This book bridges the gap between the simultaneously unfolding histories of postcoloniality and the forty-five-year ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Not only did the superpowers rely upon the decolonizing world to further imperial agendas, but the postcolony itself was shaped, epistemologically and materially, by Cold War discourses, policies, narratives, and paradigms. Ruptures and appropriated trajectories in the postcolonial world can be attributed to the ways in which the Cold War became the afterlife of European colonialism. Through a speculative assemblage, this book connects the dots, deftly taking the reader from Frantz Fanon to Aaron Swartz, and from assassinations in the Third World to American multiculturalism. Whether the Cold War subverted the dream of decolonization or created a compromised cultural sphere, this book makes those rich palimpsests visible.

Bhakti Shringarpure is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut and editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine.

Introduction: Cold War Assemblages

1. Epistemic Bifurcations: Fanon, Gandhi, and the Failure of Theory

2. Dying Before Their Time: Lumumba, Cabral, and Sankara

3. Cold War Disciplinarity: Postcolonial Studies and Its Discontents

4. The Cold War Paradigm: A Trajectory of Literary Canons

Epilogue: The Postcolony Is a Cold War Ruin