Cold War Imaginaries

John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Westminster. He has published widely on American cultural politics and intellectual history in relation to literature, art and visual culture. Books include Landscape as Weapon: Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal (2021), Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde (co-authored with Ryan Bishop, 2020), and Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power and Waste in Western American Literature (2009). Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK) and Research Associate at Witwatersrand University (South Africa). His most recent book projects are Cold War Imaginaries: Technology, Temporality, Culture (co-edited with John Beck forthcoming 2026 Edinburgh University Press) and Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (co-authored with John Beck, Duke University Press 2020). Bishop is lead editor of the journal Cultural Politics (Duke UP) and the book series associated with the journal (Duke UP) and the series “Technicities” (co-edited with Jussi Parikka, Edinburgh University Press).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction: Cold War ImaginariesJohn Beck and Ryan BishopI. Repetitions and Ruptures1. One More Time: Cold War Temporalities NowJohn Beck and Ryan Bishop2. Alhamdulillah, Nama Kami GANEFO #1Mirwan Andan and Iswanto Hartono3. Trafficked Technologies of the Cold WarVincent E4. 'That’s How You Become a Historian'Friedrich Kittler and Milo Rau Ceaușescu, with an essay by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young: 'Ceaușescu, Columbo and the Typewriters of Stalingrad: On Friedrich Kittler's Romanian Tele-revolution'II. Technicities of Organisation and Control5. The Neural Imaginary: The Cold War, Artificial Intelligence, and Neoliberal EconomicsOrit Halpern6. The Cold War Investment in Noise: Tales of Aesthetics, Control and the MicroRyan Bishop7. Peru’s Centre for the Study of People’s Participation (CENTRO) and its Contribution to Cybernetic SocialismJosé-Carlos Mariátegui8. Influencing MachinesJordan CrandallIII. Proxies and Apparitions9. Manuals, Memoirs and Reports: The Genres of Jungle SuspicionPujita Guha10. The Proxy Landscape in False ColourRobert Gerard Pietrusko11. Weird Incursions: Probing the Aerial Spatialities of the Long Cold WarMatthew FlinthamIV. Memoryscapes12. Myth, Memory and Imagination: Ursula Schulz-Dornburg’s MemoryscapesLucy Rogers13. Operative Relations: Epistemic Warfare and the Factographic ImaginaryJohn Beck14. Cold War Kitchen SinkChris Dobrowolski in conversation with John Beck and Ryan BishopIndex