A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism & Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia Pacific - History Book on US Foreign Policy & Asian Studies for Academics & Political Science Enthusiasts

Author: Hong, Christine

Asia

Published on 11 August 2020 by STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS in the United States as part of 'the Post*45' series.

Paperback / softback | 320 pages
153 x 228 x 25 | 498g

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¡ªplacing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War¨Cera 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¡ªimagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.