Transpacific Talent

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-498
Author(s):  
Benjamin M. Han

This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case study to explore the transpacific exchange of ethnic talent between the United States and Korea during the Cold War. It illustrates how U.S. military occupation, popular music, and Cold War diplomacy were visibly intertwined in entertainment television programming. The performances of the Kim Sisters in variety shows as a display of ethnic spectacle under the mask of internationalism constructed a false projection of race relations while the United States sought to win the cultural Cold War. The Kim Sisters navigated the complex structures of American Orientalism that television ascribed to them.

1999 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Holden

The US.-sponsored programs of military and police collaboration with the Central American governments during the Cold War also contributed to the surveillance capacity of those states during the period when the Central American state formation process was being completed. Guatemala is used as a case study. Washington’s contribution was framed by the conventional discourse of “security against communism” but also by an underlying technocratic ethos in which “modernization” and “security” were higher priorities than democratization.


Author(s):  
Peter Sluglett

This chapter examines how the Cold War affected the states of the Middle East. More specifically, it considers the evidence of which factors drove regional developments and how it has been contested by both international relations and regional scholars. After providing an overview of the immediate origins of the Cold War, the chapter discusses the role played by oil during the Cold War. It then analyses early manifestations of the rivalry between the Soviets and the United States in Greece, Turkey, and Iran at the beginning of the Cold War, and uses Iraq as a case study of the changing nature of the relations between a Middle Eastern state and both superpowers from the 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, it evaluates the overall impact of the Cold War on the Middle East as a whole.


Author(s):  
Janice Ross

Chance. Improvisation. Uncertainty. During the Cold War, these words came to be freighted with a complex set of aesthetic meanings in the Soviet Union and the United States. These nuances in the usage of these terms, the kind of arts practice they made possible, and the ways they were linked to each nation’s political frames hold important insights into the politicizing of aesthetic practices and the aestheticizing of social revolutions. This essay considers the affordances of constraints when paired with the selective use of improvisation in the work of Russian choreographer Leonid Yakobson. A close reading of the work of Yakobson, the leading modernist at the Kirov Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet throughout the years of Stalin’s rule and into the first decades of the Cold War, is a relevant case study. It reveals how, clandestinely in his rehearsal rooms, a degree of improvisation and chance carried unique aesthetic force and political risk.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omran Ali

This research seeks to critically analyze the international efforts, particularly the United States of America, in transforming authoritarian and non-democratic states into democratic ones, and clarify to what extent the US seeks to achieve real democratic change in non-democratic countries, especially Iraq, and whether their main goal is to achieve stability and their vital interests or democratic change and reform. It argues that although spreading democracy and human rights in the Middle East has become, especially after the end of the Cold War, one of the main goals of the US, but, in reality, the US is not ready to sacrifice its vital interests in the region at the expense of spreading democratic values, as well as reducing its strong security and economic relations with its non-democratic allies, or even applying the required pressure on them. Consequently, this increases doubts about the credibility and seriousness of the US in achieving its goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular.


This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.


Author(s):  
Anne Searcy

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.


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