This chapter historicizes the canonization of mid twentieth-century African American literature by breaking it down into three distinct phases over thirty-five years (1935 to 1970) and exploring it through the lens of five prominent writers: Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. While these writers brought unprecedented acclaim to the field, opening doors for future Black writers, analyzing their artistic and political choices reveals that Black literary success has more to do with how well their literary politics align with the white literary mainstream – not with literary talent and skill. Unfortunately, the current African American literary canon of the mid-twentieth century still aligns with conservative Cold War literary politics, excluding a score of talented Black writers with more progressive politics. By attending to the literary shifts of the 1940s, it becomes clear how that canonization took place and why it must be undone and reconfigured.

Why has the rule of law had global rhetorical appeal in the last few decades, and will it last? I argue that during the Cold War there was no space for this to happen, but with the collapse of European communism it appeared to many that a western, liberal democratic package with the rule of law at its core was and would continue to be triumphant. As a result, rule of law promotion swept the world. It has not vanished today, but its prospects have dimmed. I attribute that to twentieth-century geopolitical changes, on the one hand, with rivals to liberal democracies springing up, as well as to the transformation within liberal democracies, on the other. Both new democracies and older, apparently well-established ones have spawned increasingly powerful tendencies hostile to the rule of law. These tendencies are unlikely to disappear any time soon. The fate of the rule of law will depend in large part on whether they succeed.

This chapter traces William Burroughs’ encounters with yagé (ayahuasca) as a critical inflection point in his literary development and spiritual imagination. Marcus Boon explores the 1950s Amazonian journeys that led to The Yage Letters (1963) and its expanded edition The Yage Letters Redux (2006), arguing that Burroughs’ experiences with the vine laid the groundwork for his later explorations of language as virus, the cut-up method, and his cosmological vision of control and resistance. Intertwining Cold War paranoia, psychedelic experimentation, and postcolonial critique, Boon situates yagé not as an outlier in Burroughs’ oeuvre but as a key to understanding its epistemological and aesthetic radicalism. The chapter maps Burroughs’ legacy in the broader literary and anthropological discourse on ayahuasca, showing how his early visions resonate with – and complicate – contemporary movements for psychedelic healing, spiritual tourism, and decolonial thought. Burroughs, Boon suggests, helped carry yagé out of the jungle and into a globalized discourse of language, healing, and power.

This essay asks if the war and society approach needs reinforcement to fully capture the history of the Cold War. Both within the United States and around the globe, the Cold War was many wars: a theoretical war of nuclear threats; an armed and active conflict; a covert war; and a domestic crusade. Is a war and society framework adequate to describe a conflict of such dimensions? This essay probes the interpretive possibilities of adding a war as society frame to buttress the war and society approach. Focusing on the American Cold War’s geographies (where was it fought?), its warriors (who fought it?), and its timelines (when did it begin, and did it actually end?), I explore the myriad ways in which Americans experienced a multi-front and seemingly permanent war. Policymakers wanted everyone to be drafted into some kind of service for the Cold War, but Americans ultimately rejected that call. They could support a national security state to conduct the war, but they ultimately wanted a healthy distance from the battles. They sought coexistence–war and society–not fusion–war as society.

Chapter 1 reconstitutes Cuban and US history from 1898 to the 1970s, with sexuality at the center, focusing on the New Deal, Cold War, Red/Lavender Scare, first two Cuban Republics, and the Cuban Revolution. It tells the story of how the Cuban homosexual acquired a specific meaning associated with the prerevolutionary experience of US imperialism.

This is the book’s ‘exit’ chapter. It examines how, following the success of the Truth Commissions in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador, Truth Commissions were given an ‘origins story’. The argument is that this occurred in the 1990s through the retrospective redescription of Uganda’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry as the ‘inaugural’ Truth Commission. The 1974 Commission of Inquiry was established as part of Idi Amin’s response to international pressure from human rights groups (particularly the International Commission of Jurists). The chapter discusses how the redescription of the Commission of Inquiry began at the end of the Cold War, with the publication of an article by Richard Carver in 1990, and in 1994 with an article by Priscilla Hayner. The redescription of the Commission of Inquiry as a ‘Truth Commission’ turns on the extent to which it is considered an institution that advanced human rights, which shows how the authority of Truth Commissions has depended on their connection to international law from the ‘beginning’.

This essay critically examines the temporality of American war and surveys the persistence of armed conflict in U.S. history. “Wartimes” structure U.S. historical memory. Wartime is thought to be episodic, followed by peacetime. Instead, military conflict is endemic in North American history. Armed conflict was a means of European settlement in the Colonial Era. It was a method of westward expansion. War enabled national survival in the Civil War. It was a means of solidifying American power and influence in the world over time. The geography of war ultimately altered the character of the civilian experience. The Civil War deeply affected civilians, but this direct experience was lost when U.S. wars in the twentieth century were distant from North America. Major twentieth-century wars nevertheless affected the home front. As technology changed warfare, however, armed conflict became an abstraction for the U.S. polity. This undermined political restraint, enabling ongoing small wars, since the nation could go to war without U.S. civilians feeling that they were in a wartime.

The secularisation of British society was at odds with global developments. The resurgence of religion internationally affected the RAChD and the British Army in various ways. Despite its problems, such was the prestige of the RAChD that it helped mould Bundeswehr chaplaincy in the Cold War; chaplaincies in newly independent African nations; and chaplaincies in former Warsaw Pact countries. In the War on Terror, its mentorship was extended to the Afghan National Army. Meanwhile, the religious aspects of many contemporary conflicts involved chaplains in widespread ‘religious engagement’ with local populations. Significantly, religion proved to be a key dimension of the Cold War, of the ‘Emergencies’ in Kenya and Cyprus, of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, of the Falklands and Gulf Wars, of the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and of the War on Terror. While British soldiers could and did recoil from their often-brutal ‘religious’ character, a strong anti-religious animus (which was widely stoked in ‘New Atheist’ circles) was probably forestalled by the support they received from their chaplains and by soldiers’ recourse to religion for personal protection and consolation.

The conclusion to the book considers the significant contribution of Kenya’s worldmakers to the anti-colonial cause and the place Tom Mboya rightly holds within the pantheon of Kenya’s great nationalist leaders. He is held dearly in the memory of Kenyans as the personification of the potential for a successful Kenyan multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan democracy. His legacy has been invoked regularly at moments of political crisis in the decades following his death. But the conclusion argues Mboya’s legacy was more complicated and interesting than this posthumous memorialisation allows. He shows instead how the practices of worldmaking ran alongside those of gatekeeping. Mboya and others like him had little choice but to adopt this dual strategy of global engagement because of the context of the Cold War. Drawing on Mary Dudziak’s work on the civil rights movement in the United States, the conclusion considers in detail the influence of the Cold War on the politics of decolonising Kenya. Although the Cold War helped enable decolonisation, it also acted to limit the possible trajectories states such as Kenya could adopt once independent.

Further developing the theme of competition between Mboya, Odinga and their respective international networks and domestic power bases, this chapter explores the impact of the cultural Cold War on the politics of newly independent Kenya. Although mainly focused on the organisations and activities supported by Mboya’s network, most notably the East African Institute of Social and Cultural Affairs, it also discusses rival efforts by Odinga to use the press, publishing and training to strengthen his own position within Kenya’s fractious post-colonial politics. The chapter details the extent to which Mboya’s activities received funding through CIA front organisations. The chapter is particularly concerned with the ways in which Kenya’s debates about development, which were the source of the disputes between the KANU government and Odinga’s new opposition party, were shaped by the publications and organisations aligned to Mboya. As public awareness of the origins of Mboya’s funding grew from 1967, the chapter concludes with an examination of the increasing criticism made of him from both the left and right in Kenyan politics and the enforced closure of the EAISCA.

America’s Depression-era world’s fairs promised an optimistic future. Chicago, New York, and San Francisco fairs heralded technological and industrial innovation as keys to future prosperity. American imperialism was an unwavering tool of progress, and African Americans and women remained “invisible” except in marginalized entertainment zones. After World War II, another world’s fair did not occur until 1958. The Brussels Universal Exposition’s US pavilion met Cold War anxiety with cheerful consumerism. Following Brussels’ success, the United States resumed hosting world’s fairs. At Seattle’s Century-21 Exposition (1962), outer space was the new frontier and America the world leader of scientific and technological advancement. The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair replayed these themes, adding a bright future steeped in consumerism. Subsequent fairs, however, failed financially and convinced many that the form was obsolete.

The introduction takes the reader straight to the heart of Cold War football, beginning in 1979 with the defection to the West of East German superstar Lutz Eigendorf, killed four years later in a car accident that may, or may not, have been caused by communist secret police ‘Stasi’ agents who tracked his every move. It then discusses another, altogether friendlier East–West encounter in the same year, between East German side FC Magdeburg and AFC Wrexham. These twin stories provide the framework for an opening discussion of football’s rich and varied role in the defining conflict of the twentieth century, the Cold War. The introduction finishes with brief tasters of the ten matches that will be studied in the book.