Adam Joseph LoBue

My research focuses on communist and anti-communist print culture in East Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s. I analyze a diverse array of texts - propaganda (both overt and covert), textbooks and technical manuals, religious pamphlets, and more - to show how the creation of an anti/communist print culture relied on a dialectic relationship between the producers and consumers of these texts. By highlighting the agency of African readers, my project pushes back against extant scholarship that sees the cultural front of the Cold War as a top-down affair. I argue that the vocabulary, themes, and target audiences of the texts on which I focus allows for an exploration of how both outside propagandists and African readers were, in different ways and to different ends, attempting to Africanize the Cold War in a way that allows for a more nuanced and regionally specific reading of the conflict’s cultural front. In doing so, my project integrates Cold War historiography and contemporary interventions in the histories of African print cultures and politics.