Cultural attachés: 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 kneedeep 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