Instructors: Adhy Kim and Laura Quinton
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00-5:30pm
Meeting time: Monday, 3:00-5:30pm
The Cold War is often framed as a historical conflict between two geopolitical blocs: the capitalist United States and the communist Soviet Union. But the Cold War impacted the lives of people throughout the world, and the effects of its geopolitics - nuclearity, proxy wars, borders, political struggles - saturated international cultures. This course explores how culture shaped, and was shaped by, the global Cold War. How did Cold War cultural products function as ideological weapons and propaganda around the world? And how did far-flung artists, intellectuals, and activists - whether state-sponsored or dissident - navigate the Cold War’s binary divides? Along with key scholarship on the Cold War, we will examine a wide range of primary sources: fiction, films, paintings, opera, ballet, popular music, documentaries, narrative games, essays, speeches, historical documents, and more. We will interrogate how the politics of this era shaped cultural life-worlds across continents and oceans, and how the Cold War reverberates in our cultural memories today.