Book Diplomacy in the Cultural Cold War

Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Series: 

Broadly speaking, book diplomacy covers the use of books to achieve certain objectives related to the foreign policy interests of a given country, usually involving state-private partnerships of varying degrees. In this volume, scholars from different disciplines examine in detail how books functioned as tools of “soft power” and cultural diplomacy during the cultural Cold War. This study also introduces a 10-point typology to examine the many forms and practices of Cold War book diplomacy and the diversity of objectives and outcomes that they involved. Looking beyond the Cold War, this volume stresses the continuing importance of books as a distinct form of material culture used to convey information around the world.

Contributors are: Tahoor Ali, Hanna Blum, Deborah Cohn, Cécile Cottenet, Alexander Erokhin, Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Musa Igrek, Julia Lin Thompson, Rósa Magnúsdóttir, Christos Mais, Hafiz Abid Masood, Mila Milani, Birgitte Beck Pristed, Giles Scott-Smith, Ilaria Sicari, and Steven W. Witt.

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Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam, Ph.D. (2012), Rovira i Virgili University, is an independent scholar. His research covers book diplomacy, the intellectual history of modern Iran, and translation studies.

Giles Scott-Smith is Professor of Transnational Relations and New Diplomatic History at Leiden University. His research covers a broad range of fields around public/cultural diplomacy and citizen diplomats.
"While the last twenty years have seen a number of important studies of how books were used as tools of cultural diplomacy in the Cold War, this volume brings a heretofore unprecedented geographical breadth to the scholarship on this topic. Ranging from Pakistan to Italy, from Greece to China, the nations examined by the scholars in this collection go far beyond the US, UK, USSR, and France, which have been the subjects of most of the research to date. The contributions are of a uniformly high level of scholarship and the organization makes good sense. The introductory literature review of the existing English language scholarship on the topic is the best overview of the field I’m aware of.” – Greg Barnhisel, Duquesne University
Acknowledgments
List of Figures and Tables
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors

Book Diplomacy in the Cultural Cold War and beyond: An Introduction
 Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam and Giles Scott-Smith

Part 1 Book Diplomacy and Power in the International System



1 Internationalism Meets the Cold War: Interwar Book Networks as Challenge to State Power
 Steven W. Witt

2 Professor Pearson Goes to Washington: Norman Holmes Pearson, U.S. Literature, and the Senior Seminar in Foreign Policy
 Deborah Cohn

3 Literature as a Weapon? Soviet Book Diplomacy, Soviet, and U.S. Literature in the Cultural Cold War between 1945 and 1964
 Alexander Erokhin

Part 2 Publishers and Literary Agents



4 Bringing Books to France: Literary Agents in Cold War Transnational Networks (1940s–1960s)
 Cécile Cottenet

5 The Literary Agent as Book Diplomat: Erich Linder’s Agency in the Transnational Socialization of Tamizdat
 Ilaria Sicari

6 Serving Two Masters: Cold War Book Diplomacy in 1960s Greece
 Christos Mais

Part 3 Translation and the Role of Translators



7 Translation as a Tool of Soft Power: A Study of Franklin Book Programs’ Urdu Books in Pakistan
 Hafiz Abid Masood and Tahoor Ali

8 Translating for Children during the Cold War: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Franco’s Spain and Chairman Mao’s China
 Julia Lin Thompson

9 Publishing Translations from Russian in Italy during the Cold War
 Mila Milani

Part 4 Censorship, Propaganda and Informal Diplomacy



10 Fighting with Words: The Role of Discourses in the Literary Field during the Cultural Cold War in the GDR
 Hanna Blum

11 Bellman Books: Selling a Favorable Image Abroad
 Musa Igrek

12 Scientific American in the USSR: The Semi-Diplomatic Spaces of Soviet-American Publishing Relations, 1980–1984
 Rósa Magnúsdóttir and Birgitte Beck Pristed

Index
This book would be of interest to scholars of the history of the book, print studies, the Cold War, the cultural Cold War, area studies, international relations, diplomacy, public diplomacy, American studies, and Russian and Slavic studies.
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