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Reviewed by:
  • Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective ed. by Philip E. Muehlenbeck
  • Douglas Woodwell
Philip E. Muehlenbeck, Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War: A Global Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. 324 pp. $27.95.

For many people during the Cold War, racial and ethnic cues provided a more accessible frame for group loyalties than did abstract bipolar ideological confrontation. The edited volume Racial and Ethnic Politics during the Cold War offers readers a window on the roles that race and ethnicity played in eleven different contexts—influencing everything from the grand ideological narratives of the superpowers to conditions facing minority Afro-Caribbean laborers in Panama.

In two interesting and readily contrastable chapters, authors Michael Krenn and Maxim Matusevich explore the interplay between international politics and domestic racism in the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. Krenn offers a sweeping view of the role of race in U.S. foreign policy and shows how the problem of racism at home left U.S. officials vulnerable to harges of hypocrisy when they sought to portray an enlightened image abroad. Krenn attempts to discuss the whole history of U.S. foreign policy, but the topic is too sweeping to be covered in a single chapter, and by the time he reduces the U.S. role in Vietnam to a race-based war against a perceived “medieval [End Page 198] society desperately in need of American know-how and resolve” (p. 22), his interpretation feels like it has become overly tethered to his narrative.

Matusevich’s topic, on the other hand, is more manageable. He focuses on the often difficult lives of African students within the Soviet Union with an eye toward the larger question of why racism is so endemic in modern Russian society, which emerged from a Soviet state that boasted of having progressive domestic and international racial views. Matusevich’s contribution works particularly well when describing relatable and human stories while juxtaposing youthful socialist idealism with the everyday realities of life in the Soviet Union.

Many of the chapters in Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War explore how the lives of racial minorities, like the African students who came to the Soviet Union, became intertwined with political symbolism during the Cold War. Henley Adams offers an incisive investigation of the symbolic “common ancestry”–themed discourse of Fidel Castro’s government as it sought to curry favor among African governments in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the prominent role played by Afro-Cubans in military and diplomatic efforts surrounding Cuba’s Angolan intervention. Similarly, David Webster’s chapter on the unrequited Papuan nationalist movement shows how Papuan leaders sought support for their cause through appeals to racial solidarity with Africa, only to find themselves shunted aside by an Organization of African States determined to preserve the postcolonial territorial status quo.

Kitrina Hagen’s noteworthy chapter looks at race through the German Cold War context and the contrasting rhetorical debates between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic during the crises in the Congo in the early 1960s. German history at the time amplified the salience of racial discourse, and the East German government, in particular, wasted few opportunities to portray West Germany as the “neo-imperialist successor state of imperial and Nazi Germany” (p. 174). Again, like the most successful parts of the volume, Hagen is effective when she weaves the larger international context together with a smaller-scale exploration of media, culture, and popular perception.

Even though the final three chapters (out of eleven) of Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War focus on ethnic identities and political mobilization, the main focus of the book is on issues surrounding racial identity. In his introductory chapter, Nico Slate suggests that the volume “probes the relative strength of race-based versus more narrowly ethnic-based forms of transnational solidarity” (p. xii). The book does little of the sort, and although the final few chapters are interesting pieces of scholarship, they feel slightly out of place thematically.

Overall, however, this is an effective and engrossing collection of impressive scholarship on a relatively understudied topic. The volume succeeds in achieving the editor’s goal of “broadening...

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