The ten years between Joseph Stalin’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy brought both dangerous crises and fitful steps toward an easing of superpower tensions. While this chapter describes the confrontations in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Berlin, Cuba, and elsewhere, it also emphasizes four breakthroughs toward coexistence and cooperation: the Geneva summit of 1955; the agreement on cultural exchanges in 1958; Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of the United States in 1959; and the conclusion of a partial test ban treaty in 1963. Such progress was delayed and complicated both by domestic political dynamics and by international rivalries in an era of accelerating decolonization and the fraying of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Yet perhaps most remarkable was how far top political leaders, journalists, scientists, musicians, dancers, and others were able to go to transcend ideological tensions and negative stereotypes through dialogue, negotiation, travel, and cultural exchange.

This chapter offers a reading of a range of anglophone East African novels from Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Comoros, and Madagascar to highlight the long history of multifaceted interactions between African and Arab communities in the region due to trade, migration, intermarriage, and the assimilation of cultural and religious elements into Swahili culture. The narratives mark conditions of possibility for capacious diversity, hospitality, and accommodation, while simultaneously attending to prevalent racisms and forms of oppression: notably the slave trade, labor indenture, and the cruelty against women and children in patriarchal environments. Traces of the diffusion of Arab peoples, the spread of Islam and associated ways of life, the cross-fertilization of material culture, and the circulation of ideas and things on the Swahili littoral are demonstrated to be narrativized as diverse and varying. The chapter concludes that the fiction points to the shifting, contingent meanings of the African–Arab encounter at different points in time and in different places along this vast coastline.

The chapter explores how Hume’s Essays were received in Germany during the eighteenth century, highlighting the cultural exchange and intellectual shifts of that time. Hume’s influence is analysed in the context of the growing interest in English books and culture in Germany during the eighteenth century, a trend known as ‘Anglophilia’. Hume’s political and economic writings were translated into German shortly after their original publication. His name was held in high regard and his writings were considered to be instructive. But the specifics of cameralism prevented his economic and political essays from having a major impact on German discourse. Nonetheless, new translations continued to appear. In the German reform debate of the late eighteenth century, Hume’s Essays were used to both support the status quo and to advocate for political change. In the early nineteenth century, an academic translation of Hume’s essay was published, acknowledging his contribution to the formation of political economy as a science. By exploring the reception of Hume’s Essays in eighteenth-century Germany, the chapter shows how translations not only played a big role in sharing knowledge during the Enlightenment but also reflected cultural differences.

Diplomatic activity of various kinds forged close cultural links between England and Scotland and European polities. English and Scottish monarchs considered themselves part of a European ‘society of princes’, which was reflected in events held at court and the ways in which diplomats were incorporated into dynastic occasions. They regularly gave presents to, and received gifts from, foreign royals. Increasingly, diplomats at court were incorporated into the gifting framework; this, and the increasing volume of court entertainment driven by an increase in resident diplomats at court and the need to avoid disruptions to court events caused by precedence disputes among ambassadors, saw diplomacy spur cultural production in England in particular. At the same time, the rise in diplomatic activity inspired authors to explore themes related to diplomatic practices and cultures. Meanwhile, English and Scottish diplomats were important agents of cultural exchange, acting as cultural brokers for important political figures back home, and many of them were also avid consumers of paintings, furniture, and other cultural goods which they imported back to England or Scotland.

The most lasting testament to W. G. Sebald’s profound interest in literary translation is the British Centre for Literary Translation, which he founded at the University of East Anglia in 1989 on the model of translator houses in Germany and France. His aims with BCLT were to provide material support for literary translators and to raise the profile of literary translation as a profession in the UK. Sebald established a small team around him and quickly secured stable, recurrent funding for BCLT from the Arts Council of Great Britain and other sources. He established the pattern of BCLT activity that largely still persists: the Centre became a base for dozens of visiting translators, hosted events (conferences, workshops and seminars, the St Jerome Lecture) and pursued other projects, in particular compiling a Directory of Literary Translators. Sebald served as Director for the first five years of BCLT’s existence: he stepped down in 1994 as his literary career began to blossom, but retained an attachment till his death. Now into its fourth decade, BCLT continues its vigorous promotion of literary translation at the interface between academia and the profession.

This chapter examines the relations between thousands of Yemeni Jews and the Jews of the Indian subcontinent in modern times. Starting in the eighteenth century, Yemenite rabbis and emissaries filled in religious functions in Jewish communities first in Cochin and among other groups. In the opposite direction, members of Bene Israel community served as officials and officers in the British army during the time it occupied Aden in 1839. These mutual relations formed intimate ties among various communities across the Indian Ocean.

This chapter investigates a little considered aspect of Rushdie’s work in the context of soundscapes and the auditory imagination. While ekphrasis and the way in which Rushdie works with images has been widely explored, his novels are fully realized through sound, whether it is trains, filmic soundtracks, songs, or the sounds of street life in cities such as Bombay, London, and New York. The chapter focuses particularly on music across Rushdie’s fictional oeuvre, paying closest attention to The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Hear Feet. It argues that a change is perceptible in the way that music is figured across these two novels, which in turn reflects a wider shift in the author’s politics, especially with relation to Islam.

This chapter considers the tensions in Sino-American exchange diplomacy felt in the wake of the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s resignation and replacement by Gerald Ford. Ford lacked domestic political authority and thus was unable to find the negotiating flexibility necessary to achieve a deal to establish official diplomatic relations with Beijing. The resulting deadlock in high-diplomatic negotiations was one cause of stasis and conflict over cultural exchanges in 1974 and 1975 that culminated in the last-minute cancellation of a tour by a famous Chinese performing arts troupe, news that made the front pages of US newspapers. This chapter also examines the more gradual accumulation of tension in exchanges arising from American resentment at tight controls on visitors to China and Chinese resentment at impolitic behavior by American guests, ranging from photographing evidence of Chinese “backwardness” to drunken brawls.

The high watermark in the Sino-American relationship during the Henry Kissinger era came in 1973 with the creation of “liaison offices,” or de facto embassies, in each capital: These liaison offices further deepened and formalized the diplomatic relationship after the Richard Nixon–Mao Zedong summit of 1972 and would remain the closest that the two governments would come to establishing official diplomatic relations before Kissinger left government in January 1977. This chapter reveals that – in cause, conception, and execution – liaison offices were a direct outgrowth of the exchange relationship. Other new milestones in that relationship were also set in 1973, not least during the visit of the largest cultural delegation yet to travel to the People’s Republic of China: the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, 1973 also saw the first signs of new tensions in exchange diplomacy as lingering Sino-American disagreements about Cambodia and Taiwan, as well as turbulent Chinese domestic politics, led to confrontations in cultural contacts and during a Congressional delegation to China led by Senator Warren Magnuson.

Chapter 5 examines exchanges of material cultures. Through the paradigm of ‘domestication’, it shows how lakeshore populations incorporated several commodities circulating the wider Indian Ocean World into their everyday lives, while also showing how coastal traders sought to affect the supply of these objects to enrich their commercial networks. The principal items discussed are glass beads, cotton cloths, and guns. The chapter uses the Lake Tanganyika case study to show how demand for specific products in East Africa affected broader commercial patterns that traversed the wider Indian Ocean World, which themselves were concurrently being affected by the spread of capitalism from Europe. Additionally, it shows how patterns of consumption on the lakeshore served to enhance the status of several bonds(wo)men, suggesting a contravention of often assumed links between being in bondage and of having low social status.

Chapter 3 uses archival and anthropological sources to examine human encounters with Lake Tanganyika itself. The lake was a source of food, a barrier to cross, and the subject of religious and political innovation. How these features of human–lake encounters were understood shifted over time in ways that were related to the exchange of cultures and fluctuations in the lake’s level. In general terms, these shifts can be summed up as the ‘commercialisation’ of encounters with the lake, which affected how people crossed it, their motivations for doing so, and their means of appeasing spirits they believed to inhabit it. Technology, environmental factors, and religious paradigms with links to the wider Indian Ocean World affected how people crossed, used, and interpreted conditions on the lake.