Abstract
Conferences that directly or indirectly communicated and amplified ideological positions were one of the superpowers’ preferred forms of engagement in the cultural Cold War. This chapter addresses two concomitant events in 1979: the (West) Berlin International Literature Days, an event scheduled as part of the First Festival of World Cultures, Horizons ’79, and the Sixth Conference of the Afro-Asian Writers Association in Luanda, Angola, both of which targeted African writers from the continent and diaspora. Taking place in states aligned with the capitalist and communist blocs respectively, the events speak to overt and covert cultural sponsorship, entanglements between forms of decolonisation and cultural imperialism and the expansion of the superpowers’ politico-aesthetic canons in Third World countries, as well as ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ aspects of the global conflict.
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Notes
- 1.
The festival took place between 21 June and 15 July 1979 (see Horizonte 79 Magazin: Festival der Weltkulturen Berlin 21 Juni-15 Juli 1979 (1979); and Dieter Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival of World Cultures – Horizons 79, Berlin 21 June to 15 July 1979’, Kunapipi, 2: 1 (1980), pp. 192–4).
- 2.
The writers’ workshop (25–27 June) was not advertised in the programme and, as the organiser was absent, participating writers had to decide on a format and discussion topics (see Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival’, p. 193).
- 3.
Burness and Moser, ‘Sixth Conference of Afro-Asian Writers, 26 June to 1 July 1979’, Research in African Literatures, 11: 2 (1980), pp. 235–6.
- 4.
See Anon, ‘Lista de participantes, delegados e convidados’, Teses Angolanas: Documentos da VI Conferência dos Escritores Afro-Asiáticos (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1981), I, 190–5. The scale of the conference and total number of participants is difficult to gauge as most of the names in the proceedings are listed as ‘head of delegation’ for their respective countries.
- 5.
For a more detailed representation of the complex Cold War dynamics in Angola, see Piero Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pp. 65–97, 393–420. Vladimir Shubin’s The Hot ‘Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa (2008) highlights the incongruity between the label ‘Cold War’ and the devastating proxy conflicts fought by the superpowers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
- 6.
Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 5.
- 7.
Andrew N. Rubin, Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 11.
- 8.
Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 2013), p. 1. For further research on the CCF, see Giles Scott-Smith’s The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Post-War American Hegemony (2002); Peter Kalliney’s ‘Modernism, African Literature, and the Cold War’, Modern Language Quarterly, 76: 3 (2015), pp. 333–67; Andrew Rubin’s Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War (2012); and Bhakti Shringapure’s Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019). For an emerging history of the AAWA and its role in postcolonial studies and world literature, see Hala Halim’s ‘Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 32: 3 (2012), pp. 563–83; Duncan Yoon’s ‘Our Forces Have Redoubled: World Literature, Postcolonialism and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau’, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2: 2 (2015), pp. 233–52; Monica Popescu’s At Penpoint: African Literatures, Postcolonial Studies and the Cold War (2020); and Rossen Djagalov’s From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (2020).
- 9.
For further information on these conferences, see Es’kia Mphahlele’s ‘Postscript on Dakar’, in Gerald Moore, ed., African Literature and the Universities (Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1965), pp. 80–3.
- 10.
Brutus, ‘Museum of Antiquities’, in Brutus, ‘Berlin Notes’, West Africa, 27 August 1979, p. 1559.
- 11.
Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival’, p. 193.
- 12.
Brutus, ‘The View from Berlin’, West Africa, 27 August 1979, p. 1559.
- 13.
Brutus, ‘Museum of Antiquities’, in Brutus, ‘Berlin Notes’, p. 1559.
- 14.
On the Valindaba uranium enrichment programme, see Anna-Mart Van Wyk, ‘Apartheid’s Atomic Bomb: Cold War Perspectives’, South African Historical Journal, 62: 1 (2010), pp. 100–20.
- 15.
Nkosi, ‘Timeline for Lewis Nkosi’, in Lindy Stiebel and Therese Steffen, eds, Letters to My Native Soil: Lewis Nkosi Writes Home (2001–2009) (Zurich: LIT, 2014), p. 184.
- 16.
Both Brutus and Riemenschneider decried the lack of advertisement for the larger public and the poor organisation of the workshop, particularly the fact that the official in charge did not show up on the first day. As Riemenschneider writes, ‘[i]t was proof of the organizational skill of D. Brutus, N. Farah, L. Peters and others that a programme was charted out within a short time’ (Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival’, p. 193).
- 17.
See Brutus, ‘View from Berlin’, p. 1559; Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival’, pp. 193–4; and Bessie Head, ‘The Role of the Writer in Africa’, English in Africa, 28: 1 (2001), p. 33.
- 18.
Nkosi, ‘Timeline’, p. 184.
- 19.
See Wole Soyinka, ‘The Writer in a Modern African State’, in Per Wästberg, ed., The Writer in Modern Africa: African-Scandinavian Writers’ Conference, Stockholm, 1967 (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968), pp. 14–36; and Nkosi, ‘Individualism and Social Commitment’, in Wästberg, ed., Writer in Modern Africa, pp. 45–58.
- 20.
Morrison, ‘On “The Radiance of the King”’, The New York Review of Books, 9 August 2001, p. 18; Wole Soyinka, ‘From a Common Backcloth’, The American Scholar, 32: 3 (1963), p. 388.
- 21.
Soyinka, ‘From a Common Backcloth’, p. 387.
- 22.
While Soyinka himself was oftentimes criticised for his Euro-American modernist approach to writing, his criticism of Laye demonstrates that Cold War aesthetic battles were never a simple dispute between modernism and realism (see Georg M. Gugelberger, ‘Marxist Literary Debates and their Continuity in African Literary Criticism’, in Gugelberger, ed., Marxism and African Literature (Trenton: Africa World, 1985), pp. 2, 14).
- 23.
Nkosi, ‘Postmodernism and Black Writing in South Africa’, in Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly, eds, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid and Democracy, 1970–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 83, 77.
- 24.
See Monica Popescu, ‘Aesthetic Solidarities: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Cold War’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50: 4 (2014), p. 390.
- 25.
Riemenschneider, ‘First Festival’, p. 193.
- 26.
See Constantin Katsakioris, ‘Creating a Socialist Intelligentsia: Soviet Educational Aid and Its Impact on Africa (1960–1991)’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 57: 2 (2017), pp. 259–88.
- 27.
La Guma, A Soviet Journey: A Critical Annotated Edition, ed. by Christopher J. Lee, new edn (1978; Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), p. 229. Here La Guma uses Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, as a synecdoche for all Soviet technological inventions.
- 28.
Brutus, ‘East Berlin’, p. 1560.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 1560.
- 30.
See Brutus, ‘Memoir: From Protest to Prison’, in Lee Sustar and Aicha Karim, eds, Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader (Chicago: Haymarket, 2006), p. 36.
- 31.
See Modisane, ‘Letter to Margaret Legum’ (1966), The Colin Legum Papers, University of Cape Town Libraries, Manuscripts and Archives Department, B13.43. After several months of language training in West Germany, where he spent the last years of his life, Modisane went to the German colonial archives in Potsdam in order to do research for a book on the Maji Maji resistance (1905–1907) against German rule in East Africa (see Simon Stevens, ‘Bloke Modisane in East Germany’, in Quinn Slobodian, ed., Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn, 2015), p. 123).
- 32.
Ibid., p. 1.
- 33.
See Modisane, ‘Letter’, pp. 2–4.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 35.
See Stevens, ‘Bloke Modisane’, p. 123.
- 36.
Brutus, et al., ‘Letters to the Editor’, Research in African Literatures, 12: 1 (1981), p. 140.
- 37.
See Anon, ‘VI Conferência dos Escritores Afro-Asiáticos: Documentos’, in União dos Escritores Angolanos, Lavra & Oficina: Caderno Especial Dedicado à Literatura Angolana em Saudação à VI Conferência dos Escritores Afro-Asiáticos (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1979), p. 132.
- 38.
See Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and the Third World (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2020), p. 65. Based on Russian archive documents, Djagalov gives the number of attendees as ‘over one hundred’ (ibid., p. 65).
- 39.
Quoted in ibid., p. 70.
- 40.
Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’, Social Text, 28: 2 (2010), p. 149.
- 41.
For discussions of China’s participation at Bandung, see Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: World, 1956), pp. 84–5, 90–2; and Yoon, ‘Our Forces Have Redoubled’, pp. 235–7.
- 42.
See Yoon, ‘Our Forces Have Redoubled’, pp. 251–2.
- 43.
Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, The Struggle between the Two Lines in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Movement (Place unknown: Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, 1968), pp. 2, 19.
- 44.
See Don Burness, On the Shoulders of Martí: Cuban Literature of the Angolan War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995), p. 64.
- 45.
Neto, ‘Discurso’, Teses Angolanas: Documentos da VI Conferência dos Escritores Afro-Asiáticos (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1981), I, 171–2.
- 46.
See, for instance, the ‘General Declaration of the Fourth Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference’ (1971) which had taken place in Delhi in 1970.
- 47.
See Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘A Manifesto of Congress for Cultural Freedom’, in Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 249–51. Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder have similarly theorised the role of resolution and conference documents with respect to PEN Asia events (see Watson and Wilder, eds, The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (2020)).
- 48.
See Comandante Ndalu, ‘Discurso de Abertura’, Teses Angolanas, p. 14.
- 49.
See Maria Eugénia Neto, ‘Deve-se escrever para crianças empregando o maravilhoso?’, Teses Angolanas, pp. 38–9.
- 50.
Rui, ‘Entre mim e o nómada – a flor’, Teses Angolanas, I, 32. I am grateful to Lanie Millar and Sara Hanaburgh for helping me with this translation. In the original Portuguese, Rui uses the term ‘Karkamano’, which I have translated here as ‘Boer’. Derived from the Italian words ‘calcare’ and ‘mano’, it is a slur suggestive of deceptive behaviour (pressing down the scales with the hand to tip them). In Angola, the slur is used to refer to white South Africans.
- 51.
Cedric Tolliver points out the duplicity in Richard Wright’s behaviour in 1956 in Paris where, on the one hand, he expressed solidarity with the Congress’s organisers and, on the other hand, informed the US embassy on the conference events and distanced himself from those he perceived as having communist inclinations (Tolliver, ‘Making Culture Capital: Presénce Africaine and Diasporic Modernity in Post-World War II Paris’, in Jeremy Braddock and Jonathan P. Eburne, eds, Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 215).
- 52.
Although Diop seems to have contemplated an invitation to participate at the inaugural AAWA conference in Tashkent, Rossen Djagalov points out that Soviet cultural bureaucracies had decided against having him there (see Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, p. 77).
- 53.
Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, Struggle, p. 2. The India International Centre which spearheaded the project is, according to its website, a non-aligned institution which operates on the basis of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation.
- 54.
Ibid., p. 9.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 3. I have been unable to find any other documents about the proposed Bureau of Afro-Asian Authors and Translators, which is not an uncommon predicament. While a lot of recent research has focused on the global operations of the CCF, and while the role of the Soviet-backed Afro-Asian Writers Association is beginning to be explored, most of the scholarship focuses on the 1950s and 1960s. There are obvious logistical obstacles to expanding this history into the 1970s and 1980s, as some archival repositories are sealed for 50 years.
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Popescu, M. (2020). The Battle of Conferences: Cultural Decolonisation and Global Cold War. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_9
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