Uncle Smith Wants You: Post-Colonial Identity Formation, Book Diplomacy, and the Franklin Pakistan Archive (c.1954–1965)

Abstract The Franklin Book Program (FBP), established in May 1952 by Datus C. Smith Jr., former director of Princeton University Press, was a non-profit initiative with international reach. This article examines its operations in Pakistan to reassess the workings and limits of Cold War cultural diplomacy through print. Drawing on archival correspondence between Franklin’s New York headquarters and its Lahore office, alongside its Urdu-language publications, it argues that the program functioned as a fragile infrastructure shaped by local actors and shifting political conditions. It further situates Urdu publishing within debates over language and citizenship, particularly amid heightened scrutiny during the 1965 Indo-Pakistani War, to show how translation and circulation operated as sites of negotiation.