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 âsoft powerâ 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.
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 Iâm aware of.â â 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
âEsmaeil 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
âSteven W. Witt
2 Professor Pearson Goes to Washington: Norman Holmes Pearson, U.S. Literature, and the Senior Seminar in Foreign Policy
âDeborah Cohn
3 Literature as a Weapon? Soviet Book Diplomacy, Soviet, and U.S. Literature in the Cultural Cold War between 1945 and 1964
âAlexander Erokhin
5 The Literary Agent as Book Diplomat: Erich Linderâs Agency in the Transnational Socialization of Tamizdat
âIlaria Sicari
6 Serving Two Masters: Cold War Book Diplomacy in 1960s Greece
âChristos Mais
Part 3 Translation and the Role of Translators
7 Translation as a Tool of Soft Power: A Study of Franklin Book Programsâ Urdu Books in Pakistan
âHafiz Abid Masood and Tahoor Ali
8 Translating for Children during the Cold War: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Francoâs Spain and Chairman Maoâs China
âJulia Lin Thompson
9 Publishing Translations from Russian in Italy during the Cold War
âMila 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
âHanna Blum
11 Bellman Books: Selling a Favorable Image Abroad
âMusa Igrek
12 Scientific American in the USSR: The Semi-Diplomatic Spaces of Soviet-American Publishing Relations, 1980â1984
âRósa 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.