ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a new investigation of cultural sites where the Global Cold War played out and forms of contestation as well as communitas and solidarity were shaped. Much of the canonical scholarship on the cultural Cold War has framed the contest between the superpowers as paramount, uncovering links of patronage, “soft power,” and coercion through which one superpower or the other sought to influence intellectual discussion and win hearts and minds in Europe or the Third World. Building on important recent research that has expanded the cultural Cold War’s geographic scope to the Global South, this Introduction chapter and the volume that follows draws attention to the idiosyncratic and sometimes unpredictable encounters that arose as writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals—often identifying as inhabitants of the Third World—navigated the ideological and material constraints set out by superpowers and emerging or imagined regional powers, as well the creative, bricolage responses that developed from them. It reframes the cultural Cold War in the Global South as a phenomenon bound up with decolonization but not reducible to a replay of prior European imperialisms, and details conceptual and methodological questions raised by investigation of the cultural Cold War in the Global South.
