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  • Navigating the Ruins of Pax Americana
  • A. J. Yumi Lee (bio)
Christine Hong, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. xi + 320 pp. $30.00.

Although the United States has been engaged in continuous, escalating military conflict around the globe since the Second World War, a mistaken view persists in the US of the post-1945 period as an era of relative world peace: our overseas military conflicts are depicted in mainstream discourses as minor and peripheral, prophylactic if not benevolent, reactive rather than aggressive, a means for maintaining world peace rather than violent interventions that generate new enemies. Meanwhile, in Americanist scholarship, studies of Cold War culture still tend to imaginatively center the white middle-class family amid a domestic atmosphere of prosperity fostered by this so-called "long peace." Accordingly, the cultural productions we associate with the Cold War tend toward paranoia and kitsch, focusing on Americans' (read: white Americans) feelings of existential dread evoked by the potential threat of nuclear weapons rather than acknowledging the real, horrific losses that the use and testing of these weapons inflicted on their racialized targets. That the post-1945 era marks the expansion of the US military into the largest and most destructive force in the world remains outside the main picture, something additional rather than foundational to US culture. [End Page 125]

Christine Hong's A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific forcefully challenges and dismantles these misconceptions. Tracing the workings of what she calls the "U.S. war machine" from World War II to the present, Hong demonstrates that the so-called global "Pax Americana" since 1945 has been secured through the brutal deployment of state violence in Asia and the Pacific. In the book, Hong interrogates the "redemptive national narrative of postwar U.S. democracy," asking pointedly, "How and why did most Americans perceive a time of unrestrained war violence to be a period of uneasy peace?" (3). The answer to this question, for Hong, is twofold. First, she argues that the US military in this era took on a "redemptive liberal veneer" (9) by recruiting and integrating racial minorities into its ranks, thus operating as "an engine of both life-affirming and lethal multiculturalism" (1). She shows that against a backdrop of racial unrest at home and anticolonial struggles globally, the US military promoted a feel-good story of US liberal democracy making good on its promises. Second, Hong argues that the military's violent interventions overseas, which indiscriminately targeted entire racialized populations and terrains for destruction in the name of their strategic utility for US interests, were recast as necessary steps toward a global project of "democratization." She not only insists on "[d]emocratization's inextricability from U.S. militarism" (17) but goes further to make the case that examining how democratization works reveals a "suppressed legacy of U.S. fascism" (21).

To make these arguments, Hong assembles and examines a set of texts that she considers to be "an undertheorized body of post 1945 cultural production—a politically equivocal body of cultural expression that we might call art or literature of democratization" (20). This "transpacific archive of U.S. war and militarism," which Hong analyzes across seven chapters, brings together texts that "for reasons of national location, ethnic literary tradition, genre or medium, or narrowly conceived historic era have typically been interpreted apart" (19). Of particular interest to scholars in American literary studies will be the book's chapters on Ralph Ellison and Miné Okubo, both of which contribute extensive original research on understudied aspects of these important authors. The book's first chapter reassesses Ellison's Invisible Man as a war novel, in part by [End Page 126] locating its origins in an earlier unfinished manuscript that focuses on a Black American pilot being held in a Nazi prisoner of war camp during World War II. Reading this earlier "Airman Novel" as an expression of Black antifascism that takes aim at American racism as much as it does German Nazism, Hong argues that Ellison's "wartime...

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