Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War(Translation/Transnation)

Combining literary, cultural, and political history, and based on extensive archival research, including previously unseen FBI and CIA documents, Archives of Authority argues that cultural politics--specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts--played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II. Andrew Rubin argues that this transfer reshaped the postwar literary space and he shows how, during this time, new and efficient modes of cultural transmission, replication, and travel--such as radio and rapidly and globally circulated journals--completely transformed the position occupied by the postwar writer and the role of world literature. Rubin demonstrates that the nearly instantaneous translation of texts by George Orwell, Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, Richard Wright, Mary McCarthy, and Albert Camus, among others, into interrelated journals that were sponsored by organizations such as the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom and circulated around the world effectively reshaped writers, critics, and intellectuals into easily recognizable, transnational figures.Their work formed a new canon of world literature that was celebrated in the United States and supposedly represented the best of contemporary thought, while less politically attractive authors were ignored or even demonized. This championing and demonizing of writers occurred in the name of anti-Communism--the new, transatlantic "civilizing mission" through which postwar cultural and literary authority emerged.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Archives of Authority 11 The Archive and the Juridical 12 States of Exception 13 States of Criticism 17 Chapter 2 Orwell and the Globalization of Literature 24 Communist Crypts 28 The "Communist Menace" 34 The Translation of Authority 37 Translation and Modes of Domination 44 Chapter 3 Transnational Literary Spaces at War 47 The Sun Never Sets on the British Writer 47 The Time of Translation 58 London Calling 60 Literary Diplomacy 65 Chapter 4 Archives of Critical Theory 74 Accommodations 80 Chapter 5 Humanism, Territory, and Techniques of Trouble 87 Terrain of Philology 90 Notes 109 Bibliography 141 Index 167

About the Author :
Andrew N. Rubin is assistant professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the coeditor of Adorno: A Critical Reader and The Edward Said Reader.

Review :
Winner of a 2013 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Nonfiction, Lannan Foundation "Archives of Authority is a valuable and thought-provoking work... Archives of Authority will be of great interest to literature scholars, postcolonial theorists, and Cold War specialists across the disciplines. Its critique of cultural instrumentality and appeal for a Said-inflected humanism speak to the stakes of intellectual inquiry, reminding us that in exposing the process by which an unjust world is made, we arm ourselves with the tools to build a different one."--Kirsten Weld, Journal of Archival Organization