The Books in the Bunker: Global Flows of Meaning and Matter in Academic Assemblages

Abstract

Under United States Public Law 480, a major hallmark of Cold War diplomacy, India received millions of dollars in loans from the US during the 1950s and 1960s in the form of food and agricultural products. A portion of the interest due on this loan was repaid by India partly in the form of books in about two dozen languages which were collected from across South Asia and sent to the Library of Congress and several universities in the country during the heyday of the development of Area Studies. The object of this paper is a large deposit of written material—books, periodicals and ephemera—that was sent to the University of Texas at Austin over a period starting in the 1960s under the PL 480 programme. Most of these materials were added to the library collections, but a large number of them remained uncatalogued for about fifty years in an underground library storage facility in downtown Austin. The history of these materials, and the moment when they reappeared provides a case study of how books are appropriated (or not) into academic, library and political assemblages, and the way disciplines and their canons have been shaped by politics and infrastructure from the Cold War into the neo-liberal age.