Guest Editors' Introduction

The essays collected in this special issue participate in a larger scholarly reappraisal of the core-periphery logic and finite periodization by which the global Cold War has been written into history. Through the narrower methodological frameworks of diplomatic or military historiography or under the auspices of nationalist or liberal-triumphalist discourses, that history cleanly divided the Cold War world into ideologically opposed regional blocs and marked its demise with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The overarching contest of the Cold War was, moreover, understood to be a war of ideas that descended into military conflict through proxy in remote corners of the world and outside the North Atlantic and Central European theaters. It is no coincidence then that the most forceful revisions to this historiography have arisen with respect to the study of Asia, which not only witnessed catastrophic wars throughout the period of ostensible long peace but which continues to be a volatile site of ongoing bipolar struggle. But perhaps the more important intervention has come in the form of research showing many Asian societies were riven with conflicts that prompted them to take an active role in shaping the alignments and outcomes of the geopolitical contest. Tuong Vu, for instance, has argued forcefully for seeing the Cold War as an "intercontinental synchronization of hostilities in which Asian actors shared equal responsibilities with the superpowers in the spread of the conflict."¹ These mixed alliances and mutual manipulations owe less to regimes of puppetry and unilinear containment than they do to what Prasenjit Duara has termed the Cold War's "imperialism of nation-states." Pointing to the new postwar imperial doctrines of limited sovereignty and developmentalist economics that lay at the core of both US and Soviet containment strategies, Duara convincingly delineates both the conditions under which strong authoritarian states and armed conflict proliferated in the region and the role of East and Southeast Asia in anticipating and even precipitating the end of the Cold War.²

The cultural dimensions of the Cold War in Asia followed similarly pericentric paths within nations and within even the ostensibly aligned spheres of the region.³ Certainly, the powerful influence of US and Soviet cultural training, export, and diplomacy, often implemented hand in hand with military occupation and massive economic and political investment, cannot be ignored. Indeed, throughout the region, but especially in Japan, North and South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Vietnam, intellectual discourses and popular cultures were dominated by the continual workings of cultural-enlightenment agencies, educational-exchange institutions and, perhaps most significantly, film, music, and, to a lesser extent, literary productions flowing into and out of Hollywood and Moscow. But the crucial point is that the output of the superpower centers was not passively absorbed in place of existing cultural forms but rather that its reception was characterized by continuing and often intense negotiation and conflict between the demands of national strengthening and geopolitical diplomacy. This is precisely where the double register of the concept of the cultural Cold War has begun to be exploited as not only the "soft-power" realm in which superpowers and national regimes alike vied for "hearts and minds" but also as a terrain of lived experiences and practice upon which the often contradictory demands of ideological discipline, aesthetic ideals, and global cultural influences were negotiated.

Korean cinema is an especially fertile ground upon which to explore the Cold War given the ideological and governmental controls to which the film industry was subjected throughout the period. Indeed, the twin pillars of successive post-war regimes, anticommunism and economic development, deeply affected not only how films could be produced but also the political signification of the films that were made and seen. But as the articles in this collection demonstrate, the pressures of the Cold War were not only repressive and censorial; they could also yield transnational collaborations, experimentation with genre and style, and forms of political expression and subjectivity not easily reducible to broad ideological binaries or nationalist discourse. Whether they set out to comically represent the foibles of the premodern aristocracy or to meditate retrospectively on the psychic scars...