In At Penpoint Monica Popescu traces the development of African literature during the second half of the twentieth century to address the intertwined effects of the Cold War and decolonization on literary history. Popescu draws on archival materials from the Soviet-sponsored Afro-Asian Writers Association and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom alongside considerations of canonical literary works by Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ousmane Sembène, Pepetela, Nadine Gordimer, and others. She outlines how the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union played out in the aesthetic and political debates among African writers and intellectuals. These writers decolonized aesthetic canons even as superpowers attempted to shape African cultural production in ways that would advance their ideological and geopolitical goals. Placing African literature at the crossroads of postcolonial theory and studies of the Cold War, Popescu provides a new reassessment of African literature, aesthetics, and knowledge production.

"“Popescu’s book is a steadfast engagement with the cultural Cold War’s impact on African literary studies.... At Penpoint...shows how a range of cross-disciplinary and hybrid methodologies are required if we are to build and establish this scholarship.”" - Johannesburg Review of Books

"At Penpoint speaks to a variety of disciplines and historiographies. . . . Popescu writes in accessible language that will make graduates and undergrads appreciate and trace the transnational networks involving African writers, diasporic African intellectuals, and various Cold War actors and the impact they had on Africa, especially in the area of African literature." - E3W Review of Books

". . . At Penpoint is an engrossing and provocative book that illuminates an important archive and challenges humanities scholars of all midcentury regions to reconfigure their fields." - Modern Language Quarterly

"Popescu’s biggest contribution here is historiographical: not only does she historicize African literary production during the Cold War, she also reveals the lasting effects of the Cold War on today’s intellectual concepts and commitments. . . . By rehabilitating the idea of the writer as engaged, even committed, At Penpoint reveals a scholar undertaking not only study of the era of decolonization, but also the slow process of decolonizing literary study itself by wresting the Cold War away from the superpowers who waged it." - Contemporary Literature

"At Penpoint accomplishes what the best scholarship does by illuminating what has been right before our eyes but obscured by our own blinders, ideological or otherwise. Her account resituates Africa at the center of postcolonial studies and reveals the Cold War to be, among other things, a struggle of competing imperialisms." - The Journal of African History