Before Bandung: Afro-Asian Cross-referencing and Comparative Racialization

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 599-622
Author(s):  
Tanya Agathocleous ◽  
Janet Neary
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Missed Opportunities ◽  
Racial Solidarity ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Comparative Racialization

Abstract This essay analyzes the rhetorical and political connections between African American and South Asian critiques of race and empire in the century leading up to the Bandung conference in 1955. Specifically, we trace the way “caste” emerges as a key rhetorical term in the mid-to-late nineteenth century for linking the oppressions of race, slavery, and its aftermath in the United States to those of caste and empire in India. Building on work by Nico Slate and Antoinette Burton, we identify a strategic citational practice we call Afro-Asian cross-referencing, which the writers under consideration use to advance anti-racism in sometimes very local contexts. Focusing on the dynamic periodical culture of the period, our study analyzes anti-caste sentiment as an expression of cross-racial solidarity uniting anti-colonial movements in India with racial uplift movements in the United States. Because the concept of “Afro-Asian solidarity” first took hold at the Bandung conference of 1955 and the Non-Aligned Movement that it helped to originate, the phenomenon itself remains most visible in relation to this later period and the Cold War context. By shifting focus to an earlier moment in the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, we illuminate the work that the idea of caste did in defining strategic transnational connections—as well as missed opportunities for connection—later in the century.

Ordered to Disarm, Encouraged to Rearm: Japan’s Struggles with the Postwar

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-160
Author(s):  
Garren Mulloy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Institution ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

In the fall of 1945, the Japanese military institution’s end was sudden and final, one of the central ordering institutions of East Asia since the late-nineteenth century disappeared. Or did it? As Garren Mulloy shows, the Japanese imperial military institutions – its ethos, cultures, and personnel – were recast and reinvented in the Cold War as the United States sought to transform Japan into a key ally. In a detailed historical examination of the imperial roots of the SDF, Mulloy examines how the military institution of the fallen empire was sustained and then reconfigured to serve the new era of democracy and an international order dominated by the United States. In the process he recasts Japanese post-1945 security in a new postimperial key, focusing on the first two decades of security transformation, and showing how once imperial officers latched onto the Cold War help to reinvent the Japanese military as a territorially bound Self Defense Force. In the process he revises the familiar story of demilitarization and pacifism into a more complicated and ambivalent history of transwar martial cultures and practises which continued to flourish deep into the 1960s.

Ballet in the Cold War

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Searcy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Performing Artists ◽  
Exchange Programs ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.

The Invisible Hand of Diplomacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-376
Author(s):  
Elizabeth O’Brien Ingleson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time ◽  
Simple Narrative ◽  
The U.S

In December 1977, a tiny group of U.S. glove makers—most of whom were African American and Latina women—launched a petition before the U.S. International Trade Commission calling for protection from rising imports. Their target was China. Represented by the Work Glove Manufacturers Association, their petition called for quotas on a particular kind of glove entering the United States from China: cotton work gloves. This was a watershed moment. For the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, U.S. workers singled out Chinese goods in pursuit of import relief. Because they were such a small group taking on a country as large as China, their supporters championed the cause as one of David versus Goliath. Yet the case has been forgotten, partly because the glove workers lost. Here I uncover their story, bringing the history of 1970s deindustrialization in the United States into conversation with U.S.-China rapprochement, one of the most significant political transformations of the Cold War. The case, and indeed the loss itself, reveals the tensions between the interests of U.S. workers, corporations, and diplomats. Yet the case does not provide a simple narrative of U.S. workers’ interests being suppressed by diplomats and policymakers nurturing globalized trade ties. Instead, it also underscored the conflicting interests within the U.S. labor movement at a time when manufacturing companies were moving their production jobs to East Asia.

Response to James Lebovic's review of Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1169-1170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Jervis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Policy Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bright Side ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War

Among the many issues raised by James Lebovic's perceptive review are two that strike me as crucial: the relationships between intelligence and social science and those between intelligence and policymaking. The first itself has two parts, one being how scholars can study intelligence. Both access and methods are difficult. For years, diplomatic historians referred to intelligence as the “hidden dimension” of their subject. Now it is much more open, and Great Britain, generally more secretive than the United States, has just issued the authorized history of MI5 (see Christopher Andrew, Defend the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5, 2009). Since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has released extensive, if incomplete, records, and the bright side (for us) of intelligence failures is that they lead to the release of treasure troves of documents, which can often be supplemented by memoirs and interviews. But even more than in other aspects of foreign policy analysis, we are stuck with evidence that is fragmentary. In this way, we resemble scholars of ancient societies, who forever lament the loss of most of the material they want to study.

Locating Nowhere

2018 ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Michael Robertson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Edward Bellamy ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Fourier ◽  
Total Reconstruction

This chapter examines the proliferation of utopian literature in the United States and Great Britain during the late nineteenth century, mainly due to the economic and social upheavals resulting from industrial capitalism. In particular, it shows how writers such as Edward Bellamy and Thomas More came up with their visions of peaceful and egalitarian future worlds in response to the turbulence of their era. The chapter first provides an overview of the Great Depression experienced by both the United States and Great Britain between 1873 and 1896, a period characterized by extreme poverty and unemployment, before discussing the history of More's Utopia (1516). It then considers how utopian socialists in Europe and the United States, including Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier, devised schemes for the total reconstruction of society. It also analyzes Henry George's utopian vision, which he articulated in his 1879 book Progress and Poverty.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy

2021 ◽  
pp. 329-345
Author(s):  
Adriane Lentz-Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Grand Strategy ◽  
National Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Foreign Relations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explores grand strategy as an intellectual and cultural project by considering its willful unseeing of race as a political project. To ignore race is to misapprehend how power works in the United States and how domestic formulations of subjectivity, difference, and racialized power imbue American foreign relations. The chapter focuses on African Americans in the era of Cold War civil rights. For Carl Rowan and Sam Greenlee, the two African American veterans who provide concrete cases for thinking about the United States and the world, their blackness and ambitions for their people would color how they interpreted America's role in political and military struggles in the Third World and beyond. As with other people of color, their encounters with white supremacy shaped their understandings of liberation, violence, and the United States security project. Their perspectives challenge scholars’ conceptions of the Cold War as a period of “defined clear national interests” and “public consensus.” Centering the stories of Rowan and Greenlee highlights not simply ongoing contestation over the myth and history of the Cold War, but, more fundamentally, the unthinking whiteness of grand strategy itself.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Composers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The introduction provides an overview of the history of musical Americanism, from the 1920s to the 1970s, in tandem with an assessment of changing attitudes toward American identity in the United States. It introduces scholarly debates surrounding the Cold War politicization of serialism and tonality and describes the various opportunities for work with government exploited by American composers during the 1950s and 1960s. These opportunities included serving as advisers to the State Department, the US Information Agency, and organizations funded by the CIA, as well as touring overseas as government-funded cultural ambassadors. These contexts establish the basis for the book’s argument that the Cold War presented both challenges and opportunities for Americanist composers that would ultimately result in a rebranding of their style.

Operation Pedro Pan: The Migration of Unaccompanied Cuban Children to the United States, 1960–1962

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anita Casavantes Bradford
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federally Funded ◽  
Difficult Decision ◽  
History Of ◽  
Children’S Homes ◽  
Pedro Pan ◽  
The Cold War

Between the autumn of 1960 and October of 1962, the parents of more than fourteen thousand Cuban children made the difficult decision to send their children alone to the United States, where a young Irish immigrant priest, Father Bryan O. Walsh, arranged for them to be cared for by U.S. foster homes and in Catholic children’s homes and orphanages. The Cuban children’s exodus would later become known as Operation Pedro Pan; the federally funded and Catholic Church–administered program that was established to care for these children would be called the Cuban Children’s Program. Their interconnected trajectories are central to the history of post-revolutionary Cuba and of the Miami Cuban exile community, and shed important light on U.S.-Cuba and U.S.-Latin America relations during the height of the Cold War.

History of Testing in the United States: PK–12 Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 683 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maris A. Vinovskis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
No Child Left Behind ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
K 12

This article provides a brief history of K–12 education testing in the United States from colonial America to the present. In early America, students were examined orally. After the mid-nineteenth century, written tests replaced oral presentations. In the late nineteenth century, graded schools gradually replaced the single-teacher, one-room schools. In the beginning of the twentieth century, standardized intelligence tests were increasingly used to categorize and promote students. State departments of education have played a larger role in local school funding and policies in the past hundred years. Since the 1960s, the federal government has expanded its involvement in national education while also promoting the role of states. During the past three decades, the federal government and states increased the use of high-stakes national testing with initiatives such as America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and Every Student Succeeds.

Brazil and ‘Latin America’

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
LESLIE BETHELL
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
History Of ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
First Time

AbstractThis essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.

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