‘The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonisation and Global Literature’ by Peter J Kalliney reviewed by Daniel Neofetou

Art which is not explicitly and overtly propagandistic is difficult to pin down to a determinate position on the political spectrum. There are exceptions, such as the mainstream Hollywood film, which has always served to essentialise the norms of US society and thus provide, in the words of Fredric Jameson, ‘the apprenticeship to a specific culture, to an everyday life as a cultural practice’ (Jameson 2009: 443). However, for the most part, a substantial amount of legwork is required to make the case that a painting or a poem or a piece of music has some inherent political bent.

Given this, it is unsurprising that scholars have alighted upon the state patronage of artists, especially those working during the Cold War, in order to buttress such arguments. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example of this is the indictment of Abstract Expressionist painting by left-wing art historians since the 1970s. For these thinkers, it is crucial that the style was promoted in international exhibitions organised by bodies at the heart of the US establishment, particularly the United States Information Agency and the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art. They argue that this renders the ‘freedom’ with which Jackson Pollock flicked and poured paint onto his canvases emblematic of the supposed ‘freedom’ of liberal capitalism.

This is a debate in which I have been a partisan. In Rereading Abstract Expressionism, Clement Greenberg and the Cold War (2021), I argue against these art historians on the basis that the art cannot be reduced to the political ends to which it was deployed. In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter J. Kalliney makes his own case against easy equations between politics and art, focusing instead on the literary output of the decolonizing world.

This review is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Material appearing in The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books may be reproduced for non-commercial use provided proper credit is given to the author and The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. See foot of reviews for licence details.