Put simply–although nothing about it is simple–public diplomacy is diplomacy carried out in public, as opposed to most of diplomacy, which is done in private. It is a set of activities that inform, engage and influence international public opinion to support policy objectives or create goodwill for the home country. It is important to understand what public diplomacy is not. It is not an advertising campaign to get foreigners to like your country–even if they dislike it, they can still support, or at least accept, a particular policy or action. It is not a propaganda effort to mislead or lie to audiences for tactical or other advantage. It is a sustained endeavor that advances your country’s policies and reflects a solid understanding of the host-country’s language, culture, history and traditions. Both public diplomacy and propaganda are means to project power.

This chapter examines Bernstein’s complicated relationship with the Soviet Union. Born four years before the creation of the Soviet Union and dying eleven months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, his life story, including his rise to global prominence, paralleled the history of the Soviet republics. As an American of Ukrainian heritage, the composer had personal ties to the region. I examine these family connections and their complexities; his lifelong interest in Russian classical music; his period of attraction to Communism as an ideology, its consequences, and his statements in support of US–Soviet peace; and his 1960 cultural-diplomacy-related tour of the USSR with the New York Philharmonic. Ultimately, I argue that the United States’ relationship with the USSR had a profound impact not only on his family life and conducting career, but also on his attitudes to music-stylistic choices.

The introduction argues that Soviet satirists Ilf and Petrov’s 1935 American road trip offers a fruitful and innovative means of identifying the mediators who engaged in building friendly Soviet–American relations. Such means are necessary because unlike the Soviet state, the American government in the 1930s did not guide or systematically track Soviet visitors. Providing a brief overview of Ilf and Petrov’s biographies, the introduction highlights the mixture of fact and fiction in their American travelogue. It concludes with a sketch of their American itinerary and the wide range of sources employed to reconstruct their contacts with Americans.

This chapter documents the constellation of films and literary works extending outward from the Eastern international in the late- and post-Soviet years when socialist internationalism pivoted from an east–west to a north–south axis and then dissipated (1960s–1990s). It affirms the enduring coherence of the Persianate literary space, now bound together by Soviet models of literary representation. The chapter samples the occasional poetry produced by Eastern literary representatives involved in Soviet–Third-World cultural diplomacy at Cold War literary congresses, especially through the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. However, it also shows how artists gripped by classical Persianate forms continued to find and respond to each other after Soviet-backed literary institutions lost international legitimacy. The chapter discusses several Persian and Uzbek texts from the Soviet–Afghan War, including a leading Afghan communist literary bureaucrat’s mystical love poem to an Islamist insurgent, written continuously from 1980–2020. Its other central case study is the impact of the Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates as a model for Persianate poetics on film, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran, including in the art films of Muhsin Makhmalbaf. The chapter tempers the elegiac impulse of the post-Persianate left with an affirmation of the tradition’s continued vitality.

The conclusion reviews the arguments developed throughout the book. This summary is framed by a consideration of the changing meanings of the poetic figures of the rose and nightingale in the Persianate twentieth century. Accordingly, each chapter is elucidated through a reading of that chapter’s classical Persian or Turkic epigraph.

This chapter explores the displacement of knowledge following the First World War in two ways. First, it focuses on the displacement of people, specifically the Russian refugees displaced by the civil war in the early 1920s. It shows how thousands of intellectuals were combed out of the wider body of displaced people and relocated in sites across Europe and the wider world. Second, the chapter looks at how other forms of intellectual capital were displaced following post-war treaties and the redrawing of international borders, such as Hungarian institutions that found themselves ‘displaced’ in Czechoslovakia and Romania. Arguments about the displacement of knowledge demonstrated how individuals, institutions, and even modes of thinking were portrayed as synonymous with certain national identities in order to effect political change. The chapter explores the tension between the nationalization of knowledge and its simultaneous claims to universalism.

Making the People’s Republic of China appear great after 1949 was a technically and organizationally complex problem that required the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to mobilize all of the cultural resources at its disposal. Messianism about China’s greatness was an important aspect of Mao’s charisma as a leader, and this message was in turn disseminated internationally through repeated reference to the uniqueness and success of China’s revolutionary “path,” particularly within decolonizing Asia. When confronted with the dilemma of how to engage with nonsocialist countries, or those for which revolution was a more distant concern, the CCP’s response was instead to engage in more generic forms of cultural diplomacy which highlighted China’s achievements as a great and developing nation. International cultural display was therefore a relatively low-cost approach to signaling greatness and earning respect even in settings where relations were not carried out on a basis of socialist “fraternity.”

This chapter examines the resulting sequence of steps taken by the CCP to globally communicate China’s greatness and legitimacy. Its main focus is the film industry, which played a significant role in the dissemination of information about China’s post-1949 reconstruction during the politically turbulent Korean War period. By the mid-1950s, the PRC’s nascent international cultural infrastructure stretched from Geneva to Jakarta, underpinned by cultural industries and politically directed exchange networks at home. Mao’s promise to make the world see China as civilized first required that the world be made to see – as influence expanded, recognition of China’s greatness would surely follow

This chapter surveys various forms of identification with and consumption of K-pop idol celebrity and youth culture, from reactions on video logs to K-pop music videos, to theorize the particular forms of vicarious experience that bind K-pop idols to their fans and fans to each other. Vicarity relies on the ubiquitous reflexivity that defines social media platforms as sites of subject formation via media production and consumption. Social media participation constitutes an immersive, everyday form of meta-media, by which vicarious substitution through the consumption of vlogs/reactions induces acutely affective experiences of identification. Vicarious media seem to suggest a proxy for politics as an expression of collective sentiment – the ways in which media platforms bridge the private and the public through the increasingly complex arena of the social. Yet traditional modes of political organizing, remain recognizable in the activities of fan collectives. This chapter thus articulates how K-pop sheds light on the contradictory impulses for intense individuation – through the atomized personas overdetermined by social media and the vlog form – and the corresponding longing for ideals of collective agency and community that we see across multiple nodes of media consumption.

Singing along has aided songs to gain wide geographic distribution and popularity. In the case of K-pop, singing along is hampered by the lack of language skills. However, a key component of K-pop’s success has been the visual – music videos that feature beautiful stars and trending fashions – and, perhaps most of all, a prominent dance component. Fans from around the world have been moved to interact with K-pop by substituting dancing along for singing along. The barrier to participation is low – cover dancers benefit from a song and choreography created by other artists. While some dancers only practice, without uploading videos or performing, others attract viewers to private subscriptions for access to full videos and interactions with the dancers. Fans perform dances for crowds, upload them online, enter cover contests, and even develop new careers. They can become quite well known, their videos drawing millions of views. Just like the K-pop idols, the Korean government supports these activities. This chapter outlines the variety of cover dance activities, investigates the motivations of cover dancers using interview data, discusses the implications for cultural diplomacy, outlines the economy of K-pop cover dance, and touches on the ways it contributes to learning about Korea.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.

The book begins with a short introduction to the broad problems and key questions which shape the enquiry. Namely, that an holistic perspective of transitional justice should include legal, social, and cultural measures, within which visual art has an important role. I identify the tendency in transitional justice scholarship which addresses the arts to privilege civil society arts initiatives over state-sponsored ones and to focus on the performing arts over visual art – two gaps which the book begins to fill. I then outline the two-part case study of post-apartheid South African visual art across important national and international institutions, the Constitutional Court of South Arica and the South African Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice. The introduction concludes with a breakdown of the individual chapters and the arguments presented.

Chapter 10, The Cultural Diplomacy of Imaginary Fact, theorises the exhibition in the 2013 South Africa Pavilion at the International Art Biennale in Venice as a unique instance of cultural diplomacy. Imaginary Fact plays a paradoxical role in the process of nation building because it presents a dual image of a nation struggling with ongoing internal complexities, while projecting a collective narrative of a state that has undergone a difficult transition and come out the other side to re-assert itself in the international community.By examining South Africa’s conception of cultural diplomacy presented in government white papers, I show how the official image of South Africa as a global competitor (a transitioned nation) sits uncomfortably with the artists’ image of South Africa as a transitioning nation circumscribed by ongoing challenges to human rights.I argue that this establishes a glocal (global–local) image of the state which is in tension with South Africa’s foreign policy agenda.

The conclusion outlines the key implications and contributions of the book. Art is a radical form of political participation in times of transition.In South Africa visual art creates new critical spaces of political recognition and representation.Art is embedded in creative state-building, both internally and externally.The state uses visual art from the inside out to reconceptualise the South African justice system, and from the outside in to re-engage the international community with the South African state.The conclusion also addresses two potential criticisms facing the book, namely that what is discussed does not count as transitional justice and whether art really matters in post-conflict settings in the face of urgent human need.