Description:

Peter Kalliney joins the Workshp in Transnational Cultural History and the Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA) to discuss his new book, The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton University Press, 2022). 

How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work.

Peter Kalliney is the William J and Nina B Tuggle Chair in English at the University of Kentucky. His scholarly books include Cities of Affluence and Anger: A Literary Geography of Modern Englishness (2007), Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics(2013), and Modernism in a Global Context (2016). With Harris Feinsod and Leah Feldman, he is working on a project on the manifestos and primary documents of decolonization movements from around the world.

A limited number of books are available for those who commit to attendance. Please email Anna Zalokostas (azalokostas@u.northwestern.edu) to confirm attendance and reserve a book. Copies are limited and will be on a first come first serve basis. 

This event is sponsored by the Workshop in Transnational Cultural History and the Middle East and North African Studies Program (MENA).