1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910777389903321

Autore

Klein Christina <1963->

Titolo

Cold War orientalism [[electronic resource] ] : Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961 / / Christina Klein

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, 2003

ISBN

0-520-93625-6

1-283-42257-3

1-59734-548-2

9786613422576

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (574 p.)

Disciplina

950.4/24

Soggetti

Orientalism - United States - History - 20th century

Public opinion - United States

Asians in mass media

Cold War - Social aspects - United States

Popular culture - United States - History - 20th century

Asia Foreign public opinion, American

United States Foreign relations 1945-1989

United States Relations Asia

Asia Relations United States

United States Civilization 1945-

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-302) index.

Nota di contenuto

Sentimental education : creating a global imaginary of integration -- Reader's digest, Saturday review, and the middlebrow aesthetic of commitment -- How to be an American abroad : James Michener's The voice of Asia, and postwar mass tourism -- Family ties as political obligation : Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific, and the discourse of adoption -- Musicals and modernization : The king and I -- Asians in America : Flower drum song and Hawaii.

Sommario/riassunto

In the years following World War II, American writers and artists produced a steady stream of popular stories about Americans living, working, and traveling in Asia and the Pacific. Meanwhile the U.S.,



competing with the Soviet Union for global power, extended its reach into Asia to an unprecedented degree. This book reveals that these trends-the proliferation of Orientalist culture and the expansion of U.S. power-were linked in complex and surprising ways. While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration-a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena-including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, James Michener's travel essays and novel Hawaii, and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program-Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals, created a culture of global integration that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. Her book enlarges Edward Said's notion of Orientalism in order to bring to light a cultural narrative about both domestic and international integration that still resonates today.