thank you.

and i'm going to be talking to you about my book today, the esthetic cold war, decolonization and, global literature. i want to thank the commonwealth institute of black studies for this event. possible today. my project is about effect of the cold war, especially the effect of the competition between the united states and the soviet union on the literatures and the intellectual development of writing in the

decolonizing world what was then called the third world is now called sometimes the developing world or the global south. so there have been lots of studies of cold war literature, most of them have focused on what happened in the united states and the soviet union, but as i started to do my research on this, i learned that the u.s. and soviet union in the competition between them had an incredible effect on literary development in other parts of the world, especially africa, asia and the caribbean, which were the focus of this book. now of offering a sort of general overview and somatic instead of reading novels and plays and thinking about what is the effect of ideological competition? cold war in places in the south. i decided in this book that i wanted to focus on two of the

mechanism arms in which large states got involved directly in literary competition in the global south. the first of those areas is in what i call cold war cultural diplomacy. the united and soviet union sponsored libraries. they sponsored music tours. they sponsored cultural events, they sponsored museums, they sponsored book publications schemes and book distribution. they sponsored international conferences. most of all. and what i talk about at great length in this book is their sponsorship of magazineshat targeted writers and targeted audiences, what's now called the global south. this is a brief snippet of some of the magazines that i look at in this project. if you look the the top left of th slidesee black orpheus,

this is a magazine that was founded in ibadan, nigeria, in the 1950s. and it was ultimatelsponsored by the congress for cultural freedom, which we learned in 1966, in 1867 was a cia front below that on the left is transition magazine, the editor of which was rajan georgi, a ugandan indian. this is probably the best known of the literary and political magazines that came out africa ring the sixes. some of you may know it because this magazine was revived by henry louigates at harvard and. it's still running now. so if you look up on project muse or whoever it is that that that carries the magazine, you can find editions of transition and going all the way back to the first one in 1961 or thereabouts, 2 to 2. the magazine's current day

operations also by the cia, covertly congress for cultural freedom. i'll talk a little bit about them in a minute. in the bottom left of this, you'll see another congress for cultural freedom magazine. they were a big operation in the 1960s. this was encounter, which was based in. london. thprimary audiences were anglo american, but it had a huge impact on literary developments in africa. top of that slide, you'll see one of the many magazine ins sponsored by the u.s. state departme called world. this was produced out of hong kong and distributed throughout the chinese diaspora in the fifties and sixties. so the the wter that i talk about that that published some of her most interesting stuff in world today is chang, who who left china in the 1950s and

ultimately resettled in the united states. the last magazine that i'll point out to you on this slide probably the most successful and certainly the most durable of ese magazines was lotus writings. this sponsored by the soviet union throughout its period. it's its full print run. so you can see that magazis were one areaf competition between the u.s. and soviet unn. one of the things that i've poind out, point out, lotu that was unusual was also a tri lingual magazine and it was published simultaneously in arabic in english and in french. and it had a circulation that ranged between five and 10,000 magazines per. issue was published out of cairo by the by minister of culture, yusuf el-sayed by the editor. so cultural diplomacy. i'll talk a lot more that in

this talk but this gives you a quick overview of some of the forms of competition that took place in the world of publishing, arts and letters between the and soviet union in the decolonizing world, the part of this project, if the cultural diplomacy part of the project we might think of, is the carrot that was dangled in front of african and asian writers, was the stick write the u.s. and soviet union, both tried to influence the development and of arts and letters in the decolonizing world through state intervention intelligence agencies, putting wters in jail, deporting them, censoring their work, depriving them of citizensp, and oning monitoring and intelligence files on those writers, some for decades. right. and these are just some the

writers that i talk about in projt. there were a wide of writers from what's now call the global south that were spied up by one or more governments. and if you read the book, you'll see that actually a t of these writers show up in both parts of the narrative thai tell write, these are writers who enjoyed state patronage in certain contexts. and tn were the people who were punished by large states in other contexts. you can see on this slide, two of africa's nobel laureates aren't that many of them. right. voice showing on the left who wrote a great, amazing prison memoir, e man died that i talked about extensively in the book. he spe almost two years in in solitary. well, not all of it in solitary, but a significant part of it in solitary in nigeria. dos lessing, anoth nobel

laureate from africa, was spied upon by mi5 five for nearly two decades. and she knew it. she talked about it extensively in her writings. she was aware of it and they made sure that she knew she was under observation. alex laguna, the figure in the center, was exiled from south africa. he spent the better part of ten years either jail or under house arrest. he was harassed by the intelligence services for much of his adult life while he was living in south africa. nuala saadawi the great egyptian medical doctor and feminist, spent time in an egyptian prison. she also wrote about h experiences as didn't give you what yongle of the great kenyan writer who spent time about year in detention in kenya. the bottom rht of this slide, claudia jones and claude james

talk abouthem a little bit later in my discussion. they're both from the island of trinidad in the caribbean ty both spent time in england, as well as in the united states. they were both deported from the united states. both have very extensive fbi les that i looked at and somewhat more slender but sutantial mi5 that were collected on during their time in england. the bottom center, you'll note mo krishnan the great indian writer he's pictured here at the 1958 tashkent meeting of the african asiawriters association. next to him is w.e.b. dubois, the great african american political theorist writer who was denied a passport for many years in the unitedtates. his passport was reinstated, interestingly enough, in time for him to attend the first meeting of the afro-asian

writers association. this is the group that sponsors the lotus magazine. their first meeting was in tashkent in the soviet union in 1958, and dubois was rajat new jersey, the editor of transition. he also spent time in detention in uganda before coming to the us. sajjad zahir, the indian and pakistan senior writer, an intellectual and and more crushing on these are two of the earliest figures who up in the intelligence files that i examined, they were being tracked by british and indian security servicesuring, the colonial period. well, back into the 1930s. so monitoring of writers is something that happened over a very extensive period of many writers had dealings with state agencies through cultural diplomacy efforts. but many of these same writers were the victim, if you like, of state apparatus that tracked their movements, monitored their

work. so let me turn now tell you a little bit more about what i do with cultural diplomacy in this project. and i'll start that by giving you a little bit of an anecdote about how i got started on this research in the early 2000s, between about 2005 and 2010, i was working on a book project that to do primarily with connections between white metropolitan british writers and their counterpart parts from the decolonizing world. and i was especially interested in a bbc radio program called caribbean voices that hosted black and other writers of color from the caribbean, alongside some of their white british counterparts. and i was at the harry ransom center in texas doing some archival research for this project. and whenever i go to archival work, i like to describe what

i'm doing to the librarians and archivists because they always know stuff. they know stuff that i don't know and they know more about their own holdings than i do. so i was describing my work on my interest in bbc to an archivist and she said to me, okay, you've got to talk to one of my colleagues. this guy called bob taylor. she made an appointment with me to meet with him the next day i show up to the meeting and bob sits me down and says, have you heard of the center? i heard that doing this work on bbc radio and this program called caribbean voices. have you heard of the transcription center said not ringing any bells, man. i don't know. i have no idea what you're talking about, he said. okay, well, during the 1960s, in london, there was this bbc producer called dennis durden who had a recording studio, and he invented this thing or started this thing called the transcription center.

and they brought in all of the emerging african writing talon out of the 1960s when they passed through london. so they did interviews with yinka nkosi. he killed pele. she chinua achebe, the whole alex the broom, the whole 1960s generation of writers said, boy, that sounds really fascinating. i'm going to i'm going to check it out as soon as i'm done writing this, this, this other book that i'm working on and he said, okay, just wanted to make sure you're aware of it. we've got all the stuff here at the harry ransom center, and we were sort of getting it to lead. he sort of said with a twinkle in his eye. i said, oh, i almost forgot to tell you. i said, oh, he the transcription center was covertly funded by the cia cia. now he had my attention. i said, why? on earth was the cia in 1962,.

63 supporting an outfit that was recording programs with voice, ink and other luminaries from that generation and distributing them around the world? i just it didn't make any to me. and he said, that's where my job ends and your job begins, right? you need to find out what the cia was doing backing a program this and you need to make that story known. so that's kind of how my research started. i pulled some files that very afternoon. this was a an archive that had been acquired by the harry ransom center, but hadn't even been cataloged yet. i just said, you know, bring me some boxes. and i started looking. this document is one of the earliest spock's documents that i found in my searches. this is a program from, the

1962. it's called the embalming conference, but it was also called the african writers of expression conference at mclaren university in kampala, uganda and it's got a list of participants all in large this in a second to show you some the major figures who were at this conference. so i knew the first time i saw this roster of attendees that these are all people who had accepted money, at least indirect, from the cia. interesting. now, when conference happened, they should point out that cia sponsorship was covert. they did not say, hey, the cia is sponsoring. it was sponsored by an organization called the congress for cultural freedom. but i should point that the congress for cultural freedom made absolutely no bones, its ideological orientation. right in their manifesto was published in 1950. they say things like

totalitarianism of the kind practiced by the soviet union is is the greatest threat to mankind. and since the stone age, for instance, perhaps exaggerated. but my point is that the ideological orientation of the congress for cultural freedom was no secret, even if the funding was secret. here's a up. i don't know how well you'll be able to read it. so i highlighted a few names of figures who showed up at the 1962 conference. there's one in the bottom corner there. ralph ellison, the great african-american novelist and essayist. we don't think actually attended the conference. but he was invited. he was on the program. he may have run into complications. i don't know. but if you look at the rest of this document, especially the top half of it, you'll see that the whole generation of 1960s anglophone writers is there from chinua achebe dennis durden, the

guy who directed it the transcription center that i talked about a moment ago was there, alex lagoon and we'll talk about in a moment was fresh off the publication of a walk in the night he was he was he was invited also another no show because he was in detention the south african authorities would not let him leave the country. christopher akiba oh the great nigerian poet who sadly died in the civil war in nigeria a few years later was there. lewis. in kochi in gujarat. tongo he known as james in googie, was there. ezekiel or esquire? pele, the great south african writer, was in many ways the de facto host of the event. he was the brainchild of it. he was working for the congress for cultural freedom at this time. v.s. naipaul happened to be doing a fellowship in u. south africa at the time, and he was there, as was langston hughes, who was kind of the presiding luminary, the guest of

honor at the at the conference. so when i saw this document, a narrative, again, it's very early on in my research. in my research, a narrative started to form in my mind right. okay. what we have here, front of us, in front of me, time is a is a kind of stable of writers who had taken patronage from an anti totalitarian organization. and we can already see writers lining up and taking sides in this cold war. at least this is what i thought i saw when i saw this document. here's a picture of chinua achebe at that 1962 conference. and i'm forming in my mind this group of writers who became partizs of the us and advocates of some kind of anti totalitariangenda. i should point out briefly while i'm on this slide, ngress for

cultural freedom was unmasked as a as as a cia backed organization. and in 1966, 67, it started in 49, 50 aftermath of worlwar two and ran until about 19 oh 67. and they wer extremely active throughout the decolonizing world. so there's a choubey and a bunch of other people that i won't mention here at that. and then a couple of years later, i started turning my attention to the afro-asian writers association, the counterpart of, the congress for cultural freedom, the competing organization of the congress for cultural freedom, their magazine was called lotus the prize. they awarded grand prize tt they awarded to literary figures was the lotus prize. and here you can see chinua ache awarded the lotus prize. and i thought, like all scholars

do. resting. this is an anomaly. righ and i'm going to put brackets around it and i'm going to put it i'm going tot over here. i'm going to dea it later. i'm not going to, like, suppress it because that would be, you know, something you don't want do. but humanists love anomalies. we love interesting, weird this is one of them. i'll deal with later. alex laguna, the great south african writer who could not attendhe 1962 democratic conference, was an import figure there. his his first novella, a walk in published by embrey publisher. was started inbadan, nigeria, and it was close affiliated with the congress for cultural freedom. they took congress for cultural

freedom and a walk in the night wa centerpiece at the 1962 mcclearyonference of the fiction discussions, they broke the conference up into some fiction paneme poetry panels and some drama and a walk in the nht gunman' though he couldn't be there, was the centerpiece of those discussions. fast forward to 1973 and here you'll see a picture of alex lagunat e savoy it affiliated afro asian writer association meeting. he's actually awarded the lotus prize, one of the first lotus prizes in 1969. he's he looksikhe's strang going to be seen the great french-algerian it, but he's actually congratulating khattab yassine on his own lotus prize. this is suel-sayedy the egyptian writer and minister of culture in during the senties

during sadat's regime regime. yusef al-sabah was the founding editor of lotus magazine. alex laguna went on to edit the magazine for a time and. he also became the general secretary of the afro-asian writers association, the chief executive, if you like, of the effort. afro-asian writers, sessions so that the brackets that had pushed way over here are now kind of sitting on shoulder a little bit. right. chinua achebe is shown up as a figure at both events. alex guma has shown up as a figure at us, sponsored events and soviet sponsored events. i'm starting to think, okay, this more than an anomaly, i might need to deal it. this is a picture of sambo in whose mind? the great senegalese novelist and filmmaker i've never i don't know if anybody else has, but i've never seen a picture of without a pipe. you let me know if you find one. but if you ever see a photograph

of a senegalese guy in, you know, traditional dress, we might call it smoking a pipe chances are it's sembene is mine right here he is at the very first meeting of the afro-asian association in 19 5058, in which is then part of the soviet union here is at the french language equivalent of the macarena conference. there, hosted on his home turf in, dakar, senegal. so this is a congress for cultural freedom. it a event that he attended just a few yearsfter, the tashkent event here. he is smoking his pipe and he is 1973, except getting his own lotus award at the writers association. meeting in the middle is a vietnam poet. too long and over here is a ish

in googie we don't have a picture of him at the 1962 democratic conference. or at least i couldn't find a picture of him there. also, somebody who attended the soviet affiliated afro-asian writers association meetings. so this weight over here is now like a millstone around my neck, and i'm in a blind panic thinking. the whole premise with which i started at least half of this book, is now shot to pieces. what am i going to do? here's the great ghanaian poet, a playwright was sutherland at the first 1958, afro-asian writers association meeting in the audience is w.e.b. dubois, who was, you know, just as hughes had kind of presided it over the mccrory event, w.e.b. dubois was at the the tashkent

event. f was sutherland is somebody like sembene like laguna was going and forth between congress for cultural freedom and afro-asian writers association events. this is an abbreviated list. some of the major figures in african literature from the 1950s, sixties and seventies that went back and forth and had very s levels of involvement and engagement with both the united states affiliated cultural diplomacy apparatus and its soviet counterpart, lotus magazine. the afro-asian writers. most of these writers published in at least one congress for cultural freedom publication, as well as some of those lotus magazine issues that i talked about a few moments. so as was churning through this

information, one of the most difficult things for me to do, writing this book to account for this, but it was also one of the most liberating parts of doing this project, was trying to reckon with this archival and i'll call it empirical data that i found as i was doing my research. my original hypothesis was completely sunk. but one of the things that i discovered is that it became possible rethink this moment, not as a moment when writers from the colonizing parts of the world were declaring their allegiances lining up neatly in one camp or another through systems of patronage and cultural diplomacy. but in fact, i make the argument in the first half of this book that this was a moment when a very savvy and canny group of writers were willing to play both sides of this equation. they were willing to seek patronage and opportunities to publish their work in both the

soviet and its affiliates, as well as in the united states and is and its affiliates, as you can see here, i argue that in contrast to the people in there are a few of them there, scholars who argue that cold sponsorship of writers from africa and asia effectily anti-colonial writing. i are in my book vibrant and competing cultural networks led by the u.s. viet union, allow for at least a bri period sad the global south writers to work across and between camps carving out a space for indigenous writing for themselves and for anti-coal o'nel resistance in their work you have two superpowers down bended knee asking the favors of global south writers and they knew how to work the system. and i argue that they did very effectively, at least for a brief period of time.

the 20 or so years after. world war two. so now i want to talk a little bit about the other half of this project, maybe less fun half, but nevertheless, yes, an part of this project we all know that writers faced significant sanctions. some of those were dissident who were not afraid to truth to power and suffered the consequences for it. some of them were apolitical or nonpolitical writers that various states deemed dangerous for one reason or another. one of the points that i make in this book is that state surveillance of writers was ubiquitous during this period. there is not a national or an international superpower during this period of time that did not collect on writers.

it happened in the united states and african-american queer writers, as we know, were overwhelmingly not, exclusively, but overwhelmingly the targets of that surveillance. so it's an old story in the soviet union and perhaps an overplayed story because the soviet union were not the only nation during this time that sanctioning writers right. and it certainly happened in independent states of the post-colonial world, in africa and asia and elsewhere. all states collected intelligence on writers, all states bullied writers that they found to be unsatisfactory, dangerous or problematic. for one reason or so. i want to talk with you today, give you sort of one case study briefly from the book that, deals with claudia jones and, claude james, the great

trinidadian intellectuals on thisli, i give you a sort of brief overview of claudia jones'biography. she's born in trinidad in 1915. i think celia james born in 19. so they're not quite contemporaries, but they're close she comes to the u.s. as a child and goes to new york city in 1936 was a fairly young woman. she joins the communist party. it's not until 1942, actually, that the fbi file opens. when the fbi file opens. it really opens wide right the claudia jones dossier is over a thousand pages in length, about 800 pages of which are now available. certain partof the file still remain under wraps redacted, not ailable to the public for reasons that don't know and

n't fully explain, but it's not uil 1942 that they begin tracking her for about 100 pages of the file they think she's bornirginia somewhere in the u.s. and it's not much later in the file that they figure out that she she she migrated to the u.s. as a young rson in 1950 she's detained for short period on ellis island. claire james is also going to be detained. she spends 11 months in prison not all that farro here in west virginia with a number of other of communist active s because she was not born in the u.s. they also had the government also had the ability deport her they did that after was released from prison after serving her roughly 11 months of prison and at that time she went back to back to england. she went england for the first time and lived much of the rest of her life in england, where

the mi5, which is the sort of domestic security apparatus in the united kingdom, also tracked her, although that file has either been lost or, suppressed. i was not able to it. some interesting features about jones's file that want to mention to you so is a document taken from her file. when i first got my hands on that file, i expected see some really interesting stuff. i expected to see wiretaps. i accepted. i expected to see all kinds of secret agents alluded to i expected to see all kinds of covert operations of one kind or another. i was i don't want to say disappointed, but surprised when i read her file, it is it's kind of a boring slog. there's a thousand pages of it

and a lot of it is boring. but that got me interested that that did to the quotidian nature of it and that the sort of reporting that the fbi use to keep track of what claudia jones became really interesting. me so this is one of the documents taken from claudia jones's file there are these long documents within the file that are called prosecutor of summaries and the fbi was assembling these from the very earliest stages of tracking claudia jones and what these were were a kind of game plan right how do we convict this person this is the that we give to a prosecutor. the fbi is there to investigate, not actually to prosecute. they're going to hand that material off to a prosecutor and what they do when they're tracking and want to potentially have them prosecuted for a crime

is they assemble a assemble a game called a prosecutor of summary some of these and claudia is file are huge the largest. is 111 pages long. this plan for how are we going get claudia jones from the perspective of the government but these were fascinating in and of themselves here is a document taken from one of them the star is not going to be some kind of secret informant that had in-fill claudia jones's circle it's not going to be an intelligence expert who's been tapping her phones. it is going to be the headline librarian of the new york public library and the library of congress and their exhibits are going to be documents from the daily worker, other newspapers and magazines where claudia had published her work. this to me was so fascinating.

the main bit evidence for claudia jones and against claudia jones was by librarians librarians. and the main evidence against her was things that she'd written, things that today be legal, things that then were from probably legal. and yet so it's interesting. i had a vision intelligence agents doing one thing, but the more and more i sat with these files the the intelligence agents the fbi used to track claudia and as i'll show in a moment, celia james they did the kind of work that i do and that librarians and that archivists do. they read a lot of stuff. they clip out little things from. i mean, this is pre-internet days, right? so they're not using their google box to to search up everything. right. they're taking clippings from newspapers they're reading

stuff, they're attending rallies, notes on what people say in their speeches like a few of you are today. right everything that i do interpret, interpret. right. that's as a as a professor of english and somebody who's got a strong interest in history. that's what i do. that's what i spend most of my day doing. it's exactly what the fbi agents were doing as they developed a case against claudia jones. so wrap things up. turning to claude james, like claudia jones is born in trinidad. unlike her, he goes when he leaves trinidad, goes to england first. he spends. about six or seven years there and publishes a number of books and also reports on the great game of cricket for the manchester before going to the united states just he was publishing his great of the haitian revolution in the black

jacobins he goes to the to go on a lecture tour in 39 and war breaks out while he's in the u.s. and he ends up staying for 15 years in the u.s. before he is detained on ellis island like claudia jones, and eventually deported, at which point he goes back to england. unlike claudia jones, we have color james's mi5 file to compare to fbi file. now, i should point out that selah james is ultimately deported overstaying his visa, but it's not. he was living in hiding during this time. he divorced. he married a u.s. citizen during this period, i believe that he also registered for selective service for the draft during this period, although i haven't been able to to to fully confirm

that there a strained note that i found in his archive to that effect. so he was hardly living in hiding during this period the f the f sorry mi5 had been tracking while he was in england, the 1930s. fbi gets on his trail. in 1947. he's deported in 1952 and mi5 up the file for from there. this is one of the earlit documents ins that i found in sealedames's file. i'll show you a blow up of it here. this is one ofhe early earliestescribing claude james and right from the earliest reports, james, the agent ss we're going to deport this guy, we are going to get him out. our country as an alien subversive. so the fbi, although it

sometimes tookears for, them to produce a case, they didn't fool around, especially with aliens of color. right. their goal was to prosecute and get them out of the country more or ls as quickly as possible. and it's evidence in file from the very beginning as well as from a large james's file. now this was an interesting tiit that sort of backs some of what i was saying about claudia. this is taken from the prosecutor portion of claude james. he fought his deportation in court. and one of the argument that claude made in court to the judge ishey, listen, i i'm interested in marxism. was a trotskyite, by the way. so he and claudia jones was a card carrying member of the communist party, did not see eye to eye right for claudia jones,

somebody like claude james is an apostate right. so james in court said, hey, like don't don't get upset i'm a writer like don't deport me. i'm not planning or plotting to overthrow the government i'm not sparking a seditious movement. i'm a just go take it easy and here's here's what the prosecution says in response to him, james's his attorneys claim that the respondent is not an action ist revolutionary, merely a writer and philopher is our impression. the world revolutionary movement has been founded and led by writers. engels, whose name misspelled marx, lenin and oths, the books, the responding admits, admits to have written or woed on our. world revolution a history of the -- revolution from 1700 in 1937.

black jacobins, a work not yet. at the time of the hearings on herman melville, which would become mariner's renegades and castaways. so this this is an interesting moment where james says, hey i'm just a writer. writers aren't really that dangerous, right? and the us says, darn righ you're a writer and your kind are the most dangerous people th we have. so if you know, if in our own moment are times wn those of who are interested in writing and ideas feel like a wider public doesn't, take notice. this was a time when people paid attention to what writers had to say at the very at the very least, this and i'm just just in the process of wrapping up here isnother document that i just i the geek in me had to show this document right it's all redact write all these all these black marker spotsre

daions. there's a little bit here, hard to read, says england. right. which gives us a sense that mi5 and fbi collaborating and sharin intelligence. and they're not the only ones who was. interesting is that seal or james was involved with a very small trotskyite organization that this time that was based in the detroit area. and what i suspect is that these names are all because they're secret informants. right. and one of the things that i sort of imagine when i see a document like this impossible to know, at least based on the information that i have is, that james is there right. everybody else is gathering information. right. and typically with informants, they don't know. who else is informing? right. and so they're all gathering information on one another, but james's file that sticks this.

is a document from claude mi5 file and showing to here because it's information that was collected by an informer meant on the boat james took when was deported. right. and mi5 were right there. they were not waiting him to show up portsmouth or wherever he was landing, wherever he was landing in england, they were there on the ss italia was the name of the boat, right when it left the docks in new york. the report is is humorous for all kinds of reasons. they say, hey, unlike the fbi he's got a lot of books, nothing of interest a lot of books of a left wing nature, nothing to take special note of. he's tall. he's handsome. he's very well dressed. he's extremely articulate and well-spoken. a special search of his baggage made. but apart from showing he read

books, a pro, left wing nature, nothing of particular interest was revealed where his horn rimmed glasses very well-spoken natty suit of good appearance. one of the interesting things that i found as i delved more into claude james's mi5 file as well as doris mi5 file, is that there are some subtle but key differences between the kind of intelligence operations that were conducted by the fbi in the u.s. and mi5 in the u.k. in, the u.s., the intelligence. operations were pretty zealous in prosecuting writers of deporting them, if possible, putting other constraints on them. if that was not possible in the united kingdom, there was a slightly different dynamic because its relation to the decolonizing world, right?

and the argument that i make in the second half of the book is there were subtle but meaningful differences between the way that mi5 conducted its intelligence operations and the fbi and mi5 were happy to keep people like claude james and doris lessing and padmore and all of the other anti-colonial agitators in london, in a way from colonial. when doris lessing went to rhodesia, her home as it was then known, she was tailed every second of the way when she tried to go to south africa, put her on a plane back, rhodesia, when claudia jones was in jail, discussing what she was going to do in response, the deportation notice that she knew was to be served on her an ambassador, not the ambassador, but someone from the diplomatic from the uk came to visit her and told her, you

have a uk passport legally, you're to go anywhere in the united kingdom and its dependencies, but you are not welcome in trinidad. you come to london if you want to. that is fine by us. you go to trinidad and we will make trouble for you. and it was the same for celia james. he could go shout his mouth off at hyde park corner every sunday morning, all wanted to go back to colonial territories and you were going to run into problems. that was one of the key differences between the fbi and. mi5 were doing. so i'm going to end my presentation there. i hope i've given you sense of the project a whole. i'm happy to take any questions, and i want to thank you for joining me.

i think if anybody does have question, we're going to get them up at the microphone, which is in the center aisle. we are the question. be my guest, please. thank you for a really interesting and stimulating talk to ask a question about your first client and what i'm interested in is this idea that these writers and the articles are using public statements of support from both for laughs. yeah, but then also in what you say about relations between their own communities and verse verses and the fact that they're all part of a vehicle.

writing world and they're all involved in emotional discourses about people, revolution, liberation. so to what extent are they intentionally taking advantage of this funding to strengthen sources or to to sustain activities. and ideas that are already all in verses, you know, taking opportunities that are, you know, like me getting a freelance writing contract. it's filling, you know, sort related what i do, but maybe not my interest, but hey, it's going to pay the bills. give me an opportunity to advance my my name. yeah, that's a question. so one of the things that i'll say is my belief is that many the writers who accepted opportunities were doing that partly for professional right in, the soviet union in particular they had a massive, massive translation scheme

right. i mentioned briefly that lotus magazine was published in three languages. right. and this of huge importance for writers, the decolonizing world to to feel their work could reach audiences in multiple languages and usually not always, but often for writers, publishers being in lotus this was a gateway to the wider soviet art market. the soviet had by far and is not even close. the world's largest translation system. so exploiting opportunities with these different cultural diplomacy agencies led to other kinds of professional opportunities. i want to i guess complicate that by saying that of these writers also took an opportune to accept support to build up what they saw as indigenous cultural institutions would

serve their own needs and their own their own purposes. so my sense is that relatively few said, all right, i'm just going to write this thing satisfy, you know, my readers in the soviet union or my readers in the united states. but i have no investment in it and. part of the reason i think that is because writers can be very stubborn and incredibly bad, taking directions from anyone. it's hard for me and this may be looking at things in retrospect. it's hard me to imagine voices showing, you know, like writing on a piece like that guy writes what he wants to write and says what he wants to say to the people he wants to say. and he he he's he's not worried about what you will think and that at times that him very dearly right he spent a couple of years in jail much of it in solitary confinement he almost

died during that time because believed in what he to say. so, you know when, i say that it's hard to tell those writers what say i may have sounded somewhat flippant, but i take that very seriously. some of these writers learned at great rate, great personal cost to that saying what like can get you into some some very serious so thank you for that question. thank you for a great talk very interesting. my question i think with angela davis and so she visits the soviet union i think in 1975 and she goes to tashkent in part to sort of celebrate the non of the soviet union and know from the soviet angle they loved racial strife that the states was going through in the 1960s.

right absolutely welcome the panthers. they welcomed the race riots because this was sort of capitalism and its death throes. right. and so i'm wondering if there was a sort of an equal but opposite response of the united states trying to foment racial resentment within the soviet youth. oh, great question. so anyway, in your research, did you see the cia trying engage groups in central asia? i know because i think it's something that we the kind of gets lost in this whole debate is how multiethnic. the soviet union, in fact, is. yeah. so that's a great question. it did not come up a lot in my research and it's partly because the cia records that are available us and the releases nothing to anyone right the cia records that are available to us in the context of my research have to do with the quirks the

congress for cultural freedom in the way it was established. so that i hope this get too technical this answer but so cia set up basically. fake 503ci think is what it is right that's a nonprofit that. 503c right. okay. so they set up a fake 503c to do all of the business for the congress for cultural freedom. they funded secretly, but for even for tax purposes. in the u.s., it looked like a legitimate nonprofit. and so when the cia wound up operations, they just stopped giving money. but it's not like they went into the offices and raided the paperwork and took it back and so somebody at some point said we got all these papers around. let's let's find a home for them. and they ended up at the university chicago in the special collections. so that's how we can see the

congress cultural freedom stuff. now what i will say is that you don't see in those particular documents a lot of interest in the u.s. trying to drum racial or even better religious strife in soviet union. right. the soviet union were using central asian writers as their kind of trump card in this cultural warfare in the u.s. there were significant problems with. the public perception of racism and racial overseas right in the soviet union made sure that that was in front of writers in the decolonizing world every so they would bring they brought.

audre lorde to one of these events. she's got a great essay about it that i talk about in the book. they would, you know they would bring angela davis they would bring they would bring w.e.b. dubois for the very first one of these events. and they would say to them, like, look, people of color are an equal of the soviet project, right? that was a big part of their pr. now, on the flip side, the congress cultural freedom was always on the back foot on the question of discrimination in the u.s. so when the congress for cultural freedom would go their road show in asia and in africa, people would say, yeah, you know, how do you treat people who look like me in your country? right. that was always is the major problem. so they did some interesting things. they were a huge supporter of people, a skier in parallel and lewis and coetzee and alex laguna. these were all people who had serious serious problems and eventually became exiles from south africa. so it's interesting right.

the u.s. gop politically was aligned quietly, but nevertheless aligned firmly with south africa. right. but in terms of their cultural diplomacy see, they say very explicitly, our job is to condemn what is happening in south africa. icc is two different arms. the united states government working essentially at cross-purposes. the people in the congress for cultural freedom, they had a significant degree of latitude and autonomy and they said, you know, the u.s. line is not going to work if. we take this position on south africa. we're sunk, have no chance here. and so the congress for cultural freedom in their african activities condemned in the strongest possible terms for everything that was happening in apartheid africa and make no

mistake, the u.s. and soviet union, they had spies at one another's cultural diplomacy events. there's a there's some there some documents i found about that. there, checking out what with the other guys with the competition is doing. so, which is just really wonderful. fascinating. and i'm wondering if you have in this study, if it's sort of given you the opportunity, if you've taken the opportunity to sort reflect on the legacies, the legacy of this mechanism. right and it's sort of contemporary iteration, if that, you know, something that you've sort thought through, you know, the thing that comes to mind is what i like where ma about the publishing industries, for example, penguin and so forth and of that's one angle. but whether institutional or otherwise i'm wondering if you've thought much about its sort of contemporary iterations or the legacy of that mechanism. yeah.

so let i'm going to spin that question which is an excellent question in 1967, there's a huge change, right, because the cia is unmanned cast as the supporter of the congress for cultural freedom. that's a key moment in this in the story that i tell and then, of course, 1990 followed the berlin wall all end of the soviet union is another key key moment because, soviet interest and, you know, you could say russian interest in this kind of work in the decolonizing world. it stops completely what you have i think in the contemporary moment is a really interesting resurgence of cultural diplomacy, not through literature, but through right. if you see the way that large states are trying to legitimacy.

it is no longer primarily through books, magazines, international conferences that gather together intellectuals. right. but it is with major state investment in sports to. try to make large regimes seem more legitimate in the in in the international sports is been a part of that right germany hosted the 1936 olympics in berlin. but now the level of invest ment in sports in particular or it's analogous to it's similar the kinds of investments in arts and culture during this period. it's happening and appealing a very different group of people right because the global audiences sport are far far vaster than they ever were for the of books and magazines that we're talking about here. th that all that we have timeor

for today. i want to thank you so much for joining me here today. it was real pleasure talking with you about.