I've just finished reading Christina Klein's fine study, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Most studies of Cold War culture focus on the doctrine of containment, with its attempt to draw an absolute difference between the Communist and Western blocs. Klein argues persuasively, though, that Cold War ideology also required a doctrine of integration, a positive view of the world that stressed emotional attachments, relationality, and belief in a single "family of man." A new form of Orientalism was needed, one that tried to draw connections between the U.S. and exotic Asians, providing the sentimental education that was thought necessary to win the struggles with the Soviet camp.

She traces this discourse through the explosion of Asia-related popular culture that appeared in the decades after WWII: Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals (South Pacific, The King and I, The Flower Drum Song), James Michener's Asia-Pacific novels and essays, internationalist-minded general magazines like Reader's Digest and Saturday Review. In all of these, Asia is highly exoticized--but only as a prelude to depictions of crossings of the boundary between East and West, crossings that become all the more thrilling because of the exoticization. That these crossing usually involve romance make them all the more effective in producing powerful emotions of sympathy. The mode of "adoption" also becomes central, both as an actual practice and as a metaphor: Asians were now welcome to join in the American/global family.

Klein ties together modernization theory, Cold War liberalism, and pop culture in remarkable ways. It especially struck home for me because this was very much the world I was raised in: I grew up reading Reader's Digest--in fact, my education at Macalester College (a pillar of postwar internationalism) was paid for by a fellowship from DeWitt Wallace, one of Klein's key figures. The book made me see much more clearly than I ever had how I was brought up to be a citizen of Cold War culture. I certainly can't renounce that upbringing--nor do I particularly want to. But thanks to the book, I now see it from a new angle, and I understand better how the details of my own experience intersected with broad, global forces. And I learn once again that even my yearnings and hopes are not entirely of my own making.

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