Cold War Reckonings

Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization

Jini Kim Watson

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823294848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association
Honorable Mention, René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers' conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos' rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto's Indonesia. Watson's book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.
Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

PART I

Authorities of Alignment, 1955–1988

1

Writing Freedom from Bandung to PEN International

Relatively speaking, all of us gathered here today are neighbours. Almost all of us have ties of common experience—the experience of colonialism. Many of us have a common religion, common cultural roots, and the so-called “underdeveloped” nations have more or less similar economic problems … and yet, we know so little about each other.

— PRESIDENT SUKARNO, SPEECH AT THE OPENING OF THE ASIAN-AFRICAN CONFERENCE IN BANDUNG, APRIL 1955

“We have to recognize our being part of Asia, our being Asian.”

“But Asia means backwardness” …

“And even if we had a revolution and won in the end, what would we do? We would still have to produce and sell—sell to, yes, America.”

— F. SIONIL JOSÉ, MASS, 1978

In the years spanning 1962 to 1981, five Asian Writers’ Conferences were held in different Asian cities under the auspices of PEN, the international literary organization founded in London in the 1920s. Following the inaugural meeting in Manila in 1962, the next four conferences would be held in Bangkok in 1964, Taipei in 1970, Taipei again in 1976, and finally, Manila in 1981.¹ These meetings brought together writers, critics, university academics, and the occasional politician or diplomat to exchange ideas and debate trends in literature and culture in an ostensibly pan-Asian forum. Attended by delegates from a number of countries in the region, including the Philippines, the Republic of China (that is, Kuomintang-governed Taiwan), South Korea, South Vietnam, Hong Kong, Japan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia, these conferences brought together writers from societies that had recently emerged from colonial rule and now largely found themselves—with some important exceptions such as India—in the U.S.-aligned camp of the Cold War. At the 1964 conference held at Thammasat University, Bangkok, the formal luncheons, plenaries, and a royal reception with the king and queen of Thailand at the Grand Palace were followed by a panel titled “The Contribution of Asian Writers to World Understanding.” In his paper, Vu Hoang-Chong, delegate from Vietnam, opined that,

culture constitutes the most lasting and efficient means of arriving at mutual understanding between peoples of different languages and civilizations. The emphasis has been the more significant after the Second World War when colonialism, the once-dominant factor in East-West relationships, has been virtually eliminated in free Asia. In our “crisis of growth,” we, the newly independent countries, are but too willing to make our voices heard throughout the world, and the heritage of culture bequeathed us over the centuries is but too willing to display itself on its way to gaining more friends and better understanding.²

Vu’s quote underscores some significant aspects of these early PEN-sponsored conferences. Most obvious is the optimism that infuses this literary gathering, where colonialism has been “virtually eliminated in free Asia” and gives rise to “the newly independent countries.” With colonialism gone, a central motivation of the conference is to promote “mutual understanding” and friendship between peoples who had been arbitrarily kept apart by colonial borders, giving voice to their rich but hitherto obscured “heritage of culture.” Yet these are countries also grappling with the “crisis of growth” that pertains to newly won independent nationhood:³ the conditions giving rise to this inter-Asian conference are therefore not simply those of emancipation and the opportunity to gain “more friends.” The key expression, I wager, is “free Asia,” which demands to be read for its double meaning: both “free” from colonialism, and “free” as in the U.S.-led and non-communist, capitalist “free world.”⁴ This chapter argues that the PEN regional meetings are a unique lens through which to see how tensions between newly won postcolonial freedoms and Cold War pressures of alignment are worked through on the terrain of literary exchange and cultural cooperation. Moreover, the conferences themselves may be read as a distinct genre of Cold War decolonization, in which debates over freedom, self-determination, and futurity are especially intense.

We can immediately note that the form of the writers’ conference incites multiple modes of reading. On one level, we can read these meetings for the content of their preambles, speeches, papers, keynotes, and resolutions; some conference proceedings even include detailed transcripts of discussions that followed formal papers, providing access to their ephemeral dimensions. The proceedings also gesture toward the extra-literary aspects of the meetings: the welcome speeches, luncheons, sight-seeing excursions, receptions with local dignitaries, and even—in the case of the 1981 Manila Conference—the full budget and financing details (24,000 pesos were provided by the Ford Foundation, 3,027 pesos of which went toward “Beer and Snacks”).⁵ The conferences, therefore, are more than neutral intellectual exchanges. They are performances of inter-Asian hospitality; opportunities for cultural diplomacy and Cold War political propaganda; and material events that require substantial funding, labor, and international coordination. They exemplify one definition of Cold War literature provided by Andrew Hammond: “an intertwined, multi-generic set of socio-political concerns and textual practices produced by, and productive of, the historical conditions of the times.”⁶ I read these debates and performances as part of a much larger literary history of the global Cold War.⁷

As such, this chapter, unlike the ones that follow, does not focus on close readings of individual literary works. It serves as a condensed cultural history of a particular institution, PEN Asian Writers’ Conferences, whose participants self-consciously struggled to theorize a decolonized Asian sphere of letters—a realm of cultural exchange beyond the fetters of colonial subordination—but within rapidly hardening Cold War boundaries. If, as Joseph Keith has observed in U.S. Cold War discourses, “the principle of freedom became increasingly mobilized to define the struggle against the Soviet Union,”⁸ what kinds of “principles of freedom” were invoked and theorized in the domain of postcolonial, non-communist Asia? How does the notion of writing as a privileged object of freedom—as stressed by PEN’s founding values and charter—rub up against ideas of culture’s larger role in national and regional anti-imperialist liberation? How are fears of communist takeover negotiated alongside the realities of new U.S.-backed authoritarian regimes led by such figures as Marcos, Chiang Kai-shek, or Suharto? And finally, how might reading the conferences as a simultaneously postcolonial and Cold War genre enable us to think in new ways about the intersections of literary freedom, cultural imperialism, and Cold War authorities? The “principle of freedom” at stake, as we will see, is threatened by at least two major contaminants: on the one hand, communist takeover, and on the other, the betrayal by authoritarian comprador regimes. In asking these questions, this chapter aims to present a broader landscape of the literary-political networks, debates, and tropes through and against which the book’s later case studies and textual examples can be read.

In what follows I first give a brief history of the PEN organization, paying special attention to its Cold War expansion in Asia. I then move to an analysis of how different permutations of freedom—literary, individual, national, anti-communist, and anti-imperial—are deployed and contested in this Cold War matrix. In particular, I’m interested in what happens to the revolutionary energies of anti-colonialist nationalism when the very notion of revolution appears to be ceded, under Cold War bipolarity, to the socialist-aligned block. In the final section of the chapter, I address questions of translation and the problem of neocolonial authoritarian rule as it manifests in PEN resolutions supporting imprisoned writers around the world. The Asian Writers’ Conferences, in sum, raise the fraught question of freedom after independence,⁹ as read through a little-studied genre of Cold War decolonization.

PEN at the Cold War

Arguably, one of the most dominant conceptions of international cultural exchange and freedom of expression has been advanced by the organization PEN International. Deriving its name from the acronym for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, PEN was founded in Britain in 1921 by Catharine Amy Dawson-Scott and John Galsworthy and is now a sprawling international federation that boasts 145 centers in over 100 countries.¹⁰ PEN’s official stance has always been a liberal one of freedom of expression and political neutrality. Its charter states that literature and art “should be left untouched by national or political passion” and remain the “patrimony of humanity at large”; it exhorts its members to “pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong.”¹¹ Following its founding, the organization soon established overseas chapters in Iraq, Egypt, and Argentina in the 1920s and in India (where Rabindranath Tagore was its first president), China, and Japan by the 1930s.¹² Originally conceived as a literary social club in London whose liberal founders promoted “international friendliness for writers,” the organization’s vocation was profoundly shaped during the interwar period and the rise of fascism.¹³ Following the book burnings in Nazi Germany and the expulsion of German Jewish writers, PEN—then under the leadership of H. G. Wells—came to see “literary texts, now tied to the fate of authors, [as what] required international protection from state suppression.”¹⁴ In the 1930s it defended the writers Federico García Lorca (unsuccessfully) and Hungary’s Arthur Koestler (successfully) against Spain’s Franco. In sum, “Humanitarian [or human rights] ideas of speech beyond national boundaries, gender equality, international cooperation and education”¹⁵ were predicated on the idea of literary expression as a special moral and aesthetic object that above all demanded protection.

By 1949 it had consultative status at the UN and by the mid-1960s, as Frances Stoner Saunders relates, “International PEN had seventy-six centres in fifty-five countries, and was officially recognized by UNESCO as the organization most representative of all the writers of the world.”¹⁶ The global spread of PEN Centers during the Cold War, in turn, made it a target of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom. Established in 1950, the CCF was a front organization whose mission was to “nudge the intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of ‘the American way.’”¹⁷ As Peter McDonald writes of the CCF, “It set out to create an elite worldwide liberal alliance that would promote Western ideas of culture and act as a bulwark against communism and the broader threat of totalitarianism.”¹⁸ Saunders provides a pithy history of the extensive maneuvering within the American PEN Center, concluding that by the mid-1960s “the CIA had achieved excellent penetration of PEN.”¹⁹ Indeed, Comment: The Filipino Journal of Ideas, Discussion and the Arts, which published the proceedings of the 1962 conference in Manila, was published jointly by PEN and the CCF. Thus, although PEN’s original mission may have been shaped by European debates on fascism, art, and humanism, it found a particular calling in the postwar geopolitical conjuncture, where Third World decolonization was subtended by the Cold War. Paralleling the trajectory of postwar human rights generally, PEN’s prominent cases tended to highlight dissident writers of the Soviet bloc (the Soviets would not affiliate with PEN until 1988) and Third World authoritarian states. Doing work in the literary realm analogous to that of Amnesty International and other human rights NGOs, it is today the preeminent international NGO promoting literary freedom of expression and continues to actively oppose the state persecution of writers.

In many ways the work of PEN and the CCF dovetailed to promote similar liberal notions of culture as “free” from political contamination, privileging the individual autonomy of the writer/creator. Yet studies such as McDonald’s have explored the conflicted role that PEN centers and conferences played in postcolonial national contexts such as in South Africa and India.²⁰ At one level, PEN’s emphasis on freedom of speech, “unhampered transmission of thought,” literature as “common currency between nations,” and the dispelling of “race, class and national hatreds”²¹ fits well with the aspirations of writers and intellectuals emerging from the restrictions of colonial borders and institutions. On the other, PEN’s commitments were profoundly complicated by decolonizing contexts, where vastly different conditions would challenge its anti-political notions of freedom of expression. Furthermore, even if Saunders reminds us that the PEN executive was well “penetrated” by the CIA’s cultural front—ensuring that “free sp...