A diverse and valuable contribution to Cold War studies, The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures features essays from a variety of international scholars of the Cold War. The contributors’ wealth of approaches is evident in the wide-ranging focus of the book, which includes chapters on Cold War print culture and literary publishing in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with forays into cosmopolitan sites of collaboration and exile such as interwar Berlin, which, as Supriya Chaudhuri notes in her chapter, “The Traveller as Internationalist: Syed Mujtaba Ali,” was “a hub for revolutionary groups, especially from India and the Middle East, while Germany provided a haven for disaffected colonial intellectuals” (p. 48).
The focus of the book is the volatile transitional period of the Cold War, when the “Third World” was just coming into existence, defining itself against the so-called...