Browsing by Subject "Cold War"

“Caring for Korea” examines American relief work during and following the Korean War (1950-1953), and the way that humanitarianism shaped American Cold War approaches to empire. Centering aid workers, I highlight the lives and experiences of Americans who expressed concern for Koreans and mobilized that concern to build influence in East Asia. Utilizing records from government agencies, the United Nations, and church and relief organizations, I find incomplete American hegemony, even as the U.S. controlled and utilized many different institutions to exert its will in Korea. My research shows how through humanitarian work, the labor of empire was gendered, soft, and flexible; and that the agents of empire used American influence to work for their own goals.

The main research question of this thesis is how do grand strategies form. Grand strategy is defined as a state's coherent and consistent pattern of behavior over a long period of time in search of an overarching goal. The political science literature usually explains the formation of grand strategies by using a planning (or design) model. In this dissertation, I use primary sources, interviews with former government officials, and historical scholarship to show that the formation of grand strategy is better understood using a model of emergent learning imported from the business world. My two case studies examine the formation of American grand strategy during the Cold War and the post-Cold War eras. The dissertation concludes that in both these strategic eras the dominating grand strategies were formed primarily by emergent learning rather than flowing from advanced designs.

My dissertation project, Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War, follows the global travels of Boris Pasternak’s novel as it becomes a key text in the propaganda politics of the 1950s. The story I tell contributes to scholarly understandings of literature as covert warfare by analyzing a primary archive and offering new insight into the cultural dimensions of the Cold War. I reimagine what a literary history means in a global frame by considering how different actors—CIA agents, publishers, and readers in the Soviet Union, the United States, and Italy—approached Doktor Zhivago as both a fictional text and a political weapon. Taken together, the chapters of Doktor Zhivago’s Cold War offer a global story of Pasternak’s novel in order to draw a more comprehensive picture of literature’s importance as propaganda during the Cold War. The history I offer revises our understanding of the globality of Cold War cultural politics.

This dissertation deals with the history and memory of the Border War with China in contemporary Vietnam. Due to its particularity as a war between two neighboring socialist countries in Cold War Asia, the Border War has been a sensitive topic in Vietnam. While political sensitivity regarding the national past derives largely from the Party-State, the history and memory of the war has permeated Vietnamese society. The war's legacy can be seen in anti-China sentiments that, in the globalized neoliberal order, appear to be reviving alongside post-Cold War nationalism. The Border War against China represented an important nationalist turn for Vietnam. At the same time, the traumatic breakdown of the socialist fraternity cultivated anxiety over domestic and international relations. The recent territorial dispute over the South China Sea, between Vietnam and China, has recalled the history and memory of the war in 1979. The growing anti-China sentiment in Vietnam also interpellates the war as a near future.

As an anthropological approach to the history and memory of war, this dissertation addresses five primary questions: 1) how the historyscape of Vietnam's past has been shifted through politics on the Border War; 2) how the memoryscape involving the Border War has been configured as national and local experience; 3) how the Border War has shaped the politics of ethnic minorities in a border province; 4) why the borderscape in Vietnam constantly affects the politics of the nation-state in the globalized world order; and 5) why the border markets and trade activities have been a realm of competing instantiations of post-Cold War nationalism and global neoliberalism.

In order to tackle these questions, I conducted anthropological fieldwork in Lang Son, a northern border province and Ha Noi, the capital city of Vietnam from 2005 to 2012, and again briefly in 2014. A year of intensive fieldwork from 2008 to 2009 in Lang Son province paved the road to understanding the local history and local people's memory of the Border War in a contemporary social context. This long-term participant observation research in a sensitive border area allowed me to take a comprehensive view of how the memory of the Border War against China plays out in everyday life and affects the livelihood of the border's inhabitants. In Ha Noi, conducting archival research and discussing issues with Vietnamese scholars, I was able to broaden my understanding of Vietnamese national history and the socialist past. Because Vietnam is one of the countries with the fastest growing use of the Internet, I have also closely traced the emergence of on-line debates and the circulation of information over the Internet as a new form of social exchange in Vietnam.

As a conclusion, I suggest that memory and experience have situated Vietnam as a nation-state in a particular mode of post-Cold War nationalism, one which keeps recalling the memory of the Border War in the post-Cold War era. As the national border has been reconfigured by the legacy of war and by fluctuating border trade, the border challenges unbalanced bilateral relations in the neoliberal world order. The edge of the nation-state becomes the edge of neoliberalism in the contemporary world. The Vietnamese border region will continue to recall the horrors of nationalism and internationalism, through the imaginaries of socialist fraternity or in the practices off contemporary neoliberal multilateralism.

KEYWORDS:

Vietnam, China, Lang Son, the Border War, Memory, the Cold War, the post-Cold War, Neoliberalism.

“In Search of Friendship” attempts to set straight the confounding record on Russian oil in the twentieth century. Engaging a rich literature centered on questions of national energy dependency, a broad term denoting fraught reliance on potentially scarce fuel supplies, the dissertation poses alternative questions of energy transition, or changes in the state of a given energy system. These questions include the following: Why did the Soviet government neglect its oil industry for more than two decades after coming to power? How did that same government then manage to transform its oil industry into a global leader within less than a decade during the Cold War? And how did it manage to mobilize the material resources, political will, and technical know-how to build the world’s longest oil pipeline, which they named “Druzhba,” the Russian word for friendship? Traditionally, scholars have answered these questions by arguing that the Soviet government repurposed tried-and-true tools of central economic planning as circumstances demanded, changing its underlying economic system little in the process. Applying a business history approach, “In Search of Friendship” counters this narrative by bringing the socialist firm to the center of its analysis to create a narrative of dynamic if ultimately unsuccessful change and innovation. In short, it supplant a story of what one historian has called “history’s cruel tricks” with another story of “best laid plans gone awry.” In the process, it draws heavily on material from more than a dozen historical repositories in Russia, including the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of the Economy, and the National Archive of the Republic of Tatarstan.

Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.

In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.

My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.

Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.

The development of television in postwar Japan synchronized with both Japan’s nation building project after World War II and its geopolitical positionality within the global Cold War. While much of the previous scholarship has been dedicated to postwar Japan and its political and economic entanglement with the Cold War, the dearth of research on how the Cold War culture, or the cultures of the Cold War, shaped the growing nation leaves room for further discussion. Following the “cultural turn” in Cold War studies and taking television as the vantage point, this thesis aims to unpack the correlation between television culture and nation building during the ideological war. The conviction that television should be understood as contextualized within the socio-cultural background leads to the emphases of the thesis not only on the technological features of the apparatus, but also on its social and cultural reception and implications. The thesis firstly traces the development of and discourse on television in postwar Japan to shed light on how television has been inextricably intertwined with the nation since its nascent stage; secondly analyzes the popularization of television as a household appliance and suggests television’s omnipresent role in mediating the relationship between nation and quotidian life; thirdly focuses on television’s live broadcast technology and its utilization during the national events to indicate television’s centrality to the construction of national imaginary. Resorting to both archival resources and secondary materials, to both historical documents and TV commercials, to methodologies in both media studies, visual studies and cultural studies, and to such theorists as Raymond Williams, amongst others, the thesis argues that 1) the development of television in postwar Japan was in sync with Japan’s nation building and economic booming; 2) television presents itself as a spectacle of national prosperity towards its audience, situates the audience in the “national time” and contributes to a national “imagined community.”

In Europe and North America, NATO was established in 1949 to confront communist pressure. Meanwhile in Asia Pacific, however, no collective security institution was created, despite raging communism. Using the Foreign Relations of the United States and other diplomatic archives, I test current explanations for the contrast. Current explanations, insightful and illuminating as they are, fail to support themselves with sufficient evidence from documents. I then propose three arguments: US suspicion of the value-added of military commitment, a lack of commitment by regional countries towards collective security, and heterogeneity of communist threats. I conclude by proposing power configuration and geographic scope as two key factors that determine the effectiveness of collective security: the less major and middle powers included, and the larger geographical stretch covered, the less likely collective security is to succeed. This paper contributes to studies on the historical issue of collective security in Asia Pacific during the early Cold War as well as to real-world policy analysis of the current situation in the region.Keywords: Pacific Pact, Cold War, collective security, the United States, communism