War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy Greg Barnhisel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Cultural diplomacy is loosely defined as the type of diplomacy that promotes American culture and prestige abroad through various methods and forms, such as art exchanges and educational exchanges, to achieve US cultural influence abroad. American culture as part of diplomacy was not fully explored until the middle 1930s when the Roosevelt administration decided that cultural and educational exchanges were important to US foreign policy. After World War II, cultural diplomacy was heavily targeted toward the Communist bloc countries during the War.The author, who is an associate professor of English, Duquesne University, argues that the antibourgeois and anticommercial movement of modernism was re framed in War propaganda as a collection of artistic techniques and stylistic tools, such as literary magazines, traveling art exhibitions, touring musical shows, and radio programs which became linked with the West's own self-conception of the free, self-determined individual. The CIA, the State Department, private cultural diplomats transformed modernist literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the War.There is a good introduction and five chapters which define various aspects of what the author considers to be War modernism in the context of American cultural diplomacy during the 1950s. The important first chapter focuses on the use of the visual arts by official cultural diplomats in the State Department and, later, the United States Information Agency (USIA). The 1947 Advancing American Art exhibition that toured Europe featured many avantgarde and modernist works, including numerous abstract expressionist paintings, that initiated a backlash against the use of these works in official exhibitions by cultural conservatives such as Congressman George Dondero (R-MI) and President Harry Truman. This chapter explores the tension between the intellectuals in the State Department and the CIA and the populists or conservatives in the Truman and Eisenhower White Houses and in Congress who debated whether cosmopolitan modernism could legitimately represent American values and interests.In Chapter Three, Cold Warriors of the Book, the author describes the various programs used to get American books to markets and influence readers in Western Europe, Taiwan, Japan, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and the criteria by which particular literary titles were selected for (or excluded from) these programs. Through the public-private partnership known as the Informational Media Guaranty program, the Books in Translation program (which still exists in a much reduced form today), and the covert subvention of foreign publications, the State Department disseminated millions of American books to their target audiences. American modernist literature played only a small part in this project, which tended to include regionalist writers such as Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Of particular interest is a description of Faulkner's USIA goodwill ambassador visits to foreign nations, including Brazil (1954), Japan (1955), Athens (1957), the Soviet Union (1958) and Venezuela (1961), and the many travails US embassy staff in those countries endured in handling Faulkner who was not always steady and on course. …
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Jun 1, 2022
Julie R Harris + 17
Open Access
