Double Agent: Literature in the Americas in the Early Cold War

Abstract

The interconnection between culture and state enabled key historical processes in the Americas in the mid-20th century, from building a hemispheric alliance during World War II to regime-change during the Cold War. This dissertation explores how the literary field had a double function in ideological war, used as propaganda while being simultaneously controlled as subversive. Literature acted in collaboration and resistance, for the left or the right, North or South, in explicit messages or covert operations. The culture-state interface examined here comprised efforts such as pan-American propaganda, state-sponsored travel writing and translation programs, the publishing market, and the surveillance of authors by agents of the state. Individuals involved in such efforts, often taking part in the cultural field and in institutional roles, formed broad and heterogeneous networks. This study probes these networks to investigate the making of long-lived inter-American relations by treating literature as political, and close-reading as literature diverse state material of diplomatic, propagandistic and police natures, that is, considering their form. It maps conversations about the vehicular capacity of literature as both ally and enemy of Western Hemisphere ideology during World War II, the period of the Good Neighbor Policy, through Postwar internationalism, and, finally in high Cold War Pan-Americanism. Pan-American contradictions are revealed through the case of Brazil because of its dis- course of exceptionalism within South America and its ties with the United States since World War II, from the late Estado Novo (1945) until the Military Coup (1964) and Brazil’s democratization between these regimes. Authors from Chile, Cuba and Mexico are also studied, to consider a broader Pan-American context in which culture was treated as a resource to be mined and exported through private-state endeavors. Issues of national identity, progress and sovereignty are found in form and content, revealing underlying views about continental unity and alterity. Finding breaks and continuities in programs and narratives about the Americas that bridge regimes, this study identifies a long and contradictory Good Neighbor Policy, approaching “state critiquing” of art as well as fictional renderings of politics. Cultural policy is associated to cultural policing, examining their languages and deconstructing preconceptions about the continent that were rooted in racial, cultural and economic difference.