African nations regained their independence from Western colonialism against the background of the Cold War. Monica Popescu's book is a comprehensive study of the impact of the war on the culture, literature, and intellectual production of the postcolonial world. It is a great addition to the body of scholarship on African literature and postcolonial studies. -- Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
This ingenious account offers sharp new insight to the history of African Literary Studies and decolonization by framing them in light of the Cold War, not just in terms of subjection by the West, as stressed by postcolonial perspectives, but also by the colonial outreach of the USSR. As Monica Popescu makes stunningly clear, African and Afro-Caribbean writers of the period-Aime Cesaire, Youssef El-Sebai, and Ezekiel Mphahlele-brought to our understanding of twentieth-century imperialism a comprehensiveness unrivaled before or since. -- Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African American studies and of Anthropology, Harvard University
Popescu's book is a steadfast engagement with the cultural Cold War's impact on African literary studies.... At Penpoint...shows how a range of cross-disciplinary and hybrid methodologies are required if we are to build and establish this scholarship. -- Bhakti Shringarpure * Johannesburg Review of Books *
At Penpoint speaks to a variety of disciplines and historiographies. . . . Popescu writes in accessible language that will make graduates and undergrads appreciate and trace the transnational networks involving African writers, diasporic African intellectuals, and various Cold War actors and the impact they had on Africa, especially in the area of African literature. -- Emmanuella Amoh * E3W Review of Books *
. . . At Penpoint is an engrossing and provocative book that illuminates an important archive and challenges humanities scholars of all midcentury regions to reconfigure their fields. -- Laura Chrisman * Modern Language Quarterly *
Popescu's biggest contribution here is historiographical: not only does she historicize African literary production during the Cold War, she also reveals the lasting effects of the Cold War on today's intellectual concepts and commitments. . . . By rehabilitating the idea of the writer as engaged, even committed, At Penpoint reveals a scholar undertaking not only study of the era of decolonization, but also the slow process of decolonizing literary study itself by wresting the Cold War away from the superpowers who waged it. -- Emily Hyde * Contemporary Literature *
At Penpoint accomplishes what the best scholarship does by illuminating what has been right before our eyes but obscured by our own blinders, ideological or otherwise. Her account resituates Africa at the center of postcolonial studies and reveals the Cold War to be, among other things, a struggle of competing imperialisms. -- Cedric Tolliver * The Journal of African History *
