To be published by Columbia University Press, New York, fall 2010
cold war decomposition
Linoleum cut [engraving] book cover recently commissioned for ” The decomposition of the cold war ” by author Heonik Kwon
ABOUT THE BOOK: This book proposes an alternative way to think of the end of the Cold War: as a slowly decomposing process of a complex social and political order, which involves a multitude of locally active, culturally creative political processes.
There is a strong consensus in contemporary literature that the end of the Cold War is a fait accompli, a universal historical reality. The question of the end has no room for diversity and generates no such positive interpretative controversies as those about the origin. The story of the Cold War we tell ourselves today, therefore, has an open-ended beginning and a closed ending. This book takes issue with the these prevailing ideasabout the end of the Cold War.
Arguing that a history of mass violence and death is embedded in the history of the global Cold War, the book claims that the decomposition of the representational hierarchy between Europe’s imaginary war and the postcolonial experience of violent bipolar politics is central to grasping the human experience of the Cold War.
engraved in clay > gravée en argile > grabado en arcilla > incisione in argilla > Copyright © Raymond Verdaguer 2010
