20th century
A01=Christina Klein
america
american history
americans in asia
artists
asia
asian history
Author_Christina Klein
Category=DS
Category=JHMC
Category=NHF
Category=NHK
cold war
cold war era
cultural historians
cultural history
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
global power struggles
globalization
historians
intellectuals
international relations
middlebrow
nonfiction
orientalism
orientalist culture
pacific islands
policy makers
political history
political policies
postwar period
public opinion
soviet union
textbooks
us expansion
world history
writers
Product details
- ISBN 9780520232303
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Mar 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Christina Klein is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
