The Cold War Culture in its magazines. Program for a cartography

Abstract

The last 30 years have seen a veritable explosion of Cold War studies, with a particular emphasis on the intellectual universe, and particularly on the universe of printed culture as a crucial instance for understanding the cultural dimension of the conflict. Today it seems to be established that the networks of magazines and these as spaces of condensation of ideas, but also of concrete sociabilities, played a fundamental role in the diffusion of the ideals of the competing blocks, stimulating in Latin America a previous and constituent tradition of its lettered culture. I want to focus here on the revivalist networks of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1950-1979), an organization that shaped the "Western cultural front", as opposed to the policies driven by the Soviet space. These networks, which were joined by a large number of existing magazines attracted by the proposals of the CLC, promoted spaces of sociability, disseminated ideals and stimulated the figure of the cultural manager, and then his professionalization under the figure of the social scientist. These networks of magazines form a gigantic map that suggests, on the one hand, the particularities of the Cold War in its cultural dimension, and on the other hand, concrete articulations, geographic nuances, unexpected gears and crossings, which signify a challenge to clear this period. If the "Atlantist front" implies some kind of homogeneity, the concrete presence of this cartography confronts us with new questions that must be addressed in order to put into perspective the complex weft of the cultural field of the war for ideas.