A Violent Peace

Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific

Christine Hong

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781503612914, 9781503603134
• eBook ISBN: 9781503612921
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia.

Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive—placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Democracy within the Teeth of Fascism”: The Black POW and the Invisible War at Home in Ralph Ellison’s War Writings
• 2. Revolution from Above: Ōe Kenzaburō, the Black Airman, and Occupied Japan
• 3. A Blueprint for Occupied Japan: Miné Okubo and the American Concentration Camp
• 4. Possessive Investment in Ruin: The Target, the Proving Ground, and the U.S. War Machine in the Nuclear Pacific
• 5. People’s War, People’s Democracy, People’s Epic: Carlos Bulosan, U.S. Counterintelligence, and Cold War Unreliable Narration
• 6. The Enemy at Home: Urban Warfare and the Russell Tribunal on Vietnam
• 7. Militarized Queerness: Racial Masking and the Korean War Mascot
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• Series List