The American Age

Abstract

The conflict between post-imperial and postcolonial literatures shows that the cultural Cold War, commonly defined as an East-West affair, entailed ideological conflicts other than the containment or endorsement of communism. The definition expands even further if one turns attention to the internal dynamics of the western bloc. Although inter-bloc rivalry was one of the defects that US propagandists projected onto the communist world, there was plenty of mutual suspicion amongst the ‘free-world’ nations. This was most apparent between western Europe and the United States, as the periodic hostilities between London and Washington demonstrated. During the Second World War, ‘the Roosevelt-Churchill axis’ had brought the two nations as close as at any time in their history, the wartime alliance offering some justification for the notion of a ‘special relationship’, a phrase popularised by Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech and based on perceptions of shared traditions of language, commerce and political outlook from the seventeenth century onwards.1 Indeed, in 1945 Britain could still stake an equal claim to world leadership. Although the war had reduced the nation’s wealth by a quarter, its economy remained the third strongest in the world and its currency was the medium in which half of the world’s trade was being conducted. The term ‘superpower’, coined in 1944 to describe nations with ‘great power plus great mobility of power’, was used to capture Britain’s geopolitical standing as much as those of the US and USSR.2 As the Cold War advanced, however, the expectation of superpower status was frustrated. In the late 1940s, the Foreign Office was already asking whether ‘the United Kingdom [could] contrive to remain one of the principal second-class powers in the world, or must she sink to the status of a colonial appendage of an American Empire?’3 As this chapter will detail, it was not only the political and economic pressures of the pax Americana that diminished the nation’s autonomy. At a time when British culture found adversaries both in socialist realism in the east and in postcolonialism in the south, it was also being assailed — and assailed more dramatically — by American cultural forms from the west.