The Principled Brand Strategist

Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari

This chapter examines the Cold War experience of composer Aaron Copland. It argues that after suffering at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his cronies in the early 1950s, Copland reoriented himself. He not only turned away from musical Americanism as a composer but also took advantage of opportunities to tour overseas for the State Department, both to remove the taint of leftism from his image and to politically neutralize the Americanist style. Yet Copland’s Cold War choices were not simply a strategic response to a radically altered political landscape. Both his work with government and his musical works from this period show his enduring commitment to a set of strong personal principles that shaped his compositions, his writings, and his cultural diplomacy work across his long career. Copland’s ability to stay true to what he believed in ensured he never succumbed to cynicism, as did many other members of the Old Left.

2008 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen D. Wu

With the onset of the Cold War, the federal government became concerned with the impact that the status and treatment of Chinese Americans as a racial minority in American society had on perceptions of the United States among populations in the Asian Pacific. As a response, the State Department's cultural diplomacy campaigns targeting the Pacific Rim used Chinese Americans, including Betty Lee Sung (writer for the Voice of America) and Jade Snow Wong and Dong Kingman (artists who conducted lectures and exhibitions throughout Asia). By doing so, the government legitimated Chinese Americans' long-standing claims to full citizenship in new and powerful ways. But the terms on which Chinese Americans served as representatives of the nation and the state——as racial minorities and as ““Overseas Chinese””——also worked to reproduce their racial otherness and mark them as ““non-white”” and foreign, thus compromising their gains in social standing.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIELLE FOSLER-LUSSIER

AbstractFrom January to May 1965 the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program. This tour serves as a case study through which we can see the far-reaching effects of cultural diplomacy. The State Department initially envisioned its cultural and informational programs as one-way communication that brought ideas from the United States to new places; yet the tours changed not only audiences, but also the musicians themselves and even the communities to which the musicians returned. Both archival and oral history evidence indicate that the Michigan jazz band's tour succeeded in building vital imagined connections across international borders. The nature of these connections demonstrates that the cold war practice of pushing culture across borders for political purposes furthered cultural globalization—even though the latter process is often regarded by scholars as a phenomenon that began only after the end of the cold war. The jazz band's tour highlights the essential role of music and musicians in fostering new transnational sensibilities in the politicized context of the cold war.


Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari

This chapter looks at the Cold War experience of leading Americanist composer Roy Harris. Harris is a complicated case because although he held politically progressive views, he participated in creating an image for himself that aligned with a more conservative, exceptionalist nationalism. This contradiction between his personal politics and the politics his image projected was mostly sustainable during the 1930s and 1940s, when leftist attitudes and exceptionalist nationalism were not considered entirely incompatible. But during the first decades of the Cold War, a period in which Harris felt increasingly alienated from mainstream American values, it engendered a personal and aesthetic crisis. This crisis is assessed through an examination of Harris’s writings, music, and cultural diplomacy work during this period, including an analysis of his Symphony no. 11 (1967).


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 441-463
Author(s):  
Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam

Abstract William Faulkner is an interesting case for the history of American cultural diplomacy. Although the State Department hailed him as a Cold War warrior, it had difficulty sponsoring his “modernist” novels in a book program that promoted American ideals during the Cold War. In this article I examine how the Franklin Book Programs arranged for some of Faulkner’s novels to be translated into Arabic and Persian by using sources from the Program’s archive and an interview with a former Franklin editor. The analysis is framed by Faulkner’s rise in status from a marginal to a major world writer. I also assess the cultural forces that led to his inclusion in Franklin’s list of publications. The analysis reveals a tension between American idealism and Cold War imperatives, further challenging the propagandist reading of the program and calling for a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of the cultural Cold War in the region.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.


Author(s):  
Anna Hayes

The 1990s was host to a range of conflicts emerging from weak or failed states. These conflicts typically involved significant humanitarian crises and widespread human rights abuses. Within this changing global environment, new security thinking started to engage “people” as the referent of security, moving away from the previous privileged status granted to the state as the only referent of security. The end of the Cold War enabled the human security paradigm to provide a significant challenge to the primacy of the state in security thinking. On the other hand, human security has been subject to much criticism and there has been heated debate over its applicability within the security agenda. This chapter argues that despite earlier concerns over its efficacy, human security has made inroads into security thinking and is mutually reinforcing to national security.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Slater

AbstractDictatorships are every bit as institutionally diverse as democracies, but where does this variation come from? This article argues that different types of internal rebellion influence the emergence of different types of authoritarian regimes. The critical question is whether rebel forces primarily seek to seize state power or to escape it. Regional rebellions seeking toescapethe state raise the probability of a military-dominated authoritarian regime, since they are especially likely to unify the military while heightening friction between civilian and military elites. Leftist rebellions seeking toseizethe state are more likely to give rise to civilian-dominated dictatorships by inspiring ‘joint projects’ in which military elites willingly support party-led authoritarian rule. Historical case studies of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam illustrate the theory, elaborating how different types of violent conflict helped produce different types of dictatorships across the breadth of mainland and island Southeast Asia during the Cold War era.


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