In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney argues that literatures of decolonization are integral to, not separate from, literatures of the global Cold War. The Cold War provided opportunities for promoting cultural diplomacy programs, including Soviet sponsorship of Lotus, a trilingual literary magazine, and CIA funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization that supported conferences, magazines, cultural centers, and radio broadcasting in various parts of the world, with particular success in sub-Saharan Africa. By subsidizing literary production, Cold War states helped define a category of international writers, some of them dissidents, some of them fellow travelers who collaborated with state apparatuses when they believed doing so furthered their interests or ambitions.

In Kalliney’s persuasive account, the Cold War is an era of cultural diplomacy, in which literary production is saturated with a consciousness of international readerships. The US devised any number of programs to compete with the USSR in the global book market, although, as Kalliney astutely notes, “book production was one of the major accomplishments of the Soviet state,” at one point amounting to somewhere between fourteen and twenty percent of world production of books (90). Books published in one of the soviet republics were translated into the languages of other soviet states, in addition to languages for export abroad. In this regard, soviet literature had global reach regardless of its subject matter.

During the Cold War, Kalliney contends, writers “understood state discipline and human rights networks as part of a multinational, advantage-seeking system full of gaps and inconsistencies” (13). For example, Alex La Guma, a writer exiled from South Africa, “is a quintessentially revolutionary nationalist whose aesthetic life transpired, somewhat paradoxically, in a completely extranational context” (89). C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones, both of whom supported decolonization efforts in the Caribbean, were deported from the US because of their communist or revolutionary sympathies. The Cold War produced multiple profiles for internationalized writers. Whereas Doris Lessing, on whom MI5 kept tabs, positively relished being the object of state attention, Eileen Chang, who wrote in both Chinese and English, worked with the US Information Agency, the cultural wing of the State Department, because “propaganda could provide writers with opportunities that might not be readily available under other conditions” (139). In a very fine chapter on prison writing, Kalliney demonstrates how Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Ruth First’s 117 Days, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Detained, Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died, and other texts draw upon discourses of human rights and civil liberties to situate literature within the context of decolonization and global politics.

To make his case for the global circulation of literature during the Cold War, Kalliney draws upon substantial archival research. Photographs, declassified government files, memos, and intercepted letters provide visual proof of how scrupulously the political police in various countries monitored writers. The book contains twenty-five illustrations, many of them showing major redactions, such as an FBI document taken from C.L.R. James’s dossier in which the names of confidential agents have been scrupulously blacked out. As Kalliney acknowledges in his conclusion, archives told him a different story than the one he expected. Instead of finding proof that states punished writers through censorship and intimidation, for instance, he came to the realization that “punitive state measures strengthened the narrative that intellectuals belonged to a nonaligned creative guild that trespassed national borders and narrow ideological affiliations” (246).

Whether in South Asia or Africa, large states were able to influence aesthetic practices by creating a new system of world-literary space during the Cold War. In this regard, Kalliney delivers a salutary rebuke to standard accounts of world literature, including Pascale Casanova’s and Franco Moretti’s. For Kalliney, Cold War commitment to an aesthetics of autonomy, modernism, and translation “represents a distinct phase of global literary history” (248), where international exchange does not necessarily mean influence. Indeed, writers and intellectuals who were jailed because of their dissent became part of a world-wide guild of dissidents. This internationalization extends to readers, scattered around the globe yet unified in their resistance to state interference. At the same time, internationalization had consequences for writers from decolonizing countries who sought international readers while trying to respect national literary traditions—oral cultures, in some cases, or regional specificity.

In the introduction and conclusion to The Aesthetic Cold War, Kalliney touches on the function of the humanities as a bulwark against ideological incursion. Whereas in the twenty-first century, “literary intellectuals freely acknowledge their insignificance to the workings of the state, the cold war was a period when writers mattered, when they were important enough for large governments to patronize them, to collaborate with them, to censor them, and even to imprison, banish, or kill them” (9). To promote or to quash certain books meant that those books had a perceived relation to the state: they could promote freedom, even revolution, even as they spoke for “the importance of humanism, individuality, and literature as tools for resisting dictatorships” (240). Although it is not Kalliney’s chief argument, he does make a case for the importance of literary production as cultural diplomacy; states contributed to literary culture because ideas mattered, in stark contrast to the present day, when “most large states have lost interest in books and ideas” (249). In other words, the decline of the humanities may have nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of literature and related disciplines so much as with the perceived value of those disciplines in relation to ideological convictions.

With its global perspective, its careful parsing of archival sources, and its openness to new interpretations of Cold War tensions, The Aesthetic Cold War ranks alongside Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History (2017), Christopher Andrew’s The Sword and the Shield (1985), and Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War (2020) as an exemplary contribution to the literature of decolonization. Kalliney’s book is a tour de force—a detailed, engaging contribution to Cold War studies.