PEN Teaching Guides

International Human Rights Writers and Free Speech Writers in Exile / Global Refugees Writing the Cold War Writing World War II Digital Collections

Writing the Cold War

Origins of the Cold War Strategy for Non-Political Activism

As an organization initially founded as a social society to foster free expression for a select literary community, PEN eventually found itself committed to protecting the rights of a global community of writers. As their mission evolved, PEN founders believed that they could intervene on behalf of writers in the midst of some of the most contentious and controversial events, such as decolonization, and world war and its political and social aftermath—without identifying itself as a political organization. PEN's identity as a human rights organization changed over time, as the political climate changed and as writers around the world required more protection and specific kinds of diplomatic intervention.

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Sites of Struggle – PEN Geographies

Cold War struggles arose in many different places around the world, at times as a contest between superpowers, and at other times as a clash between cultures or political ideologies. In the years following World War II, PEN tried to intervene in places that were already historically marked by processes such as decolonization. Nations such as South Africa, Cuba, and Vietnam faced a unique set of social and political challenges resulting from the remnants of their relationships with imperial powers. In many places PEN worked to ensure a forum for writers' voices and their free expression amid the residues of racial hierarchy and political corruption left behind after the war.

For example, PEN International Secretary Hermon Ould worked tirelessly, with other members, to place a PEN centre in South Africa. As envisioned, this centre would acknowledge the contribution of South African writers, and would serve to counter the idea that all literature that emerged from the region centered on themes of colonization. But while the centre was praised as a unique accomplishment among PEN members, it did not renounce the structures of racial hierarchy and apartheid which divided the country and its literature.

South Africa

These materials document PEN's recognition of the need for a centre in South Africa, but they also reveal some of the tensions present in its negotiations with existing political conditions in the country. By the time of the Cold War, PEN began taking small steps to address societal inequalities, soliciting book donations for students who had been excluded from opportunities due to gross inequalities inherent in a system of racial apartheid. In the PEN News call for book donations, the author includes the language that would have been used at the time, and refers to "non-white" school children, as PEN makes an effort to address inequality. However, by encouraging the founding of a centre in the Afrikaans language—a language with an exclusionary and hegemonic history—and by failing to acknowledge black writers for the first two decades of the South African Centre's existence, PEN missed an opportunity to use its influence on behalf of a wider range of African literatures, or to use its platform to discourage apartheid. These materials open up discussions regarding how PEN's presence could both signal change and simultaneously maintain a status quo. Students might ask, for example, what it means for an international organization to focus first and foremost on literature in the languages of colonial powers.

Cuba

The effort to place a PEN centre in Cuba continued for decades and finally came to fruition in 1945. Some of the correspondence in the collection reveals a fascination with the people and the place. PEN International President Arthur Miller even acknowledged that holding a PEN congress in Cuba would satisfy an American curiosity about what "goes on over there," situating Cuba as both a site of contention as a potential USSR satellite, but also as a geographical and racial "other."

Vietnam

In the late 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Vietnam War, known by the Vietnamese as the American War, PEN International President Arthur Miller and PEN International Secretary David Carver tried to protect writers, prevent persecution, and publicly protest abuses. They struggled to calibrate their intervention into international affairs of state, understanding PEN's mission as an apolitical rights group but participating in overtly political conditions.

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PEN Middle East Pre-war and Post-war Efforts

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PEN Contesting Global Dominance: U.S. vs. USSR-centered Conflict

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PEN and Commercial Pressures

By the 1950s PEN, like the rest of the country, was faced with the conundrum of peace versus prosperity. The "booming" American economy introduced both new possibilities and new kinds of commercial, consumer, and cultural pressures. As more American families were pushed to consume and more employee productivity was measured, and technologies like television became pervasive, some Americans began to contemplate the morality of mass consumption. For an organization like PEN, historically wedded to a certain set of literary standards, the idea of mass consumption, and the concept of the commercially successful writer forced PEN to contend with a high-culture versus low-culture dilemma. Is commercially successful writing still considered literature? How does PEN struggle to remain relevant to and for writers at this time of economic upheaval and social change?

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PEN and the Prospect of Global Citizenship: Are Writers Bound by Nation or Language?

We can learn about PEN's trajectory as a human rights organization by looking not only at the places in which it chose to intervene, but also at the places it did not. Countries such as Vietnam and the USSR serve as logical places of inquiry, but what can we determine about places that PEN did not represent or in which it did not open centres? Even when PEN did choose to locate a centre in a geographic location, how did PEN work around social and political restrictions such as racial hierarchy in South Africa, or political and class division in Southeast Asia? While PEN was actively defending the rights of writers around the world, it was also complicit in a set of global politics which determined what qualifies as literature. Their decision to open a centre in South Africa recognizes a certain kind of literary diversity, but it also priveleges European concepts of literature, which include a particular set of ideas and literary conventions, while simultaneously excluding other writers on the basis of race, gender, or nationality. The following examples demonstrate that at certain historical moments PEN privileged a particular type of national literature – only Afrikaans in South Africa – or ignored literature from places such as Cambodia and Laos.

What Does It Mean to Claim a National Literature?

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