ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 zooms in on the cultural Cold War wherein the US government staged subversive interventions into the fields of literature, media, and publishing from the 1950s onwards. The CIA penetrated the workings of about 30 small prestige magazines at home and abroad for two decades through an organization known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). This chapter argues that such interventions put into place a “Cold War paradigm” a structure and logic of doing things in publishing that worked on many different registers. This involved creating a politics of visibility, reframing the figure of the dissident writer and promoting a diluted, apolitical version of modernism. Though the Cold War officially ended in 1991, this paradigm had embedded itself into American publishing practices and has profound effects on how non-Western literature, in particular, is chosen for publication and dissemination. Theories of technopolitics allows for an understanding of how the Cold War paradigm is embedded within practices of digital publishing as well. Through a historicization and interrogation of these cultural Cold War interventions, a blueprint of how academic, mainstream, and digital publishing work to generate and sustain literary canons begins to emerge.
