War as a continuation of European colonialism. This radically disrupts our inherited academic traditions and pushes us, as she puts it, to move beyond the over-compartmentalising of knowledge and the burial of radicalism, to open a capacious and epistemologically open future, now. As students of post-independence and decoloniality, the magnitude of this intervention is timely. It illuminates our collective blind spots which have previously created plenty of slippages and oversights in our readings. That the recurring word in the book is “obfuscation”