Arnoldo Palacios in Romania: a Transnational Reading of La selva y la lluvia. The Cold War, Cultural Diplomacy, and Socialist Realism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.elc.361929Keywords:
Arnoldo Palacios, The Cultural Cold War, Union of Sovietic Writers, Romania, Colombian literatureAbstract
This article contributes to the growing body of research on Latin American authors who wrote about or from socialist European countries during the Cold War. The aim is to examine the steps taken by Afro-Colombian writer Arnoldo Palacios (1924–2015) as an agent of the cultural Cold War to establish the conditions that impacted the writing of La selva y la lluvia (1958) during his years in Romania and its relationship to his other works. In a period when socialist realism was assumed to be the aesthetic paradigm, it also seeks to explain why the Union of Soviet Writers would have published the novel, despite it not meeting all the standards required by the editorial policies of the time.
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