Cultural attaches: African literature, the CIA, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Recent attempts to outline post-critical models of interpretation in literary studies have often fixated on suspicion, paranoia, or unmasking as their foils. But in the early decades of decolonization, it made sense to be paranoid: writers and artists were justified in suspecting that they were being covertly observed, funded, or promoted by para-state actors knee-deep in the Cold War battlefield of culture. Scholars have long debated whether and how covert state sponsorship for the arts matters. In postcolonial studies especially there has been a revival of interest in the CIA's activities as a cultural patron through its proxy foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Recent research on the CCF has tended to concentrate on what its clandestine sponsorship means for aesthetic autonomy - the notion that the artist has or ought to have some relative autonomy from meddling outside forces, a cherished value of both modernism and mid-century humanism. Focusing on the CCF's support for African modernism, this essay suggests that we need to look beyond autonomy as our default paradigm for assessing Cold War cultural patronage. Instead of joining the debate over what the CCF did or did not do to African literature, this essay asks: what did they even think they were doing? Drawing on research in the CCF archives, this essay argues that a better way to understand the CCF's approach is as a practice of attachment. The aim here is to re-describe Cold War cultural patronage - and, along the way, to ask what scholars of decolonization and the Cold War might stand to learn by engaging with ongoing debates about methodology in the broader field of literary studies.