ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 shifts its attention to the Anglo-American realm of culture during the Cold War and its impact upon shaping the postcolonial and multicultural canon today. Through campus infiltrations, the re-arranging of academic disciplines and departments, and the proliferation of magazines and journals—all of which worked as “soft power” to deliberately obfuscate the ideological aims of the American government—these interventions succeeded in altering academic disciplines and fields as well as several aspects of American publishing, especially with regards to multicultural and postcolonial literature. Though it seemed that English departments existed in a pastoral idyll and were cut off from Cold War machinations, the influence of New Criticism and the development of academic constellations such as area studies allowed English to separate literary studies from politics. In fact, the Cold War exercised a strong role in re-structuring English and this has impacted postcolonial studies, a field that tends to reside in English. More importantly, the central question is that if the Cold War significantly impacted postcolonial places, why does postcolonial studies overlook Cold War histories that seem foundational to the field? This chapter offers a sustained critique of postcolonial studies as a field by intervening in the field’s genealogy and by locating it within the very specific disciplinarity that emerged in the American academy during and after the Cold War.