At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies, and the Cold War

Abstract

Investigation of the Cold War’s cultural dimensions has surged over the last fifteen years, as have transnational literary studies and socially oriented textual studies. These areas converge in At Penpoint, an ambitious and welcome contribution to literary scholarship. Monica Popescu, a leader in Cold War cultural studies, has authored South African Literature beyond the Cold War (2010) and coedited three important essay collections that examine the Cold War’s impact on the global South, the Black diaspora, and Africa, respectively. Popescu is also series coeditor of Routledge Studies in Cultures of the Global Cold War.Unlike recent studies that focus on one of the two superpowers or blocs, this book aims to address the combined impact of both blocs in their African efforts to expand what Popescu terms their “spheres of influence” (12). Turning a lens on the phenomenon of the Cold War itself, Popescu believes, is a historical and conceptual corrective to African literary studies that center on colonizer-colonized dynamics and those that privilege global- or world-literary-systems frameworks. This book argues instead for the formative place of the Cold War as a political-cultural axis for the production, dissemination, and critical understanding of African letters.The book starts by outlining the organizational and ideological operations of American and Soviet cultural patronage in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Arising from the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) were the journals Transition and Black Orpheus, the influential 1962 Makerere conference, and the publishing house and cultural institution Mbari, headed by Es’kia Mphahlele. On the Soviet side were the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, its multinational conferences, and its journal Lotus, as well as a state publishing industry that invested major resources in translating African literature into various Eastern European languages. Popescu’s second chapter weighs the sociopolitical stakes of aesthetic debates during the later decades of the Cold War, particularly as they inform the divergent aesthetics of modernism and realism in African letters. The book’s two remaining chapters provide detailed analyses of African literary texts: one explores the conceptualization of African political revolution in fiction by Sembène Ousmane, Mongane Wally Serote, and Ayi Kwei Armah; the other, drawing on an archive of memoirs and imaginative writing from the 1970s into the twenty-first century, explores the shifting aesthetics of southern African writers in rendering the regional “Border Wars” and the Angolan decolonization struggle of the 1970s.The book’s most valuable contribution is its illumination of African writers’ intellectual independence. Their Cold War navigations generated socially engaged, innovative writing that does not simply mirror the political and aesthetic conventions of the superpowers. In this vein, Popescu develops a compelling account of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s shifting aesthetic strategies as both a product of and a critical commentary on Cold War logics. She provides generative readings of Serote’s much-neglected 1981 Soweto novel To Every Birth Its Blood and Sembène’s epic 1960 novel God’s Bits of Wood, exploring how their portraits of antiapartheid and labor struggles debate and repurpose divergent strands of Eastern European political theory to forge alternative affective models of political optimism. The chapter on Border Wars contains a fascinating account of the irreducibility of African experiences to the bifurcated lens of the US and Soviet military forces involved in the conflicts. Moreover, it opens valuable pathways for future research and theorization by cutting across the largely Balkanized Lusophone and Anglophone literary archives to encourage cross-linguistic regional analysis.Popescu’s argument about the legacy of Cold War aesthetics in the twenty-first century touches on the topic of literary canonization. Her identification of “dissidence” as a signifier of cultural value within US-supported Africanist discourse is intriguing, with Wole Soyinka as an eminent example. This casts fresh light on his Nobel Prize in 1986. The banner of “dissidence” allows any ideological distinctions between authors opposing censorship and persecution by an apartheid state, a neocolonial African government, and an eastern bloc state to disappear from metropolitan view.At times the reader may experience double vision. Popescu initially asserts that the flurry of African publications, prizes, and conferences of the early Cold War period reinforces the ideological and aesthetic preferences of the two superpowers, contending that the writers associated with CCF/CIA production demonstrated a “cohesive” modernist aesthetics (47) and that, in contrast, the writers translated and circulated in the Soviet Union were “sympathetic to the cause of communism” (48). This is not borne out by the evidence that Popescu herself presents, which reveals no consistent aesthetic or ideological divisions separating these Cold War dynamics. A case in point is the South African card-carrying communist and antiapartheid activist Alex La Guma, who uses a naturalist style in his 1962 short story collection A Walk in the Night. The book was unsurprisingly attractive to the Soviet Union, where it circulated in translation, but it also won the Black Orpheus literary prize and was published by Mbari.The African writers whose works were energetically promoted in the Soviet Union, according to a Russian article published in 1966 (in Transition, of all places), included Mphahlele, Soyinka, and such figures as Efua Sutherland, Christopher Okigbo, Cyprian Ekwensi, Alan Paton, and Phyllis Altman, none of them fellow travelers. Popescu’s account of rigid aesthetic-political polarization is contradicted not only by the archival evidence but also by her second chapter’s alternative argument that this early period was marked by ideological fluidity, in contrast to the hardening of positions after the 1966–67 expose of the CIA’s involvement in the CCF. Popescu seems torn, conceptually, between a materialist sensitivity to historical nuance, contingency, and mutability and an approach that sees the matrix of the Cold War in more metaphysical, indeed Manichaean, terms.There are (to continue the optical metaphor) some blind spots. Popescu’s approach to the two superpowers’ agendas and ideals does not exercise neutrality. The United States is spared critical judgment, while Popescu peppers the book with value judgments against the Soviet Union. The United States was a significant presence in works by her cited authors La Guma, Armah, and Soyinka. These feature the superpower as (variously) an agent of global capitalism, internal racism, and Black diasporic culture. The book’s Cold War lens might address such important elements but instead largely restricts its American focus to the CCF network. As a political aggressor in 1960s Africa, the United States supported the assassination of democratically elected Patrice Lumumba in the Republic of the Congo and was directly involved in the coup that toppled Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. By not engaging with such violent political machinations, the book’s contextualization of Armah’s Beautyful Ones, and its understanding of the Cold War itself, misses a scholarly opportunity.Popescu depicts Soviet hands-on aggression, in contrast, as ubiquitous; this leads to reflexive, rather than scholarly, conclusions. Notwithstanding her contention that Soviet institutions exercised “totalizing control . . . at their literary events and publication venues” (83), Popescu’s discussion of the cultural materials published in Lotus, and the works of writers involved in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association and Soviet-associated conferences, reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that these were as culturally and ideologically heterogeneous as those chosen for Russian translation. The book’s understanding of Soviet power—cognitive, material, and imaginative—also, disappointingly, relegates Cuba to the Cold War’s revolutionary periphery. For Popescu, the demise of the Soviet Union was the end of viable socialist projects worldwide; her passing reference to Cuban and Chinese revolutions as political failures conflates personal judgment with empirical fact. Cuba historically played a much greater role than the Soviet Union in Angola’s struggles, as Popescu’s fourth chapter acknowledges. The country’s distinctive material, ideological, and political significance for a global range of Black radicals, such as La Guma (who made Cuba his home), should not be discounted.Neither should the political-economic differences between American and Soviet Cold War involvement in continental Africa. The Soviet Union, unlike the United States, had a historical commitment to international global antiracist and anticolonial struggle that preceded the Cold War by many decades. During the Cold War the Soviet Union spent millions on African support, which was designed, according to Popescu, to generate “political capital” (others may be more inclined to view this outlay as the continuation of international solidarity). Capitalist America, economically allied to Western Europe, relied on international trade, while the Soviet Union did not. Accordingly, African decolonization posed a material threat: independent African governments might nationalize industries and deprive the United States of vital resources and markets. If economic interests distinguished American from Soviet agency, these differences raise questions about the superpowers’ cultural activities in the region. There seems to have been no American equivalent to the large-scale translation and dissemination of African literature that the Soviet state undertook; this is unsurprising, since there was no commercial benefit to be had from it in the United States.Blind spots aside, At Penpoint is an engrossing and provocative book that illuminates an important archive and challenges humanities scholars of all midcentury regions to reconfigure their fields.