Nostalgia for the Past, Hope for the Future

In 2020, the VOV celebrated seventy-five years of broadcasting. While those celebrations were underway, a former colonial villa which housed the Bạch Mai Wireless Telegraphy Station and was used by the Viet Minh to broadcast radio reports on the Declaration of Independence in 1945, was destroyed to make way for a new road. The epilogue reflects on the accepted history of radio communications, media broadcasting, and the performing arts propagated by the VOV and contrasts that narrative with the findings of this book, which outlines a longer, entangled story involving French colonialism and American imperialism. Drawing on statements by VOV CEO Nguyễn Thế Kỷ concerning the contribution of the broadcast media to Vietnam’s positive response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the writing argues that contemporary reproductions of nostalgic red music reaffirm the centrality of the VOV as a national multimedia network and secure the future of its principal benefactor, the CPV.

Envisioning the People's Republic: China and US Marxist Anti-imperialism in the Mid-1970s

This essay studies United States Marxist perspectives on China during US radicalism's decline in the mid-1970s. By the late 1960s, China's apparent synthesis of socialist and nationalist traditions inspired US Marxists to theorize a Chinese-led united front against American imperialism. However, China's opening up to the West in 1972 revealed US Marxists’ differing frameworks for understanding socialism and national liberation. Partly because of the confusion that followed, Marxist internationalism soon lost its intellectual weight on the US far left. Using archived Marxist periodicals from 1973 to 1979, I trace how this happened and what it meant for revolutionaries’ opposition to American empire.

Prohibition against American Imperialism

As temperance has largely been synonymous with anti-imperialism the world over, Chapter 15 examines it during America’s imperial era: specifically the Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines. It begins by charting the relationship between Christian anarchist Leo Tolstoy and William Jennings Bryan, who became America’s most outspoken foe of both American imperialism and the exploitative liquor traffic. The anti-canteen movement arose in response to the increasing drunkenness and exploitation of American soldiers—as well as native Cuban and Filipino populations—by the liquor traffic backed by the US military. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the emerging Anti-Saloon League helped secure an anti-canteen law in 1901, effectively getting the US government to restrain its own predatory excesses. The chapter concludes with Bryan’s evangelical, social gospel progressivism, highlighting the shared community protection logic of prohibitionism and anti-imperialism.

Orientalism, Empire, and The Racial Muslim

To protect the security of all, we must curtail the liberty of Muslims. That is the narrative the US government has peddled to the American public since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As a result, national security has effectively served as the pretext for myriad forms of discrimination against Muslims by public and private actors. This overt targeting of a religious minority reveals a glaring contradiction: Muslims are being treated with open hostility by government and private actors alike despite America’s foundational embrace of religious freedom. The author argues that the reason for this lies in the social construction of Muslims as a racial minority, rather than or in addition to being a religious minority—what the author calls The Racial Muslim. This chapter explores the role of Orientalism (European and American) and American imperialism in the Middle East in the racialization of Muslims in the United States.

Introduction

The essays in this volume describe the manifold ways in which China, India, and their respective societies were connected from the 1840s to the 1960s. This period witnessed the inexorable rise and terminal decline of Pax Britannica in Asia, the blooming of anti-colonial movements of various ideological hues, and the spread and entrenchment of the nation-state system across the world. This layered legacy looms large in the relations between Chinese and Indian societies in the twenty-first century. Euro-American imperialism figured as much more than the backdrop against which China and India interacted. Practitioners of global history (...

Cuba in Soviet and American Cold War cinema. Comparative analysis

The article presents the results of a study of Cuba's cinema images in Soviet and American cold war cinema. The study aimed to compare the ways of representing Cuba in the Soviet and American cinema of this period. Materials for the study were Soviet and American films made in the period 1945-1991. It is shown that in the American cinema of the cold war, Cuba can be positioned as an enemy, as an arena of confrontation in the struggle of two superpowers, or as a victim of this struggle. In Soviet cinema, accordingly, Cuba is positioned as a fraternal country, or as a victim of American imperialism. There is a similarity in the representation of Cuba in Soviet and American cinema: images of Cuba are involved in constructing the image of the enemy to strengthen the threat emanating from it and perform a mobilization function. Besides, the image of Cuba in distress serves to legitimize the fight against the invaders, Soviet or American. The feminization of Cuba is used as an ideological device for constructing the image of the enemy. At the same time, the images of Cuba in American cinema are more diverse, due to the long history of relations between the two countries based on geographical proximity.

“‘Far from the Pacific’: Reading Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter

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