Description
Book SynopsisArgues that cultural politics - specifically America's often covert patronage of the arts - played a highly important role in the transfer of imperial authority from Britain to the United States during a critical period after World War II.
Trade ReviewWinner of a 2013 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Nonfiction, Lannan Foundation "Archives of Authority is a valuable and thought-provoking work... Archives of Authority will be of great interest to literature scholars, postcolonial theorists, and Cold War specialists across the disciplines. Its critique of cultural instrumentality and appeal for a Said-inflected humanism speak to the stakes of intellectual inquiry, reminding us that in exposing the process by which an unjust world is made, we arm ourselves with the tools to build a different one."--Kirsten Weld, Journal of Archival Organization
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Archives of Authority 11 The Archive and the Juridical 12 States of Exception 13 States of Criticism 17 Chapter 2 Orwell and the Globalization of Literature 24 Communist Crypts 28 The "Communist Menace" 34 The Translation of Authority 37 Translation and Modes of Domination 44 Chapter 3 Transnational Literary Spaces at War 47 The Sun Never Sets on the British Writer 47 The Time of Translation 58 London Calling 60 Literary Diplomacy 65 Chapter 4 Archives of Critical Theory 74 Accommodations 80 Chapter 5 Humanism, Territory, and Techniques of Trouble 87 Terrain of Philology 90 Notes 109 Bibliography 141 Index 167
