Acknowledgments
Introduction. Genres of Cold War Theory: Postcolonial Studies and
African Literary Criticism
Part I. African Literary History and the Cold War
1. Pens and Guns: Literary Autonomy, Artistic Commitment, and
Secret Sponsorships
2. Aesthetic World-Systems: Mythologies of Modernism and
Realism
Part II. Reading through a Cold War Lens
3. Creating Futures, Producing Theory: Strike, Revolution, and the
Morning After
4. The Hot Cold War: Rethinking the Global Conflict through
Southern Africa
Conclusion. From Postcolonial to World Literature Studies: The
Continued Relevance of the Cold War
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Monica Popescu is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of African Literatures in the Department of English at McGill University. She is the author of South African Literature beyond the Cold War and The Politics of Violence in Post-communist Films.
“African nations regained their independence from Western
colonialism against the background of the Cold War. Monica
Popescu's book is a comprehensive study of the impact of the war on
the culture, literature, and intellectual production of the
postcolonial world. It is a great addition to the body of
scholarship on African literature and postcolonial studies.”
*Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Distinguished Professor of English and
Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine*
“This ingenious account offers sharp new insight to the history of
African Literary Studies and decolonization by framing them in
light of the Cold War, not just in terms of subjection by the
West, as stressed by postcolonial perspectives, but also by the
colonial outreach of the USSR. As Monica Popescu makes stunningly
clear, African and Afro-Caribbean writers of the period—Aimé
Césaire, Youssef El-Sebai, and Ezekiel Mphahlele—brought to our
understanding of twentieth-century imperialism a comprehensiveness
unrivaled before or since.”
*Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and
African American studies and of Anthropology, Harvard
University*
“Popescu’s book is a steadfast engagement with the cultural Cold
War’s impact on African literary studies.... At Penpoint...shows
how a range of cross-disciplinary and hybrid methodologies are
required if we are to build and establish this scholarship.”
*Johannesburg Review of Books*
"At Penpoint speaks to a variety of disciplines and
historiographies. . . . Popescu writes in accessible language that
will make graduates and undergrads appreciate and trace the
transnational networks involving African writers, diasporic African
intellectuals, and various Cold War actors and the impact they had
on Africa, especially in the area of African literature."
*E3W Review of Books*
". . . At Penpoint is an engrossing and provocative book that
illuminates an important archive and challenges humanities scholars
of all midcentury regions to reconfigure their fields."
*Modern Language Quarterly*
"Popescu’s biggest contribution here is historiographical: not only
does she historicize African literary production during the Cold
War, she also reveals the lasting effects of the Cold War on
today’s intellectual concepts and commitments. . . . By
rehabilitating the idea of the writer as engaged, even committed,
At Penpoint reveals a scholar undertaking not only study of the era
of decolonization, but also the slow process of decolonizing
literary study itself by wresting the Cold War away from the
superpowers who waged it."
*Contemporary Literature*
"At Penpoint accomplishes what the best scholarship does by
illuminating what has been right before our eyes but obscured by
our own blinders, ideological or otherwise. Her account resituates
Africa at the center of postcolonial studies and reveals the Cold
War to be, among other things, a struggle of competing
imperialisms."
*The Journal of African History*
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