The Ghosts of Anticommunism and Neoliberalism

2020 ◽  
pp. 445-464
Author(s):  
Michael K. Bourdaghs
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Power Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter revisits the critiques of area studies carried out in the 1980s and the 1990s. Area studies programmes during the Cold War were dominated by social scientists, but today’s programmes are almost exclusively the domain of the humanities. The US government and allied foundations sharply reduced budgetary support for Asian studies, with the void being filled by state and state-related entities from East Asia pursuing so-called ‘soft power’ strategies. Today the majority of dissertations in the field claim some measure of critical politicality, whether in terms of postcolonialism, gender and sexuality studies, or environmentalism. Many of the direct targets of the original critique of area studies of the 1980s and the 1990s have seemingly dissolved—and yet area studies continues to thrive as an institution underwriting American power. The chapter explores how we can renew and reenergize the critique of area studies in its latest guise.

scholarly journals The New Frontier: Religion in America’s National Space Rhetoric of the Cold War Era

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen E. Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
National Space ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Cold War

The origins and use of national space rhetoric used by NASA, the US government, and the media in America began during the Cold War era and relied, in part, on religious imagery to convey a message of exploration and conquest. The concept of space as a “New Frontier” was used in political speech, television, and advertising to reawaken a sense of manifest destiny in postwar America by reviving notions of religious freedom, courage, and exceptionalism—the same ideals that originally drove expansionist boosters first to the New World and then to the West. Using advertisements, political speeches, NASA documents, and other media, this paper will demonstrate how this rhetoric served to reinforce a culture held by many Americans who maintained a long tradition of believing that they were called on by God to settle New Frontiers and how this culture continues to influence how human spaceflight is portrayed today.

Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies

1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth McVey
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
Far East ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Academic World ◽  
Southeast Asian Studies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Third World

Forty-odd years ago, when I became involved in the study of Southeast Asia, it appeared to be a new region, struggling to assert itself in the political world from the lingering ties of colonialism and in the academic world from those who would absorb it in the empires of Further India or the Far East. The centre of this new field of study was indisputably the United States, where in the 1950s and early 1960s Southeast Asia programmes were set up as part of the great expansion of regional studies funded by the US government and foundations. Their guiding assumption was that the interests of America and what would become known as the Third World were compatible and that sympathetic knowledge would aid in bringing about progress towards modernity as envisioned in the American dream.

The China Quarterly and the History of the PRC

2006 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 1092-1097 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick MacFarquhar
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Daily Basis ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Communist China ◽  
History Of

When I was appointed editor of the CQ in 1959, my vision was that it should focus primarily on all aspects of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history, but that there should also be occasional articles on contemporary Taiwan and the overseas Chinese. That autumn, I did a quick tour of a few American campuses to try to drum up contributors; basically I needed social scientists. But even those universities with significant China programmes were peopled mainly by historians who were not doing research on the PRC. Benjamin Schwartz at Harvard, who had already published Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao, did write articles from time to time on the current scene; at MIT, Lucian Pye was ensuring that political scientists should incorporate East Asia into analyses of comparative politics; at Berkeley, Franz Schurmann (a Yuan historian in an earlier incarnation) was engaged in what became Ideology and Organization in Communist China, S.H. Chen was interested in contemporary mainland literature, and Choh-ming Li (like Alexander Eckstein at Michigan) was studying the economy; at Columbia, C. Martin Wilbur was working on the documents captured when the Soviet embassy in Beijing was raided in the 1920s, but Doak Barnett would not get there till the end of 1960; the only real nest of social scientists examining Chinese behaviour on a daily basis that I found on that trip was located at RAND: Allen Whiting, A.M. Halpern and Alice Langley Hsieh, all working on Chinese foreign relations. The shock of the launch of the first sputnik in 1957 had already led the US government to allocate massive funds to academia for the training of specialists on Russia and China, but the first beneficiaries of the largesse did not start coming out of the pipeline until the late 1960s. With so few potential contributors available, I stopped reviewing China books in case I offended any of them! But the scarcity of talent was also an advantage, for Western and Asian China watchers – diplomats in Beijing, journalists in Hong Kong, businessmen travelling in and out – all subscribed, making the CQ the house magazine of a growing community.

scholarly journals Educational Television in El Salvador and Modernisation Theory

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 757-792
Author(s):  
HÉCTOR LINDO-FUENTES
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Educational Television ◽  
Pivotal Moments ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alliance For Progress ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military ◽  
International Aid Agencies

AbstractThis article investigates the introduction of educational television in El Salvador in the late 1960s, an Alliance for Progress project, in light of the preoccupations of the Cold War, the application of modernisation theory, the growing influence of a development community grounded in the social sciences and the Salvadorean elite's particular obsession with communism. The top-down approach used by the military regime to introduce a flurry of changes in the education system was facilitated by the extensive resources provided by international aid agencies and the US government. However, the reforms alienated Salvadorean teachers and fuelled teachers' strikes that are still remembered as pivotal moments in the urban mass movements of the 1970s which preceded the civil war of the 1980s.

Russian Active Measures and September 11, 2001

2020 ◽  
pp. 1029-1047
Author(s):  
Michael Bennett Hotchkiss
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Text Messages ◽  
Cyber Warfare ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
World War 2 ◽  
Cyber Threats ◽  
Psychological Warfare ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold-War era English-language promoters of Nostradamus (Orson Welles and Erika Cheetham) had strong Leftist-Marxist connections including ties to the Cambridge 5 spy ring. Nostradamus was the top search anomaly of Sept 11, 2001. Interest was driven by a surge in emails and text messages via the internet. This behavior is discussed in relation to known cyber threats from 2001. Similar spikes in Nostradamus searches (Google Trends) emanated from Poland (April 2010), Ukraine (March 2014), and in Hungary (August 2015). Nostradamus mirrors proven Russian disinformation operations, such as those that today implicate 9/11 as being an “inside job” by the US government, or that the CIA killed JFK, or that the CIA engineered the AIDS virus. Noting the use of Nostradamus by both the Allies and the Axis powers as a psychological warfare tool in World War 2, the case is made that it was the Russians carrying out an “information attack” on 9/11 that is consistent with Russian cyber warfare and active measures strategy and that they may have used similar techniques elsewhere since 2001.

scholarly journals Introduction to the JAS at AAS Roundtable on “Sexuality and the State in Asia”

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 919-927
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Remick
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Address ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Annual Conference ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
Current State ◽  
Social Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Asking Questions

Attendees of the 2012 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Toronto were treated to two extraordinary speeches at the presidential address and awards ceremony. First, Charlotte Furth's acceptance of the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies was a primer in the history of China-related gender studies (Furth 2012). Then, as Rachel Leow discusses in her paper in this forum, outgoing AAS President Gail Hershatter followed up with an inspirational critique (reprinted in this issue) of the current state of gender and sexuality studies in China. Taken together, these two speeches showed how far gender and sexuality studies in Asia have come in the last forty years, but also suggested that it is time for some fresh approaches. For example, Furth explained that when the Cambridge History of China volumes on Republican China were commissioned, she and others argued strenuously for the inclusion of a chapter on gender; but in the end, one could not be written because no one had yet done the scholarship on which such a chapter could be based. Fortunately, all of this has changed: the scholarship is there now. But Hershatter quite rightly pointed out that it is time to rethink many of the categories of analysis we have been using, because they are preventing us from asking questions we should be asking, and therefore making us miss the meanings of crucial social events and phenomena.

Removing the Mask of Sanity: McCarthyism and the Psychiatric–Confessional Foundations of the Cold War National Security State

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (04) ◽  
pp. 1066-1094
Author(s):  
ROBERT GENTER
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Psychiatric Discourse ◽  
National Security State ◽  
The Cold War

In the early Cold War, the US government institutionalized a national security program, centered on the investigation into the political beliefs of federal employees, to safeguard the nation from Communist subversion. Often interpreted as the result of a partisan battle between New Deal Democrats and conservative Republicans, the national security program had deeper origins, reflecting the influence of psychiatric discourse on public understandings of deviancy. Framed by a metonymical logic that linked radical political beliefs, deviant sexual behaviors, and other illicit behaviors under the category of psychopathology, the security program sought to guard against the threat posed by potentially dangerous individuals, a form of protection that necessitated the public disclosure by those deemed security risks of all aspects of their personal lives.

Academic Migration and Cultural Diplomacy During the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 139-157
Author(s):  
Irina Nastasă-Matei ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Knowledge Transfer ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Eastern Bloc ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Power Strategies ◽  
The Cold War

Romania was the first country in the Eastern bloc to initiate diplo­matic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. On January 31, 1967, the Embassy of the FRG was opened in Bucharest, Romania. In this context, which marked the intensification of the cultural exchange between the two countries, with special attention paid to the exchange of students and researchers, in this article I aim to tackle the situation of the Humboldt fellows from Romania during 1965-1989, as agents of knowledge transfer and actors of soft-power strategies between the two blocks.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document