Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds: How Transnational Exchange Defined Cold War Cultures

FAIN: FEL-288608-23

Kevin Mercer Forsyth Platt
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

Research and writing of a book on the value and exchange of art and literature during Cold War among the West, Eastern socialist states, and the developing world.

"Cultural Arbitrage in the Age of Three Worlds" is a study of cultural relations between the developed west, the socialist states, and the decolonizing world during the Cold War. I focus on the shifting value and meaning of art and literature when they crossed boundaries between world zones, either through official exchange via cultural diplomacy and exports, or through unofficial and illegal channels via smuggling, Voice of America broadcasts, etc. Take a single case: Andrey Sinyavsky’s absurdist works, written in the 1950s, were perceived in the USSR as oppositional, and were therefore unpublishable and of no official economic value. Smuggled to the west, they were perceived as expressions of political and aesthetic freedom and published to acclaim, bringing high returns. My book presents a historical and theoretical explanation of how such cases of exchange constituted and reinforced the aesthetic systems of distinct world zones of the late twentieth century.