Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War contributes to the burgeoning area of Cold War cultural studies and, as the introduction acknowledges, is part of a “transnational turn” in American studies and a “global turn in Cold War literary and cultural studies” (6). The latter turn has been going on for some time – Andrew Hammond's Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict came out in 2005 – but it has momentum and is gradually shifting the Cold War lens from Western, particularly United States, contexts, and the direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, to how geopolitics shaped networks of social and cultural engagement around the planet.

Belletto's 2011 monograph, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, was an innovative contribution to the understanding of Cold War American literature. The introduction here, coauthored with Keith, seeks similar innovation, making the case for “neocolonialism” as a conceptual category that explains the types of relationship between the United States and other parts of the world. The value of the term is, they argue, that it recalibrates our understanding of the ways in which power operated during the Cold War. Neocolonialism, they say, offers an “alternative way of knowing, one capable of reframing and renarrativizing histories and coordinates that the logics and optics of the Cold War obfuscated” (2–3, original emphasis). Instead of a term like “imperialism,” which implies a straightforward equivalence with the ways in which former colonial powers exerted their control, “neocolonialism” reveals the more covert ways in which Cold War power operated. A neocolonial state is, they say, one in which there is the appearance of autonomy, but in which the state is “controlled and exploited by outside financial interests” (2). This not only shapes our understanding of American engagements around the world, but also recasts how we understand dynamics like racial politics within the United States.

This is a useful reminder of the complex ways in which the superpowers exercised power around the globe, and also provides space to consider the national and other energies that shaped events in neocolonial states. As is often the case with edited collections, there is some frustration for the reader, once this argument has been set up, in its execution in individual essays, not because of any intrinsic weakness on their part, but because the case made in the introduction deserves – and perhaps requires – more breathing space in which properly to map the neocolonial structures of the Cold War. The implication of Belletto and Keith's argument is a widespread and systematic reappraisal of the mechanics of the Cold War system: how its global economies worked, and what their social and cultural consequences were, and it would be interesting to see this further developed.

Perhaps inevitably, Belletto's own essay, an intriguing discussion of Korean War literature (a neglected category returned to in – and expanded usefully by – a later essay, Donald E. Pease's “Returning from the Unending Korean War: Toni Morrison's Home”), carries through the argument most clearly. Conversely, in essays addressing the significance of United States cultural attachés to the United Kingdom (“US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War” by John Carlos Rowe) and the Kabul Fair (“From Kabul to Chicago: The Limits of the Global Imagination” by Kate Baldwin), there is much that is of interest, but the connection to the thesis about neocolonialism – the nitty gritty of its mechanics – is somewhat looser.

Nevertheless, broader themes emerge. In particular, the collection is useful on the function of American exceptionalism – and of crises in American identity – in Cold War culture. In discussing the United States’ propaganda efforts during the Cold War, Baldwin points out that the “aim of media bombardment [abroad] was to align the American with the human universal” (102). In its engagements around the world, the United States was concerned not only with exporting an idea of America, but with refashioning the idea of the human to coincide with this. For William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos, in “American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime,” the protest culture of the later period of the war found in spectacular displays of American power “the hollowness of the nation's various claims to metaphysical transcendence” (77).

One of the things the collection points to, then – and perhaps this is a little at odds with a collection that sits so firmly within American studies, even as it seeks to reshape it – is that Americanness need not be at the centre of our understanding of the Cold War. This is a useful and diverse collection that questions usefully how we approach Cold War culture.