Content area
Full Text
Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War. By Naima Prevots. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. xiv, 174 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-8195-6365-X.)
Naima Prevots's handsome, revealing book on dance and diplomacy is a thoroughly original contribution to the history of Cold War intercultural relations. The book itself, with its more than fifty illustrations, is a work of art as well as of history.
Prevots's study centers on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1954 Emergency Fund for International Affairs, for which Congress authorized $5 million "to stimulate the presentation abroad by private firms and groups of the best American industrial and cultural achievements."
Eisenhower perceived the Cold War as a battle for hearts and minds in which the appeal of Western culture, broadly conceived, ultimately would win out. The emergency fund authorized cultural displays and events in allied, developing, and "iron curtain" nations. "The program," Prevots writes, "a peacetime gamble by...