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Vladimir Nabokov has been taken by many readers to be pugnaciously apolitical in his work—indeed, until very recently, few critics have thought of Nabokov as engaging political questions at all. Chapter three shows, by contrast, how attention to chance changes our sense of Nabokov’s aesthetic project as it demonstrates a politics folded into the very texture of his writing. Reading Pale Fire (1962) in a Cold War context, the chapter suggests that far from being only an apolitical novel of wordplay, it in fact intervenes in mid-century controversies about Communism and homosexuality. By focusing on the way that one important character, Charles Kinbote, treats chance versus its presence in the novel as a whole, this chapter argues that Pale Fire demonstrates the absurdity of what I term the homophobic narrative (the tendency to equate homosexual people with everything from perverts to political traitors) which works by foreclosing chance in ways that echo the denial of chance by those totalitarian regimes haunting Kinbote’s own tale.

After a brief comparison of Ian Hacking’s intellectual history The Taming of Chance to William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions (1955), chapter two analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, V. (1963), and argues that its sophisticated use of narrative chance creates an aesthetic response to totalitarian political fictions. One of the first big postmodern American novels, V. merits sustained analysis in the context of chance’s role in Cold War culture because it thematizes the function of narrative chance. Pynchon suggests a novelist’s own potential complicity in creating a fictional universe in which putative moments of chance are actually products of authorial design. V.’s innovative form is a way to work out the inclusion of chance in a novel and to level a critique of both totalitarian political systems and also Cold War norms back in the States, a comparison that became widespread in American fiction in the latter half of the 20^th century. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988), and Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991).

This chapter describes Additional Protocols (APs) as complicated and fascinating instruments that encapsulate most major aspects of global politics, such as the Third World's struggle to legitimize national liberation conflict through international law. It discusses Western efforts to manage the end of formal decolonization while containing damage to their security, image, and alliances. It also highlights the shifting of Cold War politics and proxy warfare, as well as the correlated intensification of government repression and defense of the principle of nonintervention in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe, and Latin America. The chapter explains how tensions, interests, and demands all contentiously crystallized within the APs. It explains how the new rules for national liberation war and internal conflict contained within the APs constitute face-saving, contested international law.

This chapter assesses how modernization worked its way into Cold War politics and how it influenced public discourse and foreign policy in the United States during the second half of the 1950s. Between 1957 and 1958, several events prompted the United States to shift toward a more active foreign aid policy. These events brought a consensus that a more vigorous approach to promoting economic growth and development as a way to contain communist influence was needed. The question of improved coordination of development assistance among the Atlantic nations was also a factor. Most of Western Europe shared America's concern about Soviet penetration, and several members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) insisted on activating economic collaboration according to article 2 of the North Atlantic Treaty, using it to provide aid cooperatively. The chapter then considers how, with the presidency of John F. Kennedy, modernization became the representative Western ideology for waging the Cold War, even as other coexisting traditions of imperial origin offered rival methods of using development aid as a tool of foreign policy to face radicalization in the decolonizing world.

By providing substantial financial support for college students on the basis of need, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) blazed a trail for gender parity in public support for college students. Chapter 3 explores how lawmakers successfully passed the path-breaking student aid program in 1958 and how it has contributed to women’s educational attainment in subsequent decades. This analysis suggests that women’s incorporation as full citizens under US social policy is rooted in the political development of the NDEA, which was shaped by Cold War politics on the international stage and contention over civil rights on the domestic front. The concerted influence of these factors was central to lawmakers’ success in passing a student assistance program that institutionalized gender-egalitarian support for college students and contributed to a narrowing of the gender gap in higher educational attainment that had been exacerbated by the GI Bill.

This chapter examines Raymond Pace Alexander’s efforts to translate his civil rights activism into larger political ambitions. It looks at Alexander’s handling of important civil rights cases such as the Trenton Six Case of 1948–1951 (known as the “Scottsboro North”) and how Cold War politics in Philadelphia reshaped his professional and organizational activities. The chapter also discusses Alexander’s election to the Philadelphia city council in 1951, and how he used his position to secure the extension of city services and provision of public resources to African Americans, along with his failed bids to be appointed a federal judge of the U.S. Third District Court and to obtain a number of diplomatic positions in the U.S. State Department. Finally, it explores the Democratic Party’s reform movement in Philadelphia in 1951.

This epilogue reemphasizes the arguments in the book. Brown-skin models acquired significant social status as African American women on an expanded global stage between 1945 and 1954—a short but critical period that marked the end of World War II, the hardening lines of Cold War politics, and the significant victory of Brown v. Board of Education that, in 1954, made segregation illegal in public schools. Indeed, during this short period and turning tide, a powerful iconography of beautiful brown women emerged to represent African-descended people in the United States by recasting beauty as a democratic right and function. Brown beauty was formalized, both at home and abroad, as a consumerist symbol of women’s successful negotiation of the trials of race, sex, and womanhood in the postwar nation, still half-segregated.

This concluding chapter examines how the United States' place and role in international affairs affects divergent and convergent interests between the government and individual diasporas. It examines three stages of American foreign policy. During the first stage (1900–1941), the attachments of diasporas to homelands engaged in World War I led some diaspora members to oppose both US neutrality toward the war and US support for the creation of the League of Nations. In contrast, the second stage (1941–1989) was a period of convergence brought about largely by the global implications of Cold War politics, which pitted US interests against Soviet communism. In the third and contemporary stage, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, acceptance of the rights of minorities to organize politically on the basis of racial, religious, or national identities has become increasingly common and has given legitimacy to multiculturalism in domestic politics.

This chapter explores the relations between the United States and Europe, on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, arguing that despite the fall of the Iron Curtain there still hangs an imaginary divide between Russia and the West that mirrors that of Cold War-era politics. It examines the Russo-Western tensions that still exist today as well as the possibilities of forging new partnerships, as the critical factor in the twenty-first century will be not so much how powers compete as how they interact. Russia clearly aspires to play an important role in the new international status quo, and this will place a premium on Russia's ability to deploy economic and intellectual capital and to forge effective relationships with other key actors.

No study of Lorca's poetry on its own terms can explain why his poetry resonated so strongly in the United States. For an explanation of this resonance, this chapter turns to a set of purely domestic criteria that have little to do with Lorca as he might appear within his own cultural context. Lorca was particularly attractive to poets seeking to define a new variety of American cultural nationalism. He arrived on the scene as an alien figure, strongly identified with a quite different brand of national exceptionalism—that of Spain itself. Far from being an obstacle, however, Lorca's foreignness proved useful to those in search of a form of American cultural nationalism that might stand opposed to cold war politics. Lorca's poetry came to the fore with the poets associated with The New American Poetry, an anthology published in 1960. The contributions of African American and gay male poets are especially noteworthy during this period, but there is also a more generic Lorquismo, characterized by a tone of naive enthusiasm and by a proliferation of abusive citations of the duende.

This chapter describes how Christopher Isherwood’s quest for personal, spiritual, and literary reinvention in the United States changed following his involvement in American Cold War politics and literary culture. Isherwood initially aimed to adopt the American style of writing, but two contrasting literary works changed his style: D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and Michael Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture. These both endorsed a context of “hypermasculinity” at that time. Isherwood opposed the American culture of “hypermasculinity” as a result of the influence of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. These works led him to write his first own gay protest novel: The World in the Evening

This chapter showcases a comparative analysis of stage plays by influential dramatists from both Koreas. Sin Go-song's Ten Years and Yu Chi-jin's Thus Flows the Han River were published in 1958, in Pyongyang and in Seoul respectively. They both feature recent memories of border crossing during the Korean War (1950-1953) as a prominent dramatic device to reveal the dangers of emotional ties among family members who are no longer citizens of the same Korea. Working faithfully with their respective official state ideologies within a broader international Cold War politics, both plays address the necessity to maintain draconian control over the constantly shifting wartime border. The stage space was used to dramatize public anxiety over the nature of the demilitarized zone (DMZ)—an uneasy reminder of an unfinished past and an uncertain future—as it is portrayed most profoundly in the plays' characterizations of border crossers as dangerous infiltrators.

This chapter examines the causes of unexpectedly low development levels in Guyana, a former indirectly ruled British colony. It highlights the presence of despotism despite direct rule and explains that Guyana neither strengthened preexisting state structures, increased inclusiveness, nor began state-led development efforts. This chapter argues that the independence period was a critical-juncture period during which the intersection of class inequality and cold war politics readjusted the country's developmental trajectory.

This chapter examines how foreign aid influences autocratic regime change by focusing on the domestic political incentives autocratic leaders face when they receive foreign aid that comes with political conditions. The chapter argues that the prospects of winning competitive (or semi-competitive) elections is a useful way to think about the political costs of regime reform, and shows that autocratic regimes with broad distributional coalitions and deep political networks will be the most competitive. These factors make the trade of aid for political reform less costly to regime elites. Cross-national empirical tests show that foreign aid with credible conditionality can serve as a carrot to entice autocratic regimes to concede democracy when the political costs of liberalization are relatively low. This scenario is most likely in party regimes during the post-Cold War period. Finally, the chapter examines the case of Ghana in the 1990s to illustrate the main causal mechanism.

Drawing on the image of a “Chinese Store” in the author’s photographic archive, this chapter addresses past traces of Chinese presences in remote reaches of the rural landscape of Sierra Leone—and in commodities widely circulating in the country—in contrast to the more monumental scale of present-day Chinese projects in African states. Here Cold War alliances and competing interests of two Chinas (Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China) superimpose themselves on an archaeology of Chinese presence in West Africa that reaches back to the long term.

This chapter talks about how Progressive women faced a number of challenges as they headed out on the campaign trail in 1948. Not only did Women for Wallace activists have to contend with Cold War politics, including debates about the role of Communists in the Progressive Party (PP), they also had to negotiate the competing rationales members claimed for women's political engagement. The feminisms that took root in the PP were most often shaped by debates about the grounds on which Progressive women should demand their right to political participation. Divisions within the Congress of American Women and Women for Wallace organizations were determined by the degree to which members relied upon notions of “difference” between men and women to claim their rights.

This chapter details the ways in which the articulations of the verbal/visual relation in the colonial period allowed for new identifications; new ways of thinking about writing, painting, representation, space, time, and the body; and new contestations among class, ethnonational, and imperial belonging—all of which are central to post-1945 South Korea. More importantly, the advent of modern forms of subjectivity is marked by the invocation of an accompanying technological progress associated with Western material culture. This chapter further highlights how the proletarian culture movement, nativism, modernism, and mass mobilization set in motion ways of seeing and writing that would inform the later distribution of the visible and invisible that make up the Cold War politics of division on the Korean peninsula.

This chapter examines the contributions made by “bright young academicians” to discourse about Charles E. Ives during the period 1965–1985. More specifically, it considers the impact that historians who worked under the “American Studies” rubric had on Ives's reception. The chapter first provides an overview of the 1965 premiere of Ives's Fourth Symphony before discussing the 1974 centenary celebrations of his birth. It then explores the convergence of Cold War politics and Ives's reception, along with the structure and assumptions of the field of intellectual history and its connection to American Studies. It also analyzes Ives's influence on American Studies and intellectual history and describes an approach that calls for a rethinking of America and of history “from the bottom up.” The chapter concludes with an assessment of Ives's prospects in American Studies in the late 1970s.