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INTRODUCTION Dans son dernier essai, Retrotopia (2017), Zygmunt Bauman esquissait un tableau socioculturel sombre, qu'un anti-utopiste comme Leszek Koiakowski aurait descrit, probablement, dans les termes d'une << inertie sans espoir [...], Less than a decade after the proclamation of 'the end of history', the anxieties about 'the end of utopia' are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both 'the crisis of the future' and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order--occurred in the '70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain--which defines the 'presentist regime of historicity'. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a 'global epidemic of nostalgia', including the commodified forms of 'retromania', that reveals the presentist 'faces of utopianism', from the non-instrumental 'retrospective utopias'--as poles of 'existential' types of reflective nostalgic practices--to the instrumental 'retrotopias' based on the 'restorative nostalgia', which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the '80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the 'age of extremes' and the apprehensions about 'the future of nostalgia', the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the '70s and the '80s--which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis--to the post-Cold War contests around 'the divised memories' of 'Europe's Europes', coexisting with the clashes of contradictory 'faces' of nostalgia and utopia. Keywords: presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopia

Keywords: vaccine; Cold War; Covid-19; vaccine nationalism; vaccine propaganda; health data surveillance; civil liberties Abstract Surveying the early responses to the Covid-19 pandemic among nation states, one finds a veritable babel of responses, some predictable and some not. Would these results have been different half a century or more ago, when smallpox was eradicated and hopes were high that international cooperation would yield similar results for other infectious diseases? Is this a story about the stability provided by the bipolar postwar world, juxtaposed with the complex geopolitical repositioning that finally followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, or is that too rich an irony? A multipolar world may indeed be less prepared to cope with an international health crisis than a bipolar one. In any case, the patterns of global response are not only reminiscent of the Cold War era itself but also suggestive of a new vaccination cold war. Byline: Jonathan D. Moreno, Judit Sándor, Ulf Schmidt

On 3 October 2015, the U.S. Navy met an odd milestone when it decommissioned USS Simpson--the last modern ship in its fleet to have sunk an enemy warship. Simpson had [...]

The UN General Assembly's 1975 "Zionism is Racism" resolution culminated a decades-long shift in global power dynamics. The Israeli Foreign Ministry's internal debates about how forcefully to oppose the resolution shows to what extent Soviet propagandists had stirred Holocaust-related fears by infusing anti-Zionism with allegations of racism. The diplomatic dustup, especially among African countries, reveals the multi-dimensionality of the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In boosting the New Anti-Semitism, the UN fell in American esteem. This illuminating episode demonstrates the power of going public: how the General Assembly could cause disproportionate harm and two individuals could do much good., INTRODUCTION ON JULY 1, 1982, RONALD REAGAN SENT HIS UN AMBASSADOR JEANE Kirkpatrick to Bujumbura to celebrate Burundi's twentieth anniversary of independence. In the six-hour-long parade, revelers carried a six-foot-wide […]

THE COLD WAR IS CONVENTIONALLY THOUGHT TO BE LONG OVER. Whatever legacies of it remain in East Asia, such as the continued division of the Korean Peninsula and strained relations [...]

Abstract In 1966, a new hospital was being built in western Kenya with Soviet aid. Designed by Soviet architects and planners, with equipment transported from the USSR, it was to [...]

ABSTRACT: In much of the English-language scholarship on the post-1945 Allied occupation of Germany, French officials appear as little more than late arrivals to the victors' table, in need of [...]

This article explores the literary criticism of the South African writer Es'kia Mphahlele by placing it within the context of the cultural Cold War. As the author of The African Image (1962; revised edition, 1974), one of the landmark works in midcentury Afrocentric criticism, Mphahlele helped to usher in a new era for African literary criticism, pushing it away from negritude's politicized judgments and toward a more self-consciously academic format. This article examines how Mphahlele constructed this newly academicized form of literary criticism by borrowing liberally from aesthetic discourses normally associated with US and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs. In particular, it describes how Mphahlele adapted a modernist language of 'character,' taken from the writings of Lionel Trilling and E. M. Forster, only to apply this language to its ideological opposite: a social theory rooted in Marxian notions of class division. By doing so, Mpahahlele managed to find a way to generalize his own relationship to his South African audience-remote, uncertain, and riddled by class divisions--into a model for how literary criticism could represent an increasingly fragmented social sphere., It is a well-known fact that African decolonization took place during the same years as the global Cold War. But when we look back on these years, it is hard [...]

When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. Christopher Woodward, In Ruins: A Journey Through History, Art and Literature Ayoung Mozambican woman sits in a hospital examination room speaking [...]

Developed in the context of a bipolar world order, Julius Nyerere's political philosophy of Ujamaa expressed an African socialist vision predicated on the principles of non-alignment, anti-imperialism, and the aspiration to Pan-Africanism. Government promotion of formal Swahili poetry as a medium for the dissemination of Ujamaa prompted students and faculty at the University of Dar es Salaam to begin experimenting with free verse in the early 1970s. In response, a fierce public debate would emerge about appropriate forms for poetry written in Swahili. Ostensibly an aesthetic disagreement, the debate would reflect contradictions in Ujamaa philosophy and tensions inherent to Cold War political culture. Looking beyond prevailing descriptions of the debate as a dispute between traditionalism and modernism, this article traces the emergence of poetic voices responding to and questioning both the form and content of dominant political discourse and beginning to imagine new social and political formations outside the framework of Ujamaa., On June 6, 1968, a year and a half after the release of the Arusha Declaration, which ushered in Julius Nyerere's form of African socialism--known in Swahili as Ujamaa, or [...]

'One of the inherited traditions of Western education in the last four hundred years is that of putting things in compartments, resulting in an incapacity to see the links that [...]

The discovery of a tenth-century AD high-status burial at Prague Castle in 1928 led to multiple identifications in the context of two world wars and the Cold War. Recognised variously as both a Viking and Slavonic warrior according to Nazi and Soviet ideologies, interpretation of the interred individual and associated material culture were also entangled with the story of the burial's excavator, the remains and commemorative monuments of two Czech Unknown Soldiers and the creation of the Czechoslovak state. This epic narrative reflects the circumstances of Czechoslovakia and Central Europe across the twentieth century. Keywords: Prague, Slavic, Viking, Nazi, ideology, identity, Introduction Sometimes archaeology can be confusing, and, on closer inspection, can prove even more complicated. The conflicting interpretations of a putative Viking/warrior grave discovered at Prague Castle in 1928 well [...]

The training and advising of foreign air forces is not a new mission for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) (*), but it probably deserves greater attention than it has received. [...]

This article analyzes the proceedings of the First Congress of Black Writers within the context of the global Cold War, teasing out the contradictory political agendas that subtended this foundational event for black writing and African literature. It treats the First Congress as a spectacle designed by Alioune Diop, founder and editor of Presence Africaine, in order to create before the Cold War world an image of a unified black collectivity: a (geo) political impact that Diop envisioned for his conference ostensibly limited to discussions of culture. The article explores the rhetorical strategies by which Diop maintained an image of consensus among a caucus of delegates who were in fact deeply divided politically. It discusses Diop's invocation of the 1955 Bandung Conference, his deliberately broad definition of culture, and his deployment of liberal human rights discourse as consensual strategies that cohere to project an image of a transatlantic black civic culture already independent and sovereign in all but name., The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists took place in Paris from the 19th through the 22nd of September of 1956 at the Sorbonne, the same site where, [...]

IN 1954 SECURITY OFFICIALS FOR the US Civil Service Commission questioned Ruth Windham, a former employee of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), who had recently resigned due to an undisclosed [...]

Americanists working in East Central European countries, such as Croatia, often find themselves caught in an older geopolitical imaginary that envisions this geography as the continental fault line of the [...]

Out of the smoldering ashes of socialist Eastern Europe ... On November 9, 2014, eight thousand illuminated balloons took to the Berlin night sky. The city was celebrating the twenty-fifth [...]

This article considers the opportunities that emerged during the 1950s for American interests in Africa through consideration of a unique story, that of Congresswoman Frances Bolton and her trip to Africa in 1955. Frances Payne Bolton (b. 1885, d. 1977) heiress to the Payne family Standard Oil fortune, and one of United States' longest serving Congresswomen, made a significant though largely unrecognized contribution to shaping America's cold war perspectives and policies on Africa. Following the United States' development with Congolese uranium of the atomic bomb in the early 1940s, Americans intensified their commercial and political interests in Africa. They did so in the context of rising African nationalism and continent-wide struggles for liberation from European colonial powers. American leaders then found themselves in a deeply ambiguous position vis-a-vis Africa and Africans, caught as they were between paying deference to European paternalist interests in the continent and largely unfulfilled aspirations to deal with the looming civil rights movement on the domestic front. The principal focus of the article is a consideration of Bolton's remarkable and unprecedented three month tour of the African continent in 1955. During a critical period in African states' struggles to gain independence, Bolton was deeply engaged in cultivating America's growing interest in economic and political opportunities in postcolonial Africa As chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, her 'Special Study Mission to Africa, South and East of the Sahara' included stops in twenty-four countries and, meetings with African political leaders as well as colonial officials. Upon her return over the next year or so, Bolton penned a report of mission for Congress, and made a fascinating film chronicle - Africa: Giant with a Future, 1955. The article seeks to highlight significant facets of Bolton's trip, and its influence on how Americans in and outside of government perceived Africa., Introduction Frances Payne Bolton (b. 1885, d. 1977), heiress to the Payne family Standard Oil fortune and one of the United States' longest serving congresswomen (1939-1960), made a significant, though [...]

This article examines the life story of Muhammad Kkansu (Chong Suil), a once distinguished foreign professor of Arabic history and culture at Dankook University and a prolific scholar on the Silk Road, who was indicted in 1996 on charges of espionage and use of a false identity as an Arab of Filipino-Lebanese descent to enter South Korea. It considers the complex circumstances that shaped his life choices as a diasporic Korean living in China and South Korea's blind and willful ignorance of the North, which ironically enabled a diasporic Korean from China, to pass as an "Arab" right under its nose. In contrast to accounts of North Korean spies, it humanizes the experiences of Kkansu, illustrating how a diasporic Korean learned to dissimulate by adopting an ambiguous identity and navigate the social and political realities of national division and anxieties caused by global and internecine hostilities during the Cold War. His imprisonment did not foreclose the possibility of becoming an academic again; in fact, he reemerged after a presidential pardon in 2003 and authored more than a dozen important monographs and encyclopedias on the Silk Road. While there are many contradictions and gaps about his personal life, Kkansu's life story challenges the master narratives of national culture, homogeneity, belongingness, and identity. Keywords: Anti-communism, cold-war, diaspora, dissimulation, identity, nationalism, postwar North and South Korea, race, "Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one's native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are [...]

Fueled by the Iranian oil revenues, Tehran, under both the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979) and since 1979 the Islamic Republic of Iran, has intervened in the affairs of sub-Saharan Africa. The Shah's policy was motivated by a 'defensive anti-communist/anti-radicalism containment posture. Conversely, the Islamic Republic of Iran adopted an 'offensive or disruptive policy to alter a political status quo deemed hostile to the survival of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To understand Iran's scramble to secure its interests in sub-Saharan Africa, four periods will be examined in this analysis: i) the Shah and containment, 1953-1979; ii) the Islamic Republic of Iran's diplomatic offensive,' 1980-2001; Hi) the Islamic Republic of Iran seeking to escape international isolation, 2002-2010; and iv) the Saudi-Iranian Cold War, 2011-2018., Introduction Tehran's attempt to extend Iranian influence in sub-Saharan Africa dates back more than forty years. (1) Iran's capacity to influence events in the region to pursue Iranian political, strategic, [...]

This commentary proposes to connect Russia's present activities in Africa to the history of Soviet involvement on the continent during the Cold War. While post-Soviet Russia pursues very difficult foreign policy objectives in its relations with African states, in doing so it often draws on the relationships, partnerships, and formal and informal networks forged during the Cold War. An enduring continuity can be observed in Russia's ongoing efforts to present itself as an alternative to the West. In the past, the Soviet model of development tended to emphasize socialist modernization. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has abandoned its promotion of socialism to pursue crude economic interests via its business elite, based on values that appear to be in stark contrast to the conventions of Western liberalism., Introduction (1) In the summer of 2018, three Russian journalists were ambushed and murdered in the Central African Republic (CAR). The three had traveled to the CAR in pursuit of [...]

This article reads Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow as both a dictator-novel and a critical use of the genre to analyze the larger-scale global political transformations (so-called 'transitions') that followed the end of the Cold War. Beyond its critique of dictators and dictatorship on the African continent, Wizard of the Crow turns attention to nascent networks of opposition to neoliberalism and neoliberal globalization. This constitutes the emergent Global South consciousness of Ngugi's dictator-novel, which requires a reexamination of the contours of the genre in and for the twenty-first century., INTRODUCTION At the start of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Murogi wa Kagogo (2004-07) [Wizard of the Crow] (2006) the government of the fictional country of Aburiria unveils plans to build a [...]

Master trilogist, essayist, and Somalia's most staunch critic, Nuruddin Farah has the honor of having kept Somalia alive in the global imagination. His output of thirteen novels engage various dimensions of Somali history and politics. In this interview, Farah is asked about the ideological and personal influence of the Cold War on Somalia. He reveals that the Cold War indeed impacted not only the journeys he embarked on, but that several characters in his novels attempt to resist and cope with the political framework generated by the long arm of the superpowers in Somalia., INTRODUCTION In a writing career that will span fifty years in 2020, Nuruddin Farah has had an impressive output of thirteen novels that include three full trilogies as well as [...]

In 1969, at the height of the Cold War, the Puerto Rican singer Lucecita Benitez won the First Festival of Latin Song in the World with her performance of "Genesis": [...]

THIS YEAR MARKS THE CENTENARY OF the Russian Revolution of October 1917. Toppling the provisional government that had overthrown the Romanov dynasty in February, Lenin and the Bolsheviks did more [...]

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Declassified documents from Russian archives and official Vietnamese and Albanian materials and memoirs permit consideration of the under-studied topic of relations between the Soviet Union [...]