Cold War Orientalism

by Klein, Christina

• ISBN13: 9780520224698
• ISBN10: 0520224698
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-02-01
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

In the years following World War II, American writers and artists produced a steady stream of popular stories about Americans living, working, and traveling in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile the U.S., competing with the Soviet Union for global power, extended its reach into Asia to an unprecedented degree. This book reveals that these trends--the proliferation of Orientalist culture and the expansion of U.S. power--were linked in complex and surprising ways. While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration--a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena--including Rodgers and Hammerstein'sSouth PacificandThe King and I,James Michener's travel essays and novelHawaii,and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program--Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals, created a culture of global integration that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. Her book enlarges Edward Said's notion of Orientalism in order to bring to light a cultural narrative about both domestic and international integration that still resonates today.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction	1	(18)
Sentimental Education: Creating a Global Imaginary of Integration	19	(42)
Reader's Digest, Saturday Review, and the Middlebrow Aesthetic of Commitment	61	(39)
How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism	100	(43)
Family Ties as Political Obligation: Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific, and the Discourse of Adoption	143	(48)
Musicals and Modernization: The King and I	191	(32)
Asians in America: Flower Drum Song and Hawaii	223	(42)
Conclusion	265	(12)
Notes	277	(26)
Index	303