The Good, the Bad, and the Orientals

Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. By Christina Klein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 316 pages. $21.95 (paper).

The title of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 presents author Christina Klein's challenge: to deal with its three central terms—cold war, Orientalism, and middlebrow—in relation to one another. A daunting enough task, as each one of these problematics signals an unusually complex political and theoretical history, even taken individually; to treat them in triangulation would seem to necessarily require some impossible choices about what to include and what to sacrifice for the sake of cohesion. These choices are by no means unique to Klein, of course, but Cold War Orientalism is interesting in part as a case study in the political implications of argumentative focus. That is to say that this is an ambitious and often excellent book, and one that is sure to interest and influence scholars of all three of its title's primary topics, yet it is a study of American Orientalism in which there are very few Asian Americans, and one that seems so concerned with explaining its subjects that at times it functions as an apology for the very cultural formations it seeks to critique.

Klein argues that Cold War middlebrow Orientalism was directly tied to the U.S. federal government's political projects abroad. In negotiating the complicated political terrain of the Cold War, American foreign policy makers faced a difficult question: how to maintain a continuing project of postwar imperial expansion while simultaneously projecting the image of America as nonimperial, nonexpansionist benevolent peacekeeper. "The political and cultural problem for Americans," as Klein presents it, was, "how can we define our nation as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?" (9). Klein's great contribution to the understanding of Cold War foreign policy discourse is her argument that this internal conflict was managed in two major ways: first, in the construction of narratives in which America was seen as a land of pluralism, multiculturalism, and racial integration, and second, by the casting of these narratives in ways that relied overwhelmingly on the literary and cultural tropes of sentimentalism. The Asian political designs of an expansionist American government were engaged by various producers of American middlebrow culture, Klein argues, and this engagement resulted in a wide range of sentimental Orientalisms. By projecting an image of racial tolerance, narratives that featured America's role as an imperialist presence in Asia were radically softened, made into dramas of what Klein calls "mutual exchange and understanding": "Middlebrow intellectuals eagerly embraced these ideals of tolerance and inclusion, and largely framed their representations of noncommunist Asia within them. . . . They envisioned U.S. global expansion as taking place within a system of reciprocity. In their view, America did not pursue its naked self-interest through the coercion and subjugation of others, but engaged in exchanges that benefited all parties" (11-13). This language of mutuality and emotion, Klein argues, is Cold War Orientalism's most significant feature: it masks the military and economic exploitation of America's Cold War expansion, and it is radically sentimental. "Middlebrow texts are full of exchanges between Asians and Americans," Klein explains: "intellectual exchanges of conversation, economic exchanges of shopping, emotional exchanges of love, physical exchanges of tourism and immigration. . . . Cultural producers imaginatively mapped a network of sentimental pathways between the United States and Asia that paralleled and reinforced the more material pathways along which America's economic, political, and military power flowed" (13-17).

As a result, Klein argues, narratives that favor sentimental tropes dominate Cold War middlebrow Orientalism—jungle doctors, white mothers, intercultural romance—and these sentimental narratives become idealized cover stories for American foreign policy: America is an altruistic healer, a benevolent teacher, a feminized love object. America is thus neither the racist isolationist it had been before World War II nor one of the...