Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (review)

In this beautifully crafted, arresting, and exciting study, Christina Klein explains how the producers of American middlebrow culture, through their work, writings, and institutions, presented Asia to their domestic audience in the years from 1945, when U.S. power in the region expanded enormously with the victory in World War II, to 1961, when preoccupation with the Vietnam War was just starting to overshadow all other dimensions of U.S. involvement there. With a great deal seemingly at stake as the United States began to confront the ideological threat of Communism, the willingness of ordinary U.S. citizens to accept extensive U.S. engagement in Asia became a key issue for those who feared that indifference could pave the way for further geopolitical setbacks (pp. 27–28). Events in China from 1949 on were a powerful spur to this kind of thinking. The result was an official and unofficial effort at what Klein terms "sentimental education" designed to bridge the apparent differences between East and West and to warn Americans that manifestations of coercion, racism, or attempted domination would gravely alienate the peoples of non-Communist Asia, most of whom were just emerging from the shadow of formal colonialism. Winning the allegiance of others in the Cold War was a "sentimental formulation, grounded in the fear of loss and the desire for connection" (pp. 43–44). Klein looks at numerous types of middlebrow culture: mass-circulation periodicals such as Reader's Digest and Saturday Review; the bestselling political novel The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, describing the weaknesses of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia; Thomas A. Dooley's accounts of his medical work in Laos; James A. Michener's short stories, travel essays, and novels; and a trio of (political) musicals by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, South Pacific, The King and I, and Flower Drum Song. As Klein highlights throughout, the subject of these enormously popular texts and narratives was not so much Asians themselves but the many Americans who were coming to live, work, and travel in the region. The cultural producers hoped that the presentation of these accounts to the American public would help to promote feelings of sympathy that would overcome entrenched U.S. racism and advance the goals of U.S. policy in Asia (and, not least, reinforce support for the foreign aid program).

Central to Klein's analysis is a finely drawn challenge to Edward W. Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). She argues that the early twentieth-century refutation of scientifically determined biological racism, and the rise of the Boasian notion of cultural difference, had a major impact on postwar U.S. representations of Asia. With the United States able to project itself as the home of ethnic, religious, and racial diversity, tolerance, and inclusion (regardless of the reality), it was possible to reach out to peoples across the cultural divide to establish ties and feelings of solidarity that would underpin political alliances and provide a more positive message than the bland injunctions of anti-Communism. Hence, alongside the familiar idea of containment, Klein advances the notion of parallel "imaginary of integration." The U.S. purpose (and self-image) became one of forging intellectual and emotional bonds with the peoples of Asia and Africa in relationships based on exchange, in contrast to the exploitation associated with imperialism (p. 23). The process of middlebrow education that Klein presents is reciprocal. Asians learned about Western culture, technology, and values from the Americans in their midst, and Americans were induced to reach beyond their parochial backgrounds by understanding that they had much in common with peoples thousands of miles beyond their shores. The idea, as a U.S. State Department official memorably put it in 1957, was to give Americans an "education for overseasmanship" (p. 21) that made them sensitive to the needs of newly independent Asian countries, thus counteracting the overbearing and destructive stereotypes portrayed in The...