The legacies of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF, 1950-1967) and its ill-fated offspring, the International Association of Cultural Freedom (IACF, 1967-1978), remain contested territory in the fields of Cold War and cultural history to this day. Book reviews covering the subject in the Times Literary Supplement still generate debate anno 2016. The fact that the CIA would secretly fund a transnational organisation of intellectuals in the name of freedom of expression for over a decade has captivated many political, cultural and intelligence historians. For some, it represents the ultimate ‘treason of the intellectuals’ for being part of a clandestine cultural cold war disguised as a cause for liberty. For others, regardless of the CIA involvement, it signifies the acceptance of responsibility on the part of individuals prepared to speak out in favour of freedom of expression at a time when it was under threat. In journalism and academia, the cultural cold war that the CCF helped shape has been superceded by the cultural war between its advocates and its critics. This collection seeks to escape this binary by re-evaluating one of the most far-reaching and lasting legacies of the CCF, its stable of cultural-political journals. By investigating and comparing these publications, and setting them within the national, regional and transnational contexts that nurtured, sustained, and criticised them, the Congress for Cultural Freedom can be revisited from the fresh perspective of global intellectual history. This in no way disregards the CIA influence – instead, it shifts the starting point for historical investigation of the CCF phenomenon into new terrain. It examines the CCF phenomenon not from the inside out – focusing on the institutional history – but from the outside in – giving attention to its most influential cultural products scattered across the globe, operating in their own particular local settings. In doing so, it brings together different strands of cultural, political and social history to open a new chapter of research on the CCF and the cultural Cold War in general.

This collection, edited by Joes Segal, Peter Romijn, and myself, appeared with Amsterdam University Press in July 2012. It was originally intended as a kind of follow-up to the popular Cultural Cold War in Western Europe 1945-1960 volume from 2003, but this volume has moved with the times of Cold War Culture research and is quite a different collection, focusing more on cultural production and reception across the blocs rather than cultural confrontation between the blocs. This is the Introduction. For those interested in the whole volume, I believe Amsterdam University Press has placed the entire pdf file on the web via an Open Access Publishing initiative.

The article contributes to a growing body of studies on ‘race’ and Africa, in a shift from its previously major and influential lens of focus – the Black Atlantic – towards studies more global in design and intent. Different national and regional contexts are positioned into dialogue with this scholarship, unraveling the complexities of the relationship between notions of Africa, ‘blackness’, ‘race’ and modernity/coloniality. I turn to the Soviet context of modern visuality of race, where the ways in which the Soviet racial/ized picture of humanity was in/visibly taxonomized demonstrate its genealogy in a substantive scopic regime of modernity and patterns of racial difference though in a specific ‘anti-racist’ ideological modification. In this article I am interested in how Soviet cinema as a popular cultural practice of socialist modernity projected a whole array of specific racial images of Africa, Africanness and blackness. I focus on Soviet cinematic representations of Africa and the ways in which they contributed to re-fashioning modern racial meanings of Africa and blackness in the Soviet picture of the world and humanity. I discuss film adaptations A Captain at Fifteen [Piatnadtsatiletnii kapitan, 1945] and Maximka [Maksimka, 1953], the adventure film Stronger Than a Hurricane [Sil’nee uragana, 1960], the political films The Committee of 19 [Komitet 19-ti, 1971], The Black Sun [Chernoe solntse, 1970], Chronicle of the Night [Khronika nochi, 1972] and a famous romantic tale How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor [Skaz pro to, kak tsar’ Petr arapa zhenil, 1976]. The discussion also includes so-called trophy films and famous Soviet animated cartoons containing images of Africa. A connection between politics and emotion, between the social and the somatic, or the condition of the “political affect” can be achieved in different ways. Modern visual media, such as photography and film, produced through “looking relations” a new and mass “sensorium” of national identity. The political use of audio-visual media not so much in their capacity to realistically represent a simulacrum of the world, but in the peculiar kind of appeal and presence which the technology of radio and the cinema contributed to political life and the public sphere. How Soviet films did imagine identity, and more specifically, Russian identity, as a racial construct through representations of blackness and Africa in the domain of cinema, is an especially intriguing question that I also address in this article.

The publication Red Africa edited by British curator and writer Mark Nash sets out to excavate a seemingly forgotten past: the socialist friendship with Africa in the Cold War. The contributions present the results of a two-year research project and seasonal programme at Calvert 22 Foundation in London that included the exhibition "Things Fall Apart", film screenings, and seminars. In the form of a collage, transcripts of conversations are assembled together with six scholarly essays and glimpses into the work of eleven artists and artist groups whose projects were on display at the exhibition. The mix of exhibition catalogue, edited volume, and glossy art magazine enters into a conversation with its readers and viewers that is equally intriguing and confusing and that leaves them wanting more.