Cold War Photographic Diplomacy

Cold War Photographic Diplomacy
Author: Darren Newbury
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2024-01-31
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 027109821X

The emergence of newly independent African nations onto the world stage in the mid-twentieth century precipitated a contest for influence among Cold War superpowers, leading the United States to mount an international campaign of photographic diplomacy underpinned by a faith in the medium’s capacity to cross cultural boundaries. However, the increasing global visibility of racial injustice undermined US claims that the nation had transcended colonial racism. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and concentrating on the period from the mid-1950s through to the late 1960s, Darren Newbury traces the role of photography in the United States’ appeal to Africa. Newbury shows how photographing the political, cultural, and educational visits of Africans to the United States provided a space for the imagination of international cooperation and friendship; how the United States presented the civil rights struggle as an example of democracy in action; and how it pictured a world of integration and racial coexistence. Cold War Photographic Diplomacy chronicles this careful scripting of images and picture stories and details the cultural and pedagogical work that photography was expected to perform as it was inserted into the visual culture of African cities through magazines, posters, pamphlets, and window displays. Locating photography at the intersection of African decolonization, racial conflict in the United States, and the cultural Cold War, this study will especially appeal to students and scholars of the history of photography, American studies, and Africana studies.

Upstaging the Cold War

Upstaging the Cold War
Author: Andrew J. Falk
Publisher: Culture and Politics in the Company
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781558499034

How dissident artists became cultural emissaries during the early decades of the Cold War

Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War

Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War
Author: Roberto Cantoni
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2017-03-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1315531518

The importance of oil for national military-industrial complexes appeared more clearly than ever in the Cold War. This volume argues that the confidential acquisition of geoscientific knowledge was paramount for states, not only to provide for their own energy needs, but also to buttress national economic and geostrategic interests and protect energy security. By investigating the postwar rebuilding and expansion of French and Italian oil industries from the second half of the 1940s to the early 1960s, this book shows how successive administrations in those countries devised strategies of oil exploration and transport, aiming at achieving a higher degree of energy autonomy and setting up powerful oil agencies that could implement those strategies. However, both within and outside their national territories, these two European countries had to confront the new Cold War balances and the interests of the two superpowers.

Dance for Export

Dance for Export
Author: Naima Prevots
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2012-12-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819573361

At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other artists to political "hot spots" overseas. This peacetime gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success. Among the artists chosen for international duty were José Limón, who led his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America; Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center. Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources, including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the inner workings of "Eisenhower's Program," the complex set of political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US. CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner.

Photographic Memories

Photographic Memories
Author: Rob Kroes
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2007
Genre: Documentary photography
ISBN: 9781584655930

The role of photographs in the formation of public memories.

Entangled East and West

Entangled East and West
Author: Simo Mikkonen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110570602

Despite increasing scholarship on the cultural Cold War, focus has been persistently been fixed on superpowers and their actions, missing the important role played by individuals and organizations all over Europe during the Cold War years. This volume focuses on cultural diplomacy and artistic interaction between Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It aims at providing an essentially European point of view on the cultural Cold War, providing fresh insight into little known connections and cooperation in different artistic fields. Chapters of the volume address photography and architecture, popular as well as classical music, theatre and film, and fine arts. By examining different actors ranging from individuals to organizations such as universities, the volume brings new perspective on the mechanisms and workings of the cultural Cold War. Finally, the volume estimates the pertinence of the Cold War and its influence in post-1991 world. The volume offers an overview on the role culture played in international politics, as well as its role in the Cold War more generally, through interesting examples and case studies.

Cold War Modernists

Cold War Modernists
Author: Greg Barnhisel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-02-27
Genre:
ISBN: 9780231216593

Cold War Modernists documents how the CIA, the State Department, and private cultural diplomats transformed modernist art and literature into pro-Western propaganda during the first decade of the Cold War.

Framing the Interpreter

Framing the Interpreter
Author: Anxo Fernandez-Ocampo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1317598261

Situations of conflict offer special insights into the history of the interpreter figure, and specifically the part played in that history by photographic representations of interpreters. This book analyses photo postcards, snapshots and press photos from several historical periods of conflict, associated with different photographic technologies and habits of image consumption: the colonial period, the First and Second World War, and the Cold War. The book’s methodological approach to the "framing" of the interpreter uses tools taken primarily from visual anthropology, sociology and visual syntax to analyse the imagery of the modern era of interpreting. By means of these interpretative frames, the contributions suggest that each culture, subculture or social group constructed its own representation of the interpreter figure through photography. The volume breaks new ground for image-based research in translation studies by examining photographic representations that reveal the interpreter as a socially constructed category. It locates the interpreter’s mediating efforts at the core of the human sciences. This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students in translation and interpreting studies, as well as to those working in visual studies, photography, anthropology and military/conflict studies.

Theatre Diplomacy During the Cold War

Theatre Diplomacy During the Cold War
Author: William Wadsworth
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1664139362

This multi-volume work began as a biography of Martha Wadsworth Coigney, who was a pioneering thought leader and advocate of internationalism in the American theatre during one of the most challenging periods in modern U.S. history. Coigney served as President of the International Theatre Institute (ITI) from 1966 to 2011. An independent NGO, ITI was devoted to the UNESCO mission of peace through mutual understanding, and, after World War II, often single-handedly sustained cultural exchange between artists on either side of the Iron Curtain, across religious divides, and in war zones. ITI was consistently in the vanguard of UNESCO's multi-lateral aim to bring all voices to the table, including former colonial peoples, developing nations, and indigenous cultures. In partnership with Rosamond Gilder and Ellen Stewart of La Mama E.T.C., Coigney led these landmark initiatives, including the representation of U.S. multicultural theatre leadership in Moscow in 1973. What was set in motion then is playing out today. Owing to the scope of Coigney’s work, William Wadsworth and Jim O’Quinn interviewed a wide range of her dramatist friends and professional colleagues. These conversations illumined a liberal cultural epoch (1954-86) and the U. S. Culture Wars that followed. The authors also recovered substantive original materials from Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library and the Rockefeller Archives about the life and work of Coigney, her mentor Rosamond Gilder, and Coigney’s longtime employer, the producer Roger Stevens. These materials document a sustained political effort by theatre people to socialize and liberalize post-WWII America. For these reasons, the work became much more than the story of one amazing person. It became a living history about relations between great artists and their milieu, told by the artists themselves. The Martha Coigney story has several key elements: • Coigney embodied the principle of internationalism as a counterforce to nationalism and fascism. • He career is a virtual how-to manual for re-visualizing and revitalizing American theatre. • Her life demonstrates the power of people-to-people diplomacy, based on the principles of individual human rights as established by the United Nations, the support of artistic freedom of expression, and the concept that every policy and funding mechanism finds its essence in the individual artist. • Coigney was one of the great theatre matchmakers and promoters of experimental and devised theatre work. Within this sector, she can be said to have revolutionized the theatre profession worldwide. • Gilder and Coigney, in their roles at ITI, led the movement to establish international theatre festivals in Europe, the USA, and globally. • Gilder and Coigney were collaborators with Roger Stevens, Donald Oenslager, Hal Prince, Nancy Rhodes, Edward Albee, and scores of other distinguished figures in the transmission of American dramatic art overseas. • Coigney served as advisor to and instrument for private theatre funders determined to create a national theatre accessible to working-class citizens and the poor, an investment, they believed, that was necessary to U.S. ascendency and world peace. In this they followed the inspiration of President John F. Kennedy, who articulated that to be influential, a great nation must have a great culture to contribute to the world.