Rum and Coca-Colonization? Ralph de Boissière and US Cold War power

This essay examines Rum and Coca-Cola, Ralph de Boissière’s novel about the World War II presence of US troops in Trinidad, tracing the striking shifts between the original, 1956 version released by a Communist-affiliated publishing cooperative in Australia and the revised, 1984 version published by Allison & Busby in Britain. These shifts–surprisingly, given de Boissière’s lifelong socialist commitments–enhance the earlier book’s initial emphasis on the liberatory possibilities opened up by the arrival of US-American soldiers. Via this comparison, the essay delineates the sometimes unexpected results of the intersection between the cultural and political currents of the Cold War and (one example of) the anti-colonial nationalist movements that were taking place simultaneously around the globe. Ultimately, the essay suggests that the “progress” of de Boissière’s novel across the bulk of the Cold War period can be read as a register of the efficacy of US-American soft power, which de Boissière represents as especially influential by virtue of its respect for the human desire for material comfort in the here and now, as opposed to more abstract calls to revolution and political change characteristic of the competing, Soviet approach.