The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

Abstract

A diverse and valuable contribution to Cold War studies, The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures features essays from a variety of international scholars of the Cold War. The contributors’ wealth of approaches is evident in the wide-ranging focus of the book, which includes chapters on Cold War print culture and literary publishing in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with forays into cosmopolitan sites of collaboration and exile such as interwar Berlin, which, as Supriya Chaudhuri notes in her chapter, “The Traveller as Internationalist: Syed Mujtaba Ali,” was “a hub for revolutionary groups, especially from India and the Middle East, while Germany provided a haven for disaffected colonial intellectuals” (p. 48).The focus of the book is the volatile transitional period of the Cold War, when the “Third World” was just coming into existence, defining itself against the so-called First and Second Worlds and also struggling to establish a unified identity among multiple internal factions competing for control of the future of these nations. Such a protean moment offers rich territory for these scholars of print culture and Cold War literature.The question of how ideology and form intersect, and indeed whether and how political ideology can influence decisions about literary form, largely frames the book. In chapters demonstrating a multiplicity of approaches, the authors explicate genre and medium more often than formal decisions. But print culture is the focal point of these critical investigations, from decisions to favor one type of fiction over another, to the strategy of publishing magazines, literary newspapers and affordable, widely distributed paperbacks in order to promote a particular politics or worldview through literature.Paulo Lemos Horta's essay, “Euforia, Desencanto: Roberto Bolaño and Barcelona Publishing in the Transition to Democracy,” is one of the book's highlights, a bracing and necessary reappraisal of the Chilean writer and worldwide literary star who spent much of his adulthood in Spain. Horta examines Bolaño's life and work in the context of his close contacts with insurgent writers and publishers, focusing on his engagement with Spanish politics during a particularly unsettled period and arguing that these issues are reflected in his writing. The picture that emerges here of Bolaño as an outspoken, engaged writer is more subtle and subversive than many casual readers of Bolaño's popular novels may recognize.As a radical leftist, Bolaño and his writing were considered by some to be “‘militantemente minoritario,’ a phrase that captures … Bolaño as a partisan, a soldier in the defense of the literature for the few against the demands of commercial publishing” (p. 296). The transnational scope of the book is exemplified here by Horta's description of writing from Allen Ginsberg published alongside uncritical comments on the Baader Meinhof Group in a Spanish magazine, suggesting that Bolaño's reading of Ginsberg in Barcelona in 1977 had connotations very different from those most apparent to readers in the United States, the majority of whom knew relatively little about the politics of Cold War Europe.Itzea Goikolea-Amiano's “The Poetics and Politics of Solidarity: Barg el-Lil (1961) and Afrotopia” examines how the eponymous novel helped form the postcolonial consciousness in Tunisia, in part by featuring “the first enslaved black protagonist in a modern Arabic novel” (p. 267). In this informative essay Goikolea-Amiano also suggests how Barg el-Lil examined and even helped facilitate the difficult process of cultural contact between Europeans and Muslims without falling prey to nationalist and religious stereotypes.The study of the Cold War has been invigorated over the past two decades by several groundbreaking texts, specifically concerning literary transnationalism and the insidious yet often creatively generative work of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization funded by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that sponsored significant literary publications around the world during the Cold War. Francesca Orsini's “Literary Activism: Hindi Magazines, the Short Story and the World” complicates some of the scholarship on this topic, especially concerning the Third World. This is particularly clear in the way Orsini departs from work by Andrew Rubin and Elizabeth Holt, who have argued that the global simultaneity of publications by CCF-sponsored journals had a homogenizing effect on the literary and political discourse. In fact, as Orsini writes, “multiple and competing visions of world literature could be found in the same magazine at the same time—tracing different ‘significant geographies’ and belying simple geopolitical polarities” (p. 105).The competing visions of world literature that flourished during the Cold War have continued to animate the work of scholars of the period, providing numerous, often contradictory frameworks through which to read and interpret this writing. By using multiple approaches while focusing specifically on the print cultures of the Third World, this book enriches our understanding of how Cold War ideology played out in the literature of developing nations in the late twentieth century. The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures encourages a decentralized, transnational approach rather than the First World narratives and points of view that have tended to dominate the critical discourse among Western scholars.