Print Censorship and the Cultural Cold War: Books in a Bounded World

Abstract

This chapter embarks upon a transnational account of literary censorship during the Cold War. Defining censorship as the sanctioned control of literary and print culture, it seeks a broad-reaching, global understanding of the controls over the production, distribution and consumption of literature that were characteristic of the latter half of the twentieth century. The chapter compares modelled regimes of censorship in place between 1947 and 1989 and assesses their impact on the cultural Cold War via focused case studies of the German Democratic Republic, Occupied Japan and Indonesia. The aim is to further contemporary understanding of censorship’s role in this period of profound global conflict and division.