How did the global ideological conflict between superpowers during the Cold War shape literary production? How was freedom or constraint imagined and rendered? This seminar invites new appraisals of the affective geopolitics of the period that focus on literary and cultural exchanges around the globe. A slew of new historical work on Cold War has appeared of late, representing a third generation of Cold War studies and emphasising cultural production globally (rather than considering the Cold War simply as an East/West issue). We invite submissions that analyze writers, genres, and national literatures during the years from 1945 to 1992 that consider literary production vis-a-vis the horizon of the Cold War.  How did various literary communities come to imagine themselves as participating in global freedom struggles? How did state censorship (or sponsorship) of cultural production inflect aesthetic practices? What new genres emerged to articulate Cold War subjectivities? How did literary discourse circulate across different borders? How did postcolonial nations navigate a political landscape where countries (and individuals) were pressured to "take sides" in global struggles? How did the "hot wars" of the Cold War (many of which took place in the global south) overdetermine national or world literatures? How did the Cold War shape the emerging diaspora literatures of the era? To what extent did global ideological struggles in the second half of the 20th century contribute to the refugee crisis or the 21st century? How do Cold War assumptions persist in ongoing discussions of "world literature"? The present moment, as the post-Cold War consensus that lasting from roughly 1989 to the Trump presidency seems to be dissolving, and as the geopolitical again feels increasingly personal, seems a propitious occasion to reconsider literary production during the second half of the 20th century.