Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War 9781609386320, 9781609386313

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Neocolonialism and Literature / Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith
Part I: Neocolonialism and the Global South Imaginary
1. The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel / Steven Belletto
2. The Fragmented Heart of Blackness: The Congo Crisis in African American Culture and Politics / Cedric Tolliver
3. The Appeal of Cuba: The 1968 Havana Cultural Congress and US Intellectuals / Michele Hardesty
4. American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime / William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos
Part II: Solidarities: US Racial Politics and the Global Cold War
5. From Kabul to Chicago: The Limits of Global Imagination / Kate Baldwin
6. The Unyielding Earth: Women of Color Feminism and Cold War Fiction / Crystal Parikh
7. “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”: Housing, Race, and Cold War Internationalisms in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Raisin in the Sun / Cheryl Higashida
8. Returning from the Unending Korean War: Toni Morrison’s Home / Donald E. Pease
Part III: Realignments: The Global Cold War and Changing Forms of Empire
9. US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War / John Carlos Rowe
10. The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War: Beckett, Greene, Kavan, Ballard / Adam Piette
11. The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? / Andrew Hoberek
Contributors
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War

The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in C on t e m p or a ry L i t e r at u re a n d C u lt u re Samuel Cohen, series editor

neocolonial

fictions of the

global

war



cold

edited by Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith

university of iowa press, iowa city 52242

Copyright © 2019 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by Ashley Muehlbauer No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Belletto, Steven, editor. | Keith, Joseph, editor. Title: Neocolonial fictions of the global Cold War / edited by Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith. Description: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2019] | Series: The New American canon | Includes bibliographical references. |  Identifiers: LCCN 2018034316 (print) | LCCN 2018056287 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-60938-632-0 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-60938-631-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—20th century— History and criticism. | Cold War in literature. | Literature and transnationalism—United States. Classification: LCC PS228.C58 (ebook) | LCC PS228.C58 N46 2018 (print) | DDC 810.9/3582825—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034316 Chapter one, “The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel” by Steven Belletto, was originally published in American Literature. 87, 1:51–77. Copyright 2015, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the publisher. Chapter four, “American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime” by William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos, was originally published as “The Nothingness of Being and the Spectacle: The American Sublime Revisited,” in Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Mediation on the American Vocation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 1–41.

To William V. Spanos, 1924–2017

contents

Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction: Neocolonialism and Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith

part i: Neocolonialism and the Global South Imaginary 1. The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel. . . . . . . . 15 Steven Belletto

2. The Fragmented Heart of Blackness: The Congo Crisis in African American Culture and Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Cedric Tolliver

3. The Appeal of Cuba: The 1968 Havana Cultural Congress and US Intellectuals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Michele Hardesty 4. American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos

Part II: Solidarities: US Racial Politics and the Global Cold War 5. From Kabul to Chicago: The Limits of Global Imagination . . . . . 101 Kate Baldwin

6. The Unyielding Earth: Women of Color Feminism and Cold War Fiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .116 Crystal Parikh 7. “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”: Housing, Race, and Cold War Internationalisms in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Raisin in the Sun. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Cheryl Higashida

8. Returning from the Unending Korean War: Toni Morrison’s Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150 Donald E. Pease

Part III: Realignments: The Global Cold War and Changing Forms of Empire 9. US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 John Carlos Rowe

10. The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War: Beckett, Greene, Kavan, Ballard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Adam Piette 11. The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End?. . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Andrew Hoberek Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285

acknowledgments

We would like to thank Ranjit Arab, senior acquisitions editor at the University of Iowa Press, and Sam Cohen, editor of the New American Canon series, for their enthusiasm and support for this project. The entire production staff at Iowa has been a pleasure to work with. We would also like to thank our contributors once again for producing such fine work, and for their patience as we brought this volume to fruition.

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War

introduction Neocolonialism and Literature Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith

In 1965, Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah published Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, putting a finer point on his earlier books such as Towards Colonial Freedom (1962) and Africa Must Unite (1963). In NeoColonialism, Nkrumah was interested in the elasticity of that term, and how it might be used as a window into the economic exploitation of smaller states by larger powers following the collapse of the old colonial system. “The essence of neo-colonialism,” he explains in the book’s introduction, “is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside.”1 The states Nkrumah has in mind are by and large former colonies in Africa (including Ghana), Asia, and Latin America that, while formally independent, are “in reality” subject to economic exploitation equal to or even greater than their exploitation under colonialism, a key difference being that the newer system operates through international banking cartels and the manipulation of capital rather than through armies and the establishment of legal colonial territories. Nkrumah explores the economic underpinnings of neocolonialism in exhaustive detail, what he evocatively calls “the serpentine interlocking of

financial monopoly today” (76). In his view, neocolonialism is predicated on “a constant penetration of a few banking and financial institutions into large industrial and commercial undertakings, creating a chain of links that bring them into a connective relationship making for domination in both national and international economy” (76). Such economic domination, Nkrumah goes on to argue, extends into the political realm, so that in a neocolonial state, the “interests of the overriding monopoly groups govern national policies” (76). In other words, the hallmark of a neocolonial state is that it is controlled and exploited by outside financial interests—where necessary supplemented by covert or overt military force—while maintaining official, internationally recognized sovereignty. It is a state paradoxically free and economically enslaved. For Nkrumah, this situation (“imperialism in its final and perhaps most dangerous stage”) has potential to be even more destructive than formal colonialism because any pretense of responsibility that the colonial master may have had toward its colony has vanished: neocolonialism “means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress” (xi).2 We turn—or perhaps return—to the concept of neocolonialism because it provides an important analytic that is both historically specific and more generalizable in terms of understanding “First World”—in particular US— relations with the “Third” or decolonizing world in the years after WWII. Indeed, with liberation struggles and the costs of the war having undermined the system of territorial colonialism historically employed by European powers, neocolonialism emerged, in the latter half of the twentieth century, as the governing form of international hegemony, superseding colonial methods of direct administrative rule with political and, in particular, financial forms of domination masked beneath a legitimizing logic or “fiction” of liberation. As such, neocolonialism provides a generative conceptual framework with which to understand the continuities—and discontinuities—between formal colonialism and the generally subtler tactics of US postwar hegemony that emerged within and were profoundly shaped by the global Cold War. George Lipsitz has persuasively argued that the Cold War represents not just a historical process and event but also a “way of knowing and way of being,” with its own “logics and optics” that “encouraged us to see some things and prevented us from seeing others.”3 Neocolonialism might be understood, in distinction, as an alternative way of knowing, one capable of reframing 2  Introduction

and renarrativizing histories and coordinates that the logics and optics of the Cold War obfuscated. It provides, in particular, a global structure of recognition that recasts the international Cold War not as a space where American freedom fought against Soviet or Chinese Communism, but as a space where anticolonial independence—and, often, socialism—struggled against new forms of imperial or racial capitalism. Neocolonialism enables us to see the post-WWII global conflict not merely in terms of the East/West divide between the Soviet-style totalitarianism and US-style democratic freedom, but in terms of the North/South divide, between nations rich and poor, mostly white and mostly not, terms which emphasize what Richard Wright finally deemed the “Color Curtain” as opposed to the Iron Curtain.4 In turn, this collection proposes that the concept of neocolonialism provides a significant though neglected theoretical and historical framework through which to recast and reapproach US “Cold War literature”—both as an understudied thematic and as an analytic for reading the political unconscious of a wide range of literary works and cultural artifacts from the period. Neocolonialism proved, in many respects, an ideal arrangement for the West within the ideological terms of the Cold War, which in the West was figured as a struggle of democratic freedom and free-market capitalism against Soviet or Chinese-style totalitarianism and its artificial suppression of the free market. Western powers could claim to serve the interests of “freedom” and “democracy” in the Third World while instituting predatory economic and financial policies that had little regard for the local independent governments, even when democratically elected, and even less regard for the well-being of local populations. The United States in particular positioned itself in opposition not only to Communist totalitarianism but also European colonialism, claiming it was the foremost champion of independence and democracy around the world. In other words, the United States legitimated its ascendance to the dominant international power by redeploying a long-standing and central ideology of American exceptionalism: the idea that the United States was in a distinctive position to lead the world and to promote the general interests of humanity and freedom, not only because it was anti-Communist but because it was innocent of Old World legacies of empire and colonialism.5 But where the United States financially invested or offered aid to newly independent nations under an anticolonial and anti-Communist banner Introduction 3

of democracy and liberation, Nkrumah sees evidence of neocolonialism, arguing that “foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less-developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and poor countries of the world” (x). What the term “neocolonialism” aims to make visible, then, is a system of relationships between larger powers and smaller states that is exploitative but does not appear to be so; we invoke this term to draw attention to these relationships and the ways in which they depend on fictions for their efficacy. This is in part what Gayatri Spivak means when she likens the cunning structures of neocolonialism to radiation: “You feel it less,” she states, “you feel like you’re independent.”6 In this regard, the basic concept of neocolonialism is a way to account for the fact that the United States was not a colonial master according to the old European model, and yet during the Cold War was still responsible for a startling number of global interventions. As we now know, such interventions compromised the rule of democratically elected governments if they were perceived as hostile to US business interests in the region: in Iran in 1953, to take a well-known example, US and British operatives succeeded in fomenting a coup d’état ousting the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh when he proposed the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company enter into a 50/50 profit sharing plan with the Iranian people. Likewise, in 1954, Guatemala’s democratically elected leader Jacobo Árbenz was ousted by a CIA-engineered coup when he nationalized the vast banana plantations owned by US-based United Fruit Company. Or we might look no further than the case of Nkrumah himself, whose own democratically elected government in Ghana was deposed in 1966, less than a year after he published his tragically prescient analysis (while there is no definitive confirmation, a growing body of historical evidence suggests at the very least the CIA’s tacit approval of the overthrow).7 Thus in Iran, Guatemala, Ghana, as well as places like Syria (1949), Indonesia (1958), Cuba (1961), Iraq (1960–63), Congo (1960–65), Chile (1970–73), Afghanistan (1979–89), and Nicaragua (1981–1990), the United States established a long history of Cold War interventionism tied not to the promotion of democracy and individual freedoms, but to sustaining the “chain of links” protecting European and American capital. Such history, some of it only recently acknowledged by the CIA, retrospectively bears out Nkrumah’s claim that “in the neo-colonialist 4  Introduction

territories, since the former colonial power has in theory relinquished political control, if the social conditions occasioned by neo-colonialism cause a revolt the local neo-colonial government can be sacrificed and another equally subservient one substituted in its place” (xiv). Certain critics, such as Robert Young, have cautioned that neocolonialism—as an analytic framework—can run the risk of becoming a “defeatist gesture.”8 That is, in its central focus on the persistent, albeit shifting, economic structures of exploitation that maintain power within the hands of former colonial agents and foreign capital, neocolonialism can potentially elide or devalue the agency and various forms of resistance in the Third or developing world. It is at least partially for this reason that other conceptual terms were sought to make sense of post-WWII international arrangements— development, dependency, and, most notably, postcolonialism. Simon Gikandi, for instance, has explained that his initial effort to define postcolonialism was in explicit distinction to “what used to be called neocolonialism.” Specifically, he suggests, postcolonialism was intended to describe “not just a continuation of colonial structures of power, economics, and relationships” as depicted, he suggests, by neocolonialism. Instead, he argues, the concept of postcolonialism set out to represent “both a change”—for Gikandi most notably a cultural change—“and a lack of change.”9 While acknowledging this potential critique, or at least caution, we contend that neocolonialism aptly describes the broad international transformations of the immediate post-WWII moment, in which former colonial countries, while gaining their sovereignty, remained subject to US (and other dominant global powers) economic and political control.10 We further contend that the displacement of neocolonialism by subsequent analytic paradigms such as postcolonialism, while of course enormously generative, has led to a critical depreciation of a rich archive of work by literary and political figures such as, to offer a few examples, Nkrumah, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claudia Jones, Jack O’Dell, W. E. B. Du Bois (in his later work), and Frantz Fanon (at least that dimension of his work), among many others, who employed neocolonialism during the post-WWII period and up through the 1970s as a paradigm to critically reassess post-WWII global decolonization.11 Finally, in its insistence on the primacy of the economic, neocolonialism is a useful term not only for interpreting US management of decolonization during the postwar moment but also, more enduringly, for demystifying the broader development of Introduction 5

global capitalism after WWII, allowing us to catch hold of the international affinities or interrelationships of capitalism with imperialism and colonial ideology underlying the modern and contemporary world system. Neocolonial Fictions thus draws together two broad critical developments: the transnational turn in American Studies with what has been deemed the global turn in Cold War literary and cultural studies.12 While these fields are implicitly linked insofar as one cannot talk about the Cold War United States without gesturing toward the rest of the world, this collection is the first to place these fields in explicit conversation with each other. In doing so, the current volume hopes not only to contribute to both fields, but also to reframe them in significant ways, by reorienting Cold War US literatures within a transnational frame and by providing a much needed historical and political contextualization for the emergence and investments of transnational American literary studies. In this regard, Neocolonial Fictions has affinities with—and is indebted to—seminal critical collections such as Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993) and Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (2000).13 As suggested by the titles of both books, since the mid-1990s, “imperialism” has been a key term for literary scholars and cultural historians interested in parsing the relationship between the US and the rest of the world during the Cold War. While there are some obvious resemblances between the terms “imperialism” and “neocolonialism,” the former tends to elide differences among the colonial and postcolonial eras, and it is those very differences we think neocolonialism can make visible. What also distinguishes this volume from these other collections is its primary attention to literature and the literary in thinking the neocolonial fictions of the global Cold War. What, indeed, does neocolonialism have to do with literature, and conversely, what might literature have to do, or say, about neocolonialism? We believe that literature is a crucial media for the formation of oppositional narratives and for the recovery and rearticulation of histories and ways of knowing that have been unrepresented or disavowed by the existing political and social order. This potential takes on particular poignancy in the context of the Cold War, when anti-Communism attained such a hold on the American unconscious, narrowing the spectrum of what was politically admissible, or even intelligible, to its Manichean logic. As cultural critics 6  Introduction

and literary scholars have demonstrated, the ideological lens of Cold War America simplified heterogeneous social conflicts, needs, and desires under the banner of containing Communism (a simplification that would eventually rupture into the logics of postmodernism).14 But it also obfuscated and masked histories, in particular the global histories and coordinates of US imperialism and racial capitalism that contradicted the exceptionalist narrative of American anti-Communism and anticolonialism. If, as we have suggested, neocolonialism depends for its efficacy on a fiction, on a narrative that insists on freedom and independence while concealing and indeed enabling the darker reality of economic subjugation, then literature’s potential is as a generative optic for animating those histories disavowed by the Cold War frame, in particular the shifting paradigms and occluded histories and economic practices of US empire—the stories, or “fictions,” of neocolonialism. Conversely, literature’s capacity to render legible submerged or marginalized worlds of meanings and relations provides not only a rich source of critique against the neocolonial fictions of the Cold War but also for imagining and practicing both subject and community differently. That is, the literary can provide a rich archive of countermodels from which to imagine worldly ties and aspirations in the name of an alternative geopolitics that had otherwise become inaccessible in the space and logic of Cold War America. “Neocolonial fictions,” then, signals not only literary and cultural works that render critically legible the hidden transcripts of neocolonialism’s transnational histories and networks of empire and racial capitalism, but also a tradition of literary and cultural imaginaries from which forms of affiliation, collectivity and justice might be fashioned in the face of—and in opposition to—the increasingly imperial worldliness of US neocolonialism in the post-WWII years. In planning this volume, we have used neocolonialism as a starting point, and solicited contributions from scholars who we believe are on the forefront of theorizing US literature and culture of the global Cold War. Rather than asking contributors to frame their work exclusively in terms of neocolonialism, we have instead considered it a guiding ethos of the volume—insofar as the contributors are invested in varieties of critique that would have been familiar to Nkrumah—and we have chosen to underscore the diversity of perspectives on the relationship between US letters and the Cold War world. As such, Neocolonial Fictions is organized around three broad ways the neocolonial Introduction 7

analytic opens up US literature and culture of the global Cold War—Part I: Neocolonialism and the Global South Imaginary; Part II: Solidarities: US Racial Politics and the Global Cold War; and Part III: Realignments: The Global Cold War and Changing Forms of Empire. Part I: Neocolonialism and the Global South Imaginary, explores the neocolonial relationship between the United States and the developing world by examining in detail four hot zones of contact: the Korean peninsula, the Congo, Cuba, and Vietnam. In chapter 1, “The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel,” Steven Belletto proposes that “Korean War literature” is a category that can help us understand literary responses to neocolonialism in the form of the so-called “police action” on the Korean peninsula, an early and significant Cold War engagement. The chapter theorizes two phases of Korean War literature, a first phase written mostly by white, male Americans who viewed the conflict in terms of the bipolar global imaginary of US-style democracy against Soviet and Chinese Communism, and accordingly understood the war as a proxy battle in the ideological Cold War; and a second phase, written mostly by Korean-Americans and invested in dismantling the very logic of the Cold War frame that conceptualized the conflict as a limited war, instead citing it as evidence of US neocolonial intervention underwritten by the Cold War. In chapter 2, “The Fragmented Heart of Blackness: The Congo Crisis in African American Culture and Politics,” Cedric Tolliver turns attention to the Congo Crisis (1960–66), a politically turbulent period during which Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was assassinated and Congo was plunged into civil war. Tolliver assembles historical, literary, and critical fragments concerned with these events to trace the ideological consensus that formed to define what could count as legitimate African American political and cultural practice during the Cold War, the intellectual consequences of which remain with us today. Tolliver’s work of assemblage strives to make narrative sense of such disparate events as a coalition of black activists operating in Harlem, which included such prominent literary figures as Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka organizing a protest in the gallery of the United Nations the day after news of Lumumba’s assassination was announced, and Max Yergan and George Schuyler affirming their Cold Warrior bona fides in their work for the American Committee to Aid Katanga Freedom Fighters. Moving from Congo to Cuba, chapter 3, “The Appeal of Cuba: The 1968 Havana Cultural Congress and US Intellectuals,” 8  Introduction

by Michele Hardesty, takes the Havana Cultural Congress as a paradigmatic point of contact between the United States and the Global South, focusing both on reactions to the Congress by individual writers and intellectuals and on contemporary debates in Cuban magazines like Unión and Casa de las Américas about US literature and culture. The chapter finally shows that these battles over culture and the role of the intellectual must be understood as part of the global history of the Cold War that can profitably be understood as the history of antineocolonialism. In chapter 4, “American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime,” William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos argue that the Vietnam War precipitated a profound rupture in the compact of American exceptionalism. Specifically, they maintain that the war undermined what had been the long-standing capacity of the “American spectacle” to disavow and displace the constitutive violence and underlying arbitrariness of the nation onto a narrative of providential and exceptional design—a narrative at the very heart of the fiction of the US neocolonial project. In bringing this concealment into the open, the war opened up possibilities for new social, political, and intellectual initiatives including within the American university—with the rise of ethnic studies, black studies, lesbian and gay studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and a new Americanist studies. Part II: Solidarities: US Racial Politics and the Global Cold War explores the ways in which US racial politics were reshaped and reimagined in conjunction with US Cold War interventionism. In chapter 5, “From Kabul to Chicago: the Limits of Global Imagination,” Kate Baldwin uses Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), as an occasion to draw surprising connections among the domestic and global spheres. Set in the context of a bourgeoning obsession with the postwar kitchen as mission control for Cold War womanhood, Maud Martha offers an architectural theory of race, detailing how race shifts as bodies move through particular places. Baldwin argues that the novel participates in a postwar tendency toward exploring empathy as a means of communicating the particularities of mid-century US racial subjectivity, and as such opens up conversations in which communications theorists and designers, such as Charles and Ray Eames, along with the government institutions that hired them, such as the United States Information Agency (USIA), were immersed—namely the project of connecting the world through empathic structures. Chapter 6, “The Unyielding Earth: Women of Color Feminism and Cold War Fiction,” by Crystal Parikh, argues Introduction 9

that, beginning in the 1980s, just as a burgeoning market for women of color writers became manifest in the United States, many such authors took stock of radically altered domestic and international landscapes during the late Cold War. Parikh demonstrates how such works grappled with the breach that had come to obtain between US civil rights/black freedom struggles and Third World decolonization movements. Looking at the work of Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Helena Maria Viramontes, Parikh explores the compromises demanded of people of color in the United States and the foreclosure of global radical politics in exchange for the promises of American integration. Like chapter 5, this chapter situates US women of color feminism as a source of and intervention into the transnational solidarities that this literature archives. Chapter 7, “ ‘Home Is Where the Hatred Is’: Property, Race, and Cold War Internationalisms,” by Cheryl Higashida, extends the work of critically connecting the domestic and global spheres during the Cold War by showing how two landmark works of literature from this period, Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), exemplify the suturing of race to US nationhood by moving between internationalism and suburbanization, and focusing in particular on restrictive covenants and the legal challenges that they provoked. In different ways, Higashida shows, both Wilson and Hansberry connect domestic issues of housing with global struggles for hegemony; but she is finally more interested in the ways that Hansberry, in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Malcolm X, resituates civil rights within a paradigm of black internationalism. Lastly, in chapter 8, “Returning from the Unending Korean War: Toni Morrison’s Home,” Donald E. Pease takes Morrison’s novel Home (2012) as an occasion to further explore the connections between neocolonial encounter and US racial politics, for the novel’s protagonist, Frank Money, is an African American veteran of the Korean War who returns home only to face a continuation of the colonial-imperial violence that confronted him in Korea. Pease goes on to show how Home deals with two incompatible narratives, one concerning the “intrapsychic” meditations of the black Korean War veteran, the other the “psychogeographical” cast of Money’s lived experiences as a combat veteran. Finally, Pease shows how Home offers a model for how a subaltern figure might participate in the production of colonial-imperial regimes of knowledge when such figures are usually written out of such production. 10  Introduction

Part III: Realignments: The Global Cold War and Changing Forms of Empire takes as its basic premise the notion that the United States stretched and remade notions of empire during the neocolonial period. In chapter 9, “US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War,” John Carlos Rowe explores how cultural attachés worked to tighten the knots of the “state-scholarly complex” begun in WWII and tied down in the Cold War. Focusing on two US cultural attachés to the United Kingdom during the Cold War—Carl Bode (1957–59) and Sarell Everett Gleason (1959–61), Rowe shows how these two men, both professors, represent different versions of how the state-scholarly complex was managed during the Cold War. As Rowe argues, these case studies illuminate the macropolitical roles of US cultural attachés during the Cold War, thereby offering another, historically grounded, perspective on the cultural reach of US global power during the Cold War. Chapter 10, Adam Piette’s “The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War: Beckett, Greene, Kavan, Ballard,” offers a fascinating perspective on what he calls “superpower politics” by showing how British and Irish writers “Americanized” themselves during the Cold War. Focusing in particular on Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Anna Kavan, and J. G. Ballard, Piette shows how these writers mimicked US superpower politics—playing the special relationship card that launched the global Cold War in the first place with Churchill’s Fulton speech—while at the same time internalizing toxic anti-Americanism as the psychic model for resistant global politics. Finally, in chapter 11, “The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End?,” Andrew Hoberek ranges over seemingly disparate texts—from the film Black Hawk Down (2001) to Joe Haldeman’s science fiction novel The Forever War (1974) to John Updike’s novel about neocolonial Africa, The Coup (1978)—to show how they all explore the Cold War’s logic of perpetual war. As Hoberek argues, a wide range of contemporary works normalize constant, ongoing warfare by making it seem like the natural state of existence in certain parts of the world—not only in places like the Middle East, but also in Africa and elsewhere. From this perspective, the proper answer to Hoberek’s question “Did the Cold War ever really end?” is no; the War on Terror represents a continuation of the version of the Cold War that emerged, over the course of the 1970s, when optimism about the United States’ modernizing mission among decolonizing nations gave way to frustration and a renewed belief in the inherent savagery of some parts of the globe. Introduction 11

If these chapters emphasize that the literary is a site for critically representing and remapping the elusive logics and legacies of neocolonialism, then perhaps neocolonialism can, in turn, provide a historical and theoretical lens through which we might critically reframe and reread US literature of the period. We want to underscore that the global analytic of neocolonialism draws into focus a broad, and oft-neglected, range of international-minded US literature produced during the Cold War (thus proposing a version of this literature quite different from the one focusing mainly on middle-class white people grappling with domestic repression). Neocolonial Fictions suggests that in literary and cultural studies there is a need instead to view the Cold War in terms of what US writers and other cultural producers thought or imagined about the rest of the world, especially those sites of neocolonial intervention where the interests of the state and international business blur, usually to disastrous effect on the local populations. At the same time, neocolonialism also provides a critical frame to view not only those literary works that looked “abroad” but also many that remained focused on the home front of US empire and global capital. During a period when the national form became the horizon for all politics, the analytic of neocolonialism can help retrain our critical gaze to look for the larger global political and economic coordinates of ostensibly domestic minded Cold War US literature. As will be clear in the following chapters, neocolonialism can help us remap the connections and continuities among political, economic, and social conflicts within the United States and those being fought against empire and imperial capitalism around the decolonizing world. In the end, we hope that the following chapters will contribute to a critical literary and geopolitical remapping of the postwar period, one that recasts a decades long conflict that for too long was understood as a Euro-American affair into a more truly global frame.

12  Introduction

part one

Neocolonialism and the Global South Imaginary

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Chapter two the fragmented heart of blackness The Congo Crisis in African American Culture and Politics Cedric Tolliver

Of all the dramatic events and achievements of the decolonization period, perhaps none looms as large as the meteoric rise and abrupt end to the political career of Patrice Lumumba. His short, less-than-three-months rule of the former Belgian Congo crystallized many of the interests that brought the striving of African peoples for freedom into a collision course with the priorities and material interests of the Cold War superpowers. Indeed, this confrontation augured the array of forces that quickly tamed the aspirations of decolonization, replacing them with the changing same of the neocolonial era. The reaction to Lumumba’s rise, eventual assassination, and the subsequent Congo Crisis reverberated strongly within African American political and cultural life. These events exposed ideological fractures both submerged and aggravated by a fight for domestic civil rights framed by Cold War imperatives. Within this overarching frame, a wide range of texts and events accrued greater ideological significance. The texts and events considered in

this chapter include: Ralph Bunche’s role as the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations at the transfer of power ceremony, and as director of that organization’s peacekeeping mission in the Congo; a protest organized by a coalition of black activists, which included such prominent literary figures as Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka, in the gallery of the United Nations the day following news of Lumumba’s assassination; an essay by James Baldwin published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine following Lumumba’s assassination; a letter to the editor of the New York Times by Lorraine Hansberry denouncing Bunche; black conservatives Max Yergan and George Schuyler’s work for the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters; and, finally, Philippa Schuyler’s imperialist apologia Who Killed the Congo? Despite the wide variety of these texts and events, few African American critical works and perhaps even fewer literary texts have taken stock of them as a whole. Perhaps this silence reflects the lingering power of an ideological consensus formed during the Cold War. Critical in defining legitimate African American political and cultural practice, this consensus managed to enfold African American progress toward civil rights and political inclusion into the US imperial project. Far from being uncontested, however, this consensus was always subject to critique from dissident quarters. In large part those critiques have gone unacknowledged, despite emanating from some of the most celebrated names in the culture, because of their departure from popular, sanitized narratives of racial progress. Through the work of assemblage, which places these texts and events in productive relation to one another, this chapter gives narrative shape to seemingly disparate entities in order to interrogate the fragmented heart of blackness.

Rumblings in the Jungle The Congo formally achieved independence on June 30, 1960, midway through the year the United Nations declared to be “The Year of Africa.” That historic year in the redrawing of the map of European colonial domination on the continent witnessed a dozen or so countries being accepted as new members of the United Nations, while seventeen countries in all gained independence. In none of these nations did the transition to independence prove as fraught as in the Congo. The breakneck speed at which events developed in that The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 39

country quickly spiraled out of control and precipitated the Congo Crisis. In general, the Congo Crisis refers to the roughly eight-month period from Belgium’s hasty granting of independence in June 1960, the almost immediate dissolution of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba’s newly formed government, and his eventual, or perhaps inevitable, assassination in February 1961. Lumumba made his entrance onto the world historical stage not long after he became active in Congolese national politics. In 1958, after his release from jail on embezzlement charges brought against him for political reasons, he founded the Mouvement National Congolais (MNC) party. Under his leadership the MNC became the leading nationwide party in a political landscape dominated by parties with ethnic and regional ties. In December of that same year, he led the Congolese delegation to the first All-African People’s Conference held in Accra, Ghana, where he earned the sympathy and support of Pan-Africanist heads of state such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Ahmed Sekou Touré of Guinea. According to Nkrumah, writing several years after Lumumba’s assassination in 1961, “At this memorable conference . . . the Congolese nationalists had their baptism of fire as apostles of the impending struggle for Africa’s liberation” (14). At the congress Lumumba elevated his own stature among African nationalists, cementing relationships that were a source of support for the Congo as it entered into the age of independence and into the larger ideological struggle against the forces of imperialism and neocolonialism. Lumumba’s attendance at the conference probably also had the unintended consequences of bringing him under the scrutiny of the US intelligence community. Conference attendees from the United States represented a fairly wide swath of those interested in Africa and included the likes of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, the labor activist Maida Springer, Detroit Congressman Charles Diggs, and Alpheus Hunton of the disbanded Council on African Affairs. In addition, there were delegates representing organizations such as the American Committee on African Affairs (ACOA), the Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF), the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Among these organizations, at least of three of them were recipients of covert funding from the CIA and their delegates—Mercer Cook (CCF), Horace Mann Bond (AMSAC), and George McCray (ICFTU)—were covering the conference for “official and 40  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

quasi-official consumption” (Gaines 95).1 Lumumba’s exposure to the US intelligence community at the conference appears to not have been limited to these cultural front operatives. Lumumba’s lack of English-language skills apparently presented the vulnerability exploited by a well-versed US intelligence agent. According to Thomas Kanza, the Congo’s first ambassador to the United Nations under Lumumba’s government, “an American who spoke very good French offered his services as an interpreter to Lumumba, who knew no English, and the offer was accepted.” Kanza continues that “Nkrumah later discovered, however, that this ‘interpreter’ was, in fact, a CIA agent, and Lumumba may well have told him more than was advisable” (50). Given the leadership of AMSAC at the time, Kanza’s and Nkrumah’s suspicions that Lumumba was targeted by an African American working for the CIA were not groundless. A little over a year before the Ghanaian conference, sometime in the fall of 1957, James T. “Ted” Harris joined AMSAC and became its assistant executive director. Harris came to AMSAC after having served in leadership positions in several organizations tied to another CIA front organization, the National Student Association (NSA). It is likely Harris was fluent in French, since he served on the staff of the Geneva-based International Student Service (later the World University Service), directed a recruiting vehicle for the CIA, the International Student Relations Seminar, and just prior to joining AMSAC served as director of the Foreign Student Leadership Project, which groomed foreign leaders by bringing to the United States “hand-picked foreign students from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East for a year of education, with paid tuition and living expenses” (Paget 142). In early 1961, shortly after Lumumba’s assassination, Harris left AMSAC and New York for Leopoldville (later Kinshasa), Congo. According to Hugh Wilford, the move was “suggestive of his importance to CIA operations in Africa,” since he was tasked with managing the Institute of Law and Administration, which was responsible for training “local politicians in western administrative techniques (and, probably, channel CIA subsidies to them)” (214). Such institutes were a crucial linchpin in the administration of neocolonialism, a clear example of what Belletto and Keith describe as “the generally subtler tactics of US post-war hegemony that emerged within and were profoundly shaped by the global Cold War.” In just over a year after the All-African People's Conference, in January 1960, the Brussels Round Table convened to negotiate Congolese indeThe Fragmented Heart of Blackness 41

pendence. To the surprise of many observers, Belgium agreed to turn over control of the colony at the end of June of that same year. As there were few Congolese upper administrators in the government and few university graduates, many Western governments voiced deep reservations about the colony’s capacity for self-government. They feared that the Congo’s lack of an indigenous bourgeoisie steeped in the values of Western advanced capitalist societies would leave it vulnerable to being overrun by either of two interlopers, radical Pan-Africanists in the vein of Nkrumah and Touré or the Communist Soviet Union (Plummer, In Search 88). Ralph Bunche, the African American diplomat who would lead the United Nations’ mission in the Congo following independence, no doubt shared similar anxieties about the rapid pace of decolonization. A proponent of the tutelage/trusteeship model of decolonization, Bunche saw it as a way to prepare the ground for a smooth and orderly end to European colonial rule. Indeed, as Neta C. Crawford has shown, Bunche helped draft the sections of the UN charter dealing with colonial issues, specifically the chapters on trusteeship, which he hoped would “fulfill the original mission of ‘sacred trust,’ paving the way for more gradual and peaceful decolonization” (102). Thus, when Bunche joined the world dignitaries that gathered for the independence ceremonies on June 30, 1960, he probably did so with trepidation about the future prospects of an independent Congo given its hasty decolonization process. To those Western observers the June 30th independence ceremonies presaged the difficult, uncertain road that lay ahead. In his speech for the ceremonies, King Badouin of Belgium celebrated the Belgians as dedicated servants who labored to bring light to dark corners of Africa, and he challenged the Congolese to demonstrate their political maturity. The president of the Congo, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, followed the king, by expressing his gratitude to the Belgians and reassuring them that the Congolese would assume the solemn work of continuing the progress of civilization. Excluded from the official program of the ceremony, Prime Minister Lumumba seized the microphone after these remarks and inserted himself and the history of Congolese suffering into what had been up to that point a congratulatory ceremony. One observer recalled Lumumba’s speech as a “bitter” “lashing out” against Belgian brutality, while the Belgian press characterized it as “international suicide” (Plummer, In Search 89). In boldly declaring to the departing King Baudoin, “We are no longer your monkeys!” Lumumba assur42  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

edly did not win the approval of the sitting US President Eisenhower, who was close to the king (quoted in Borstelmann 129). While anticolonialists celebrated Lumumba’s “impromptu and impassioned speech,” it only served to confirm Western suspicions about his demagogic tendencies. Bunche, who “characterized Lumumba’s oratory as electric and spellbinding, intoxicating even to Lumumba himself,” no doubt reacted negatively to Lumumba’s perceived impetuousness, since he had early in his career acquired “a visceral distaste for those he regarded as demagogues” (Young 131). Thus, the same improvisatory, oratorical skills on which Lumumba’s domestic political career depended because they bound him to the Congolese masses likely sealed his fate among the international powerbrokers angling to shackle an independent Congolese state in the chains of neocolonial dependency.

Bunche: Whose Man in the Congo? As events quickly spiraled out of control following the independence ceremonies, Ralph Bunche assumed the responsibility of trying to restore order as the United Nations’ special representative in the Congo. Just days after power was handed over to the Congo’s new leaders, twenty thousand Congolese soldiers of the Force Publique, the army, mutinied against their all-white Belgian officers, who “made it clear that independence would have no effect on their control of the army” (Borstelmann 131). The mutiny provoked an exodus of Belgian bureaucrats. Several days later, on July 11, the mineral-rich Katanga province seceded when the pro-Western Moise Tshombe declared its independence. Three days later the UN Security Council passed a resolution responding to a Congolese request for a UN intervention to provide emergency aid in the form of technical support and food, force the withdrawal of Belgian troops, and restore order in the breakaway province. Having arrived in the Congo with “impeccable credentials,” Bunche enjoyed “the complete confidence” of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, “who gave [Bunche] wide latitude to act on the spot” as he oversaw what was then the largest operation in the history of the United Nations (Young 130). Bunche’s handling of the Congo operation, however, would ultimately prove to be the one blemish on an otherwise long and distinguished diplomatic career. Both personal and professional reasons hindered Bunche’s ability to successfully conclude the UN mission in the Congo. His temperament and The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 43

ideas about leadership undoubtedly precipitated the degeneration of his relationship with Lumumba, which spiraled quickly “from initial cordiality into mutual contempt and animosity” (Young 128). Their strained relationship was at least in part the result of the very different understanding of the UN mission. Bunche had traded his earlier, more radical positions for the measured responses of the diplomat.2 As a representative of the United Nations in the Congo, he understood that organization’s role as a primarily peacekeeping one that could support the smaller powers of Africa and Asia in their efforts to achieve independence and develop their national economies. For his part, Lumumba turned to the United Nations under duress as he felt the Congo’s national sovereignty was being compromised by the forces of Belgium and Western neocolonial aggression manifested in the Katanga secession. Their divergent understanding perhaps reflects the very different paths they traveled to power. While Lumumba rose to power as a national unity candidate with the support and friendship of Pan-African statesmen, Bunche came to the United Nations after stints in the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA) and the US State Department. The differences between the two men, and Bunche’s familiarity with those wielding the levers of power in Washington, at first occasioned wariness about him in the Congo. A committed Pan-Africanist, Lumumba moved beyond his initial reservations. Likewise, the Congolese people embraced Bunche as an African American, their welcome expressing feelings of a racial bond that transcended nationality. According to Kanza, Bunche was “received . . . with the greatest sympathy and the most profound respect . . . and in his dealings with the new government of the Congo, the fraternity of race played a part that must not be underestimated” (Kanza 142). The bonds of race, however, proved brittle when put to the pressure tests of Cold War realpolitik.3 Throughout his sojourn in the Congo Bunche was shadowed by the question of his divided loyalties: Did he represent the interests of the United States or the United Nations? It is not a discredit to either his qualifications or accomplishments to acknowledge that Bunche owed his position, at least in part, to the outsized influence of the United States in the United Nations, which as an organization depended on the support of Western powers. These political realities and Bunche’s role in the Congo Crisis open up larger questions regarding the tethering of the professional advancement and self-interests of the African American elite to the geopolitical interests of the United States, 44  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

which were furthered through neocolonial arrangements. As recent work on the intersection of the Cold War and civil rights makes abundantly clear, US interests came to depend on promoting examples like Bunche as evidence of the strides made and the progress possible for African Americans under America’s capitalist and democratic system. Such high-profile figures were critical to US propaganda efforts, particularly in the Third World at this stage of the Cold War. Scholars have suggested that Bunche’s loyalties were entirely with the United Nations during his sojourn in the Congo, but they also note that escaping the long shadow of the United States was impossible. Crawford Young observes, for example, that Bunche was “utterly impatient” with the government’s fixation on “communist penetration” and Lumumba’s supposed Communist tendencies, which often led to conflicts with the US embassy in the Congo (131). Nevertheless, owing to the United Nations’ initial lack of a logistical infrastructure, Bunche had to make use of embassy communication and other facilities. And, most important, Bunche was constantly under the watch of American agents, which resulted in Congolese officials being guarded in their interactions with him. Indeed, Kanza notes that Bunche “could never get away from the all-pervasive watchfulness of American agents, whether official or merely officious” (142). This looming presence inevitably created a distance between Bunche and the Congolese, especially Lumumba; despite the sincerity of his Pan-Africanist commitments, Lumumba could not find his way to bridge this wide chasm opened up by neocolonial political realities. It was particularly crucial as the crisis evolved from a matter between a European imperial power and its former African colony to become a crucial site in the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. For both sides in this particular conflict, the Congo represented a critical point of entry to expanding influence over a wide swath of the African continent. Undoubtedly, it was the Congo and Lumumba’s entrance into the Cold War matrix that made the end of the crisis a foregone conclusion. Disillusioned with the United Nations’ inability or unwillingness to intervene in the Katanga secession, Lumumba accused that organization of acting in complicity with Western interests and sought assistance from the Soviet Union. This accusation rankled Bunche and led him to finally conclude, in private correspondence to his wife, that Lumumba was a “madman” whose The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 45

“insane fulminations” had destroyed the “greatest of international efforts” (Young 142). When Bunche finally left the Congo, American Secretariat executive Andrew Cordier replaced him as interim head of the UN operation in the Congo. In one of his first actions, Cordier, who had been an international security advisor at the US State department, approved a request from Kusa Vubu that the United Nations guarantee his personal safety and bar Lumumba and his supporters from the radio stations and the airports. Cordier’s decision proved critical in sealing Lumumba’s fate. By even considering the option of Soviet support, Lumumba confirmed suspicions about his Communist leanings and provided the justification needed to make his liquidation a matter of US national security. Although no evidence suggests that Bunche was personally involved in this plot against Lumumba, he did play, as it turns out, a minor but important role in the US government’s decision to assassinate Lumumba. According to the historian Brenda Gayle Plummer, the White House and NSC feared that their motives would be reduced to simple racism, so “they sought and received corroboration for Lumumba’s alleged maniacal character,” from a letter Bunche wrote to Andrew Cordier (In Search 90). Ultimately, the US government did not follow through on its assassination plot; in January 1961, Lumumba was cut down by agents of Moïse Tshombe. It was several weeks before news of his death reached the world.4 When it did, many in the African diaspora reacted strongly to what they understood as an act of Western aggression meant to impede the development of radical, Pan-African nationalists on the continent and elsewhere.

A Riotous Mood: African America Responds The news of Lumumba’s death incited demonstrators to pour into the streets of the world’s capitals—Brussels, Paris, London, Moscow, Washington, Cairo, and Accra—and to voice their outrage, condemning the complicity of Western powers in his murder. That outrage soon moved from the streets and entered the halls of power, when a group of mostly African American activists “set off the most violent demonstration inside United Nations headquarters in the world organization’s history” (“Riot” 1). The demonstration disrupted the deliberations in the UN Security Council chamber, which had 46  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

been convened to discuss Lumumba’s death and charges brought by the Soviet Union that UN Secretary General Hammarskjöld was complicit in his demise. The New York Times reported, quoting Daniel H. Watts, who was identified as the “chairman of the nine-month-old Liberation Committee for Africa,” that demonstrators entered the public gallery in silent protest with “the women [wearing] black veils and the men black arm bands” (1). According to the Times report, when the newly appointed US Ambassador to the UN Adlai E. Stevenson started to express his support for Hammarskjöld, a woman from On Guard for Freedom stood up and was rushed by guards, sparking the “riot.”5 Outside the United Nations, other protesters marched on Forty-Second Street westward across Manhattan, shouting a “modified Cuban slogan”—“Congo, yes! Yankee, no!”—that exemplifies how the protests against Lumumba’s death “occasioned the articulation of a new black identity” that fused “1960s anticolonialism and black cultural politics” (Cynthia Young 50). These demonstrations were a signal event in post–World War II African American literary and cultural history, involving such figures as Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry.6 While the New York Times reporter quotes Watts as putting members of his organization and On Guard at the center of the demonstration, Cheryl Higashida has recently argued that it was the black internationalist women working under the banner of the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH) who “instigated [this] event that became pivotal in the revival of Black nationalist consciousness in the United States.”7 According to Higashida, the driving forces in CAWAH were the literary artists Rosa Guy and Maya Angelou, and the singer Abbey Lincoln, and it was only after the demonstration that Sarah Wright and fellow novelist and Harlem Writers Guild member Calvin Hicks formed On Guard for Freedom to solidify the coalition of activists that had come together for the demonstration (54). The demonstration highlighted the organizational acumen and revolutionary consciousness of African American women leaders. The demonstration also proved pivotal in the political development of the poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). In the Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Baraka reminisces about the demonstration as the moment when he began to meet and befriend young black intellectuals connected with the black liberation movement. His description also supports Higashida’s contention The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 47

about African American women’s leadership in the event. Baraka describes “sisters . . . bashing the guards in the head with their shoes and throwing shoes down in the gallery” and writes admiringly of “one sister, Mae Mallory,” who “put up a terrific battle and the police were sorry they ever put their hands on her. . . . She was one of the people in On Guard and she is still very active in the Black Liberation Movement today” (181).8 The mainstream media at the time, however, did not speak with such reverence and disparaged the organizers and participants in the demonstration, who emerged from black nationalist and leftist circles active in Harlem, as merely “pro-communist agitators.” Two of the most celebrated names in African American letters at the time, James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, bestowed legitimacy on these activists and their sentiments in the pages of the New York Times. Baldwin used the assassination of Lumumba and the protests in the gallery of the United Nations by African American artists and activists as the starting point for a discussion that linked African independence to the self-assertion fueling the African American freedom struggle. Baldwin begins his article, titled “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” which appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine three weeks after the UN demonstration, by assuring his readers that only “the chaos on [his] desk prevented [him] from being in the United Nations gallery that day.” He then assails “the prevailing view” that “the Negro is so content with his lot [in the US] that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest” (25). Here Baldwin refers to the fact that the charge of Communist infiltration had been applied liberally and used to discredit all manner of African American protest; it had been used to great effect to discredit the legitimacy of the civil rights struggle that was being waged at the time in the South. Baldwin presents the African American activists demonstrating at the United Nations as “but a small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world” (104). He therefore urges his readers to not be deluded into perceiving the designs of agent provocateurs in the spectacular display of that discontent on the world stage. Instead, he locates its sources in the effect of Africa’s entrance on the “stage of history,” which “has proven to be a great antidote to the poison of self-hatred” or the “power of the white world to control [African American] identities” (104). Two weeks later, Hansberry echoed Baldwin’s sentiments in a letter expressing her gratitude to the editor for printing Baldwin’s article. 48  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

Hansberry’s letter, which carried the title “Congolese Patriot,” suggests forcefully that the mood of African Americans was one of righteous outrage and indignation. Like Baldwin, she takes offense at the attempt to link the demonstrations protesting Lumumba’s death to Moscow or Mecca and confesses that she, “a political and religious non-affiliate, ‘intended,’ like Mr. Baldwin, ‘to be there myself.’ ”9 Of course, in asserting her political nonaffiliation, Hansberry diminishes the significance of her writing career having started in the pages of Freedom newspaper. Writing for Freedom, Paul Robeson’s radical leftist newspaper, Hansberry immersed herself in a “vibrant Black Left network that included Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Burnham, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Alice Childress” (Higashida 57). Despite the wider anti-Communist mood in the country, this network of African American intellectuals and activists maintained their anticapitalist and anticolonial commitments. In expressing her willingness to protest alongside “Mustafa Bashire or Benjamin J. Davis [the Communist Party leader and former New York City councilman] or any other Negro who had the passion and understanding to be there,” Hansberry might have betrayed the origins of her political and artistic development in a network of black radical artists and activists. As an indication of the contemporary African American mood, Hansberry’s declaration suggests the extent of African American impatience with the contemporary colonial and racist order. Ignoring the wider American antipathy to Communism and Islam, African Americans found it necessary to be catholic in their embrace of allies of various political and religious persuasions who supported freedom for Africa, and by extension African America. In her letter, Hansberry also directed her impatience at perceived African American apologists for Western imperialism, and her letter concludes with a sharply worded rebuke of Ralph Bunche. After the UN protest, Bunche issued a formal apology to senior officials of the United Nations in which he endorsed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) recognition of the “emotional link between Africans and black Americans,” but expressed his disapproval of the “scandalous conduct of the demonstrators” who “were not representative of the thinking and standards of conduct held by the great majority” of African Americans (quoted in Halila 192). Counting herself among those “shocked and outraged at reports of Dr. Bunche’s ‘apologies’ for the demonstrators” and “curious as to his mandate from our people to do so,” she offers a public apology to “Mme. Pauline Lumumba The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 49

and the Congolese people for our Dr. Bunche” (4). Hansberry’s apology is an example of the fragmented heart of blackness being revealed around the question of neocolonialism. Baldwin’s essay also makes an oblique reference to Bunche, when he mentions dismissively that it was not long “before prominent Negroes rushed forward to assure the Republic that the United Nations rioters did not represent the real feeling of the Negro community” (25). In the Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, Baraka follows Hansberry’s lead in being explicit about his contempt for Bunche: “Ralph Bunche said he was ashamed and scandalized by such niggerism, while we were scandalized and ashamed of his negro-ass tom antics” (181). Bunche was not just asserting his authority to define the acceptable boundaries of African American protest; he was also coming to the support of his longtime friend Stevenson.10 In concluding her letter in this manner, Hansberry revealed the fragmentation at the heart of blackness that became more pronounced as sections of the African American elite aligned their interests with those of the Western powers. Bunche’s actions, however, appear almost benign when compared to those of more conservative African Americans.

Securing Cold Warrior Bona Fides: Yergan and Schuyler, père and fille In December 1961, just nine months after Hansberry published her letter in the New York Times supporting the slain Lumumba and the activists who protested his death at the United Nations, Max Yergan announced the formation of the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters in a news conference held at the Overseas Press Club in New York. The announcement completed a drift to the right that had begun at least thirteen years earlier in 1948, when he publicly clashed with members of the Council of African Affairs (CAA), an organization whose predecessor he had founded in 1937.11 Soon after being ousted from the CAA, Yergan reemerged on the international activist scene with ties to a CIA-front organization, the International Confederation of Free Trade Union (ICFTU). The ICFTU was “the United States’s first major campaign in the Cold War contest for western hearts and minds,” which, under the direction of Irving Brown, engaged in anti-Communist operations “in western Europe, a crucial battleground in 50  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

the propaganda Cold War, given European labor’s vast postwar power, both economic and political, and its historic susceptibility to Communist influence” (Wilford 52, 54). Yergan opened a new front in the European colonies on the African continent. In May 1950, he published an article, “ICFTU’s Opportunity in Africa,” which called for “an altogether new approach” to the continent, which “recognize[d] . . . that the era of the old imperialism has ended” (quoted in Anthony 234). The fruit of Yergan’s labor on behalf of the new imperialism or neocolonialism apparently bore fruit in the relationship the ICFTU developed with Tom Mboya, who became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labor in 1953 and was “supported as a force to the right of Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta” (Schechter 29). The month after his article appeared in the ICFTU News, that organization’s print organ, Yergan traveled to Berlin, Germany, to address the Congress of Cultural Freedom, held June 26–30, 1950. The congress gave a platform to a “hundred invited writers, artists, and scientists,” “almost all [of whom] were liberals or social democrats, critical of capitalism and opposed to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, racism, and dictatorship” and committed anti-Communists (Coleman 18, 20). Yergan addressed the conference on the subject of “Negroes and Democracy in the U.S.,” assuring his audience with “quasi-legalistic” arguments that African Americans were making strides in their quest to “be a part of the American nation,” despite Communist claims to the contrary (Anthony 237). His address complemented the speech of his fellow African American and frequent companion on the right-wing fringe for the next two decades, the conservative columnist George Schuyler, who also “circulated a report to delegates, complete with statistics, demonstrating that the situation of blacks in America never stopped improving . . . thanks to the capitalist system’s constant ability to adapt to change” (Saunders 78). The organization that emerged out of the Berlin congress, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, was the CIA’s “principal front organization in the so-called cultural Cold War” (Wilford 101–102). Yergan and Schuyler maintained their membership in the organization for four years before resigning in 1954. Apparently, membership in organizations funded clandestinely by the CIA did not go far enough in satisfying these men’s urge to be the ne plus ultra of black, right-wing Cold Warriors. The Congo Crisis presented both Yergan and Schuyler with an unprecedented opportunity to establish their bona fides as the most committed of The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 51

anti-Communists. To top matters off, Schuyler went so far as to enlist his former child-prodigy pianist and journalist daughter, Philippa, into the endeavor. At the center of the Congo Crisis was the secessionist province Katanga and its leader, Moïse Tshombe. In the months following Lumumba’s assassination, Katanga became a magnet for doubters of African independence and defenders of white rule. In order to maintain control over an independent Katanga, Tshombe depended on the support of Belgium soldiers and white mercenaries from South Africa and Rhodesia and, eventually, prominent white American conservatives “who appreciated his anti-Communism, openness to foreign investors, nominal Christianity, and general orientation toward the West” (Borstelmann 148). American support for the effort to stem the tide of black rule in Africa coalesced around the American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters. While the task of announcing its existence in a joint press conference fell to Yergan and fellow left defector James Burnham, a former CCF-er and CIA consultant, the committee enjoyed support from a swath of the American right wing, from the conservative intellectual and National Review founder William F. Buckley to the arch-segregationist senator from Mississippi, James O. Eastland. To deflect charges of racism, the committee appointed Yergan as its chairman and recruited his longtime associate George Schuyler and his daughter Philippa Schuyler to the organization (Plummer, In Search 92). In providing a shield from the charge of racism to the committee, these African Americans supported a situation which Yergan’s biographer David Anthony describes as a total perversion of the very concept of African “independence”: “Katanga . . . was a paradise for the European ‘experts’ engaged with the mining and ancillary industries who extracted considerable profits while their African wards, the primary producers, writhed in abject penury” (261). While the reactionary nature of the committee ensured that it never gained wide support among African Americans, its use of Yergan and the Schuylers extended to its logical extreme the overall Cold War pattern of aligning African American elite interests to with those of the neocolonial West. As a journalist, Philippa Schuyler contributed directly to the cultural Cold War effort to rewrite the narrative of the Congo Crisis. In addition to the news articles she wrote as a foreign correspondent for the United Press and other news agencies between 1960 and 1961, Philippa Schuyler’s contribution also appeared in the form of her book Who Killed the Congo? Although mostly forgotten today, this imperialist apologia generated con52  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

troversy when it was published in 1962. According to Schuyler’s biographer Kathryn Talalay, “Conservatives applauded it, liberals disdained it,” and it was given “a merciless panning” by a book reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune (211). Schuyler had been in the Congo for several weeks in June and July 1960, witnessing the lead-up to independence and the disorder that ensued immediately afterward. She returned to the Congo in mid-August on assignment as a United Press International special correspondent (Talalay 204). Much of Who Killed the Congo? was written over this same period. In Who Killed the Congo?, Schuyler sets out to rectify what she saw as the “many errors and misinformation circulated about the Congo” (vii). Her portrait rehabilitates the image of Belgium imperialism, debunks the fanciful representations of Katanga’s riches, and provides a study in contrast of the two leaders at the center of the Congo Crisis, Lumumba and Tshombe. Perhaps the most unpalatable argument in the entirety of the text is its insistence that “a tremendous lot of good was . . . done by the Belgians, whose coming was, in some ways, the best thing that ever happened to the Congolese” (95). Whereas our contemporary image of Belgian colonialism is one of Belgian enrichment through resource extraction and immiseration of the Congolese people, Schuyler lauds the “large-scale welfare programs . . . and continuing development in the fields of education, agriculture, transportation, animal conservation and economic growth” (96). She describes in a similar vein Union Minère, which for most observers embodied the reactionary forces and white colonial interests supporting Thsombe’s secessionist movement in Katanga. Instead of naked exploitation, Schuyler depicts “social welfare programs of the most advanced caliber for the Congolese workers” and insists there “was no comparison between this benevolent treatment and the terrible conditions under which African mine workers labor in British-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa” (84). To make sense of her lack of scruples sanitizing European colonialism, it is worth noting that sometime in 1961 she was sent by her father to Angola to produce pro-Portuguese articles for the New York Daily Mirror. Her trip was financed by Selvage and Lee, a publicity firm hired by the fascist dictator of Portugal Antonio Salazar to counteract recent articles in the Washington Post and Harper’s that offered “gruesome and graphic” details of Portuguese atrocities in Angola (Anthony 259). Who Killed the Congo? continued this publicity work on behalf of the forces of European colonialism and US neocolonialism. The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 53

Most pro-Lumumba observers located the roots of the Congo Crisis in the desire of Western financial and industrial capitalists to maintain a government favorable to their interests in the mineral-rich province of Katanga. Countering this narrative, Schuyler argued that foreign journalists had greatly exaggerated Katanga’s wealth. Her experience in many of the province’s “best homes,” none of which “approached the luxury of some dwellings in the Near East,” leads her to conclude Katanga’s ‘fabulous’ wealth “was a product of romantic imagination and is largely a fairy tale” (208). Of course, it was not the amount of the province’s wealth that was important, but its form in uranium and other strategic minerals. Indeed, according to Thomas Borstelmann, “the preeminent military might of the United States depended on its nuclear arsenal, and over 95 percent of the fuel for those weapons since the original Manhattan Project had come from the Shinkolobwe mine,” located in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo. Moïse Tshombe’s rule guaranteed Western access to uranium and the province’s other mineral resources. In her description of Tshombe, Schuyler emphasizes qualities that are clearly meant to reassure her readers that the West could not find a better partner in the Congo. She writes that “he never switched sides or betrayed his friends,” being “loyal, trustworthy, and deeply religious” (161). Tshombe emerges in Who Killed the Congo? as the Cold Warrior the West can depend on to protect their interest against Soviet designs, unlike the miscreant Lumumba who had somehow managed to seduce the outside world. Schuyler presents an image of Lumumba that confirms all his detractors’ characterizations. Echoing assessments emanating from Western powers that literally demonized Lumumba, she relates that “thousands of Congolese called him ‘the demon’ or ‘the anti-Christ’ ” (150).12 She repeats US Secretary of State Christian Herter and UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s conclusion that he was a dope fiend by reporting: “hashish cultivation . . . was one of Congo’s major evils, and hashish-smoking one of its major vices. It was well known in the Congo, though less well known outside, that Lumumba frequently used this narcotic” (153). And, finally, she gives credence to tales of his penchant for white women by quoting a former minister in Lumumba’s government, Joseph Yav, as having told her that Lumumba “went Red not for mental conviction but because he was bought. On his visit to Russia and East Germany, he was given money, presents, girls and lavish hospitality” (154). A similar story circulated in Washington following Lumumba’s one 54  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

visit to that city. According to Borstelmann, Lumumba apparently asked his State Department handler “to procure him a blonde companion for the night,” a request that outraged President Eisenhower and his advisers, but which the CIA apparently had no qualms about satisfying (131). While news of Lumumba’s death sparked outrage among some African American activists, it is hard not to read Who Killed the Congo? as a paean to the decision to have him removed.

Lingering Fragments Brenda Gayle Plummer has recently argued that “the stark polarities of white versus black, colonialism versus freedom, and racism versus tolerance . . . became ambiguous in the era of African self-rule” (In Search 88). This type of ambiguity thrives in the murky waters of neocolonialism. In the mutual entanglement and divergence between African and African American freedom struggles, this ambiguity was not without its consequence, particularly as revealed in the texts and events surrounding the Congo Crisis, which reverberated strongly within African American political and cultural life. Indeed, according to James H. Meriwether, “African American responses to the Congo crisis and to Lumumba reveal how issues such as black nationalism, leftist thought, and militancy created fissures in black America” (209). I would argue, however, that it was less these issues creating fissures than the fragmentation at the heart of blackness being revealed in these varied responses to the crisis. In the course of crafting a post–Jim Crow African American identity framed by the Cold War conflict, this fragmentation was smoothed over as an ideological consensus formed to define legitimate African American political and cultural practice. The intellectual consequences of this consolidation remain with us today. Consider again the diversity of African American activists that protested at the United Nations after Lumumba’s death. Besides the people already mentioned in this chapter, the group included such individuals and groups as drummer Max Roach and deputy vice-chairman of the South African Pan African Congress Vouse Make, as well as members of the Universal African Legion, the International Muslim Society, the Brooklyn-based United Sons and Daughters of Africa, and the Order of Damballah Ouedo.13 Yet of all the individuals associated with this protest, the ones that continue to live The Fragmented Heart of Blackness 55

on in African American historical and cultural memory are James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, both of whose schedules or prior commitments prevented them from being there. Maya Angeolu is perhaps an exception to this characterization, but as Higashida argues “her remarkable popularity and cultural capital” were achieved in part by “emphasizing personal triumph and identity formation over sociohistorical narrative [and] the revolutionary politics she shared with comrades who have been exiled, persecuted, or otherwise banished from public memory” (28). What this situation reveals is that the Cold War’s dominant ideology on matters of race, racial liberalism, and its attendant critical practices continues to fragment blackness along the lines of the acceptable and not.

56  c e d r i c t o l l i v e r

Chapter three the appeal of cuba The 1968 Havana Cultural Congress and US Intellectuals Michele Hardesty

Leonard Mead in La Habana In early 1968, the FBI opened an investigation to find out whether science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was one of the thirty-plus US delegates who attended the Cultural Congress of Havana (CCH), which took place in January of that year.1 In the course of this investigation, which spanned seven months, the bureau documented a decade’s worth of Bradbury’s alleged political activities. It also attached a report from an earlier investigation in 1959, which raised suspicions about Bradbury’s organizational memberships, his criticisms of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and the subversive potential of his works of science fiction.2 If, for the FBI, Bradbury posed a potential domestic threat to “American institutions” in 1959, by 1968 his threat was being measured in terms of a suspected relationship with Cuba. By August, however, when the investigation ended, the Los Angeles field office had found no evidence that Bradbury had gone to Cuba, nor any indication that he applied for permission to do so.3 Bradbury’s file shows how wide a net was cast by US agencies to track and manage well-known writers

who may have traveled to the “restricted area” of Cuba to the international gathering of intellectuals in Havana in 1968. Despite the outcome of the FBI’s investigation, Bradbury does show up in Havana, in a manner of speaking. In the Cuban weekly magazine Bohemia for January 5, 1968, amid extensive coverage of the CCH, there appears “El Peatón,” a Spanish translation of Bradbury’s 1951 short story “The Pedestrian.”4 Set in 2053 and clearly a study for Fahrenheit 451, “The Pedestrian” follows the evening reveries of a solitary walker, Leonard Mead. In the story, as Leonard passes house after house of families rapt in front of their televisions, he speculates about the programming: “What’s up tonight on Channel 4, Channel 7, Channel 9? Where are the cowboys rushing, and do I see the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue?” Ultimately, Leonard is confronted by the city’s only police officer and taken to the “Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies” for his strange behavior, his suspicious lack of a profession (he describes himself as a writer), and his failure to own his own “viewing screen.”5 “The Pedestrian” depicts an alienated society, controlled by the mass media and afraid of its own writers. The short story stands as an indictment of domestic US Cold War culture, and a vindication of the writer as oppositional critic. It is a fitting accompaniment to Bradbury’s FBI file. The 1968 publication of “El Peatón” in Bohemia during the week of the Cultural Congress of Havana creates an additional, transnational context for the story. The CCH’s organizers invited intellectuals—broadly defined as artists, writers, technicians, and scientists—from over sixty countries “to discuss problems of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”6 The CCH was a significant event in the post-Bandung Third World movement, coming closely on the heels of the Tricontinental Congress in Havana. At the same time, the CCH was a skirmish in the global cultural cold war, one in which Cuba, together with its international allies, waged an ideological battle on two fronts: against US neocolonialism and Soviet dogmatism.7 In the January 5th issue of Bohemia, “El Peatón” becomes incorporated by spatial and temporal proximity into the critical repertoire of the CCH. In their declarations and papers, Congress organizers and delegates took aim at US mass media as an instrument of alienation and social control not only in the United States but also in the decolonizing world, understanding it as part of a larger US-dominated system of neocolonial plunder and domi58  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

nance. “They impose ignorance on us, they take away our riches and distort our reality,” said Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes in his paper for the CCH. “The mass-media are a continuation of the war by peaceful means.”8 Reading Bradbury’s story in the context of such statements helps to highlight the subtle connection the story itself makes between US imperialist ideology and mass media control; the image of “the United States Cavalry over the next hill to the rescue,” for example, may have evoked the 1898 US intervention and its marketing as benevolent rescue, as well as more recent US invasions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, while Bradbury’s short story critiqued mass consumption of media, one of the aims of the CCH was the development of national media industries—including television—in decolonized nations and the formation of what Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez called “a new spectator.”9 In fact, though the CCH was explicitly a congress of intellectuals, its sessions held the traditional figure of the intellectual and writer, championed by Bradbury, up to intense scrutiny. By opening this chapter with Leonard Mead in La Habana, I have three aims. First, I am beginning with an author frequently read in terms of the domestic US cold war and asking how and why he was read in an international, neocolonial context. Second, by reading Bradbury as a spectral delegate to the Cultural Congress of Havana via his FBI file, I am illuminating how the US national security state sought to break the bonds of counterhegemonic intellectual solidarity that the CCH tried to foster. And third, by reading Bradbury as a spectral delegate to the CCH via “El Peatón,” I want to show how Cuban editors were extracting, publishing, and responding to the work of US writers and intellectuals on their own terms. From the FBI’s dead end with Bradbury, this chapter will examine the context for Cuban organizers inviting a large number of US intellectuals to attend its 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, including the events that led to the CCH, the US security state’s management of invitees, and the reports by and activities of US-based delegates. It will also trace another transnational publication trail similar to that of “El Peatón,” putting into dialogue two essays published in the wake of the CCH by Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar and US writer Noam Chomsky on the responsibility of the intellectual. By looking at this incomplete set of documentary records, I argue that the CCH was, in part, an occasion in which Cubans and other Third Worldists negotiated a solidarity with intellectuals in the belly of the neocolonial beast.10 The Appeal of Cuba 59

“A Vietnam in the Field of Culture” The Cultural Congress of Havana had roots in the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, at which brought together leaders of twenty-nine newly independent nations of Asia and Africa to overcome divisions that had been structured by colonialism and to advocate for political nonalignment and peaceful coexistence.11 That conference spurred many more gatherings of what became known as the Third World movement, including the NonAligned Movement Conference in Belgrade in 1961, which Cuba attended. More proximately, the Cultural Congress of Havana was a sequel to congresses of two new Havana-based organizations: the Organization of African, Asian, and Latin American Solidarity (OSPAAAL) in 1966, and the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS) in 1967. With these congresses, Cuba took leadership in the Third World movement and moved it in a more militant direction. As Vijay Prashad has argued, Fidel Castro questioned the Third World movement’s doctrine of “peaceful coexistence,” which was adopted by the Soviet Union as well, leading to what Castro saw as immobility in the face of US-backed coups and the abandonment of North Vietnam. Backed by the ideas of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, and others, Cuba’s new tendency opposed not only old-style colonialism but also neocolonialism and imperialism in the context of US dominance, and it insisted on armed struggle “not only as a tactic of anticolonialism but significantly as a strategy within itself,” regardless of the specific local conditions.12 OSPAAAL remained influential from the mid-1960s into the 1980s, and its strategy—as well as its style, exemplified by its Tricontinental magazine and bold posters folded inside each issue, which made their way around the world—influenced a number of US-based revolutionary organizations.13 While the Cultural Congress itself was advertised widely as a gathering of intellectuals rather than national liberation organizations, it did not draw a line between the two, inviting representatives of liberation struggles like the NLF and FRELIMO (some of whom were also poets), and anticolonial intellectuals like Aimé Césaire and C. L. R. James. Previously, at the OSPAAAL congress, Che Guevara’s “Message to the Tricontinental,” delivered in absentia, called for revolutionary forces to launch “a second, or a third Vietnam, or a second and third Vietnam of the world,” and insisted that genuine solidarity with these forces meant a shared fate, not sideline support.14 The CIA-sponsored 60  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

assassination of Guevara in October 1967, according to Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, led the Tricontinentalists to pivot the focus from armed struggle to ideological battle, just as Cuban artists and writers were meeting to prepare the January 1968 Cultural Congress.15 Many of the congress’s papers would exalt Che as a model revolutionary and an intellectual. In Castro’s closing speech at the CCH, he reprised Guevara’s slogan and speculated that the “imperialists” would call the congress “a Vietnam in the field of culture.”16 Another important context for the CCH was the 1966 PEN Congress, which took place in New York a year and a half earlier. Deborah Cohn has argued that this 1966 congress served US national interests by courting key writers and intellectuals in Latin America with Communist affiliations.17 PEN invited writers whose Communist affiliations had previously prevented their entry into the United States—including Pablo Neruda and Carlos Fuentes. To clear the way for these invitations, the State Department granted a group waiver to the ideological exclusion clause of the McCarren-Walter Act for the very first time. Then, not long after that congress, in April 1966, the New York Times broke the story that the CIA had been covertly funding several anti-Communist organizations, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which provided the financial support for Mundo Nuevo, a Paris-based literary journal that published writing from Latin America.18 Cuban writers, artists, and filmmakers (148 altogether) responded with an open letter to Neruda, condemning his trip as serving US interests, and making connections between PEN’s invitations (which some Cuban writers had received, but had refused), and the CIA revelations.19 The Cultural Congress of Havana, then, can be understood as a symbolic counterattack to the efforts of both the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the 1966 PEN Congress, and Alejo Carpentier, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Nicolás Guillén—who signed the open letter to Neruda—would go on to become its key organizers. As Eric Hobsbawm would write of the CCH, for which he was a delegate, “In more senses than one, it was the exact opposite of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”20 In the face of these strategic US-sponsored intellectual exchanges in the Americas, which fed processes of neocolonial “cultural penetration” and “brain drain,” the CCH sought to sponsor its own intellectual exchanges that would not only affirm the solidarity of erstwhile supporters and fellow revolutionaries but would draw on Cuba’s revolutionary appeal to invite broader participation.21 Of those who were invited from the United States, some had The Appeal of Cuba 61

made previous solidarity trips to Cuba with Fair Play for Cuba or individually; other invitations affirmed Cuba’s longtime support of the US black liberation movement, and its growing interest in the student antiwar movement.22 More surprisingly, Cuban organizers also chose to invite a number of anti-Stalinist leftists and liberal intellectuals, including Philip Rahv, Susan Sontag, Dwight Macdonald, and Robert Lowell. While these individuals may have been sympathetic toward the Cuban Revolution and other national liberation struggles, several were directly or indirectly implicated by the revelations about the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Philip Rahv, coeditor of the Partisan Review, had been among the leadership of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom; Dwight Macdonald had spent time in the 1950s as an editor of Encounter, the premiere CCF-funded magazine based in London; Robert Lowell had gone on a CCF-sponsored tour, albeit a disastrous one, of South America in 1962.23 These invitations suggest that Cuban organizers wished to win anti-Communist leftists to its cause, especially those who in more recent years had begun protesting their own government’s policies. While organizers honored foreign intellectuals with CFF invitations, the picture within Cuba was quite different. As Jean Franco would write much later, “Rereading the Cuban journals of the 1960s, the anxiety surrounding the term ‘intellectual’ is palpable: foreign intellectuals’ support for the revolution was critical to its success, even as the domestic intellectual was being reined in.”24 This “reining in” started, in many ways, with Castro’s 1961 speech “Words to the Intellectuals,” in which he promised that the Cuban government would not impose aesthetic demands, as the Soviet Union had with socialist realism, but it would also not tolerate intellectual and artistic work that could be construed as counterrevolutionary: “This means that within the Revolution, everything goes; against the Revolution, nothing.”25 Many greeted this statement with relief, yet the question of what was deemed counterrevolutionary remained ambiguous, open to interpretation and to use as an expedient measure for silencing political foes. By 1965, when Che Guevara published his famous essay “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” which inaugurated the notion of the “New Man,” his unease with intellectual culture is palpable: “To sum up, the fault of many of our intellectuals and artists is to be found in their ‘original sin,’ ” he wrote. “They are not authentically revolutionary. We can attempt to graft elm trees so they bear pears, but at the same time we must plant pear trees. The new generations 62  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

will arrive free of ‘original sin.’”26 In the years before the Cultural Congress, people faced scrutiny against the ideal of the “New Man.” Lillian Guerra notes how the government linked “intellectualism” and “homosexualism,” as “nonproductive, self-absorbed, and related tendencies that jeopardized the long-term advancement of Communism by undermining the value of manual labor.” The government sent many “offenders” to disciplinary camps, Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP).27 A year after the 1968 congress, in a roundtable with other mostly Cuban writers, Cuban novelist and CCH organizer Edmundo Desnoes would admit, “When foreign artists and intellectuals visited us, we created that illusion, we repeated that in Cuba there existed unconditional freedom to express problems, for all opinions. That is relatively false within the Revolution.”28 Likewise, exiled Cuban writer Carlos Moore detailed how Minister of Education and CCH president José Llanusa Gobels forbid a group of black Cuban intellectuals—which included prominent filmmaker Sara Gómez, poet and essayist Rogelio Martínez Furé, poet Nancy Morejón, and historian Walterio Carbonell—from reading a paper on race and culture in Cuba, or attending the congress at all.29 For Moore, “Afrocentric foreign policy interest never ruled out Afrophobic domestic initiatives” for “Cuba’s white revolutionary leadership.”30 These contradictions were not always visible to visitors, and in what had just been named the “Year of the Heroic Guerrilla,” 1968, Cuba took advantage of its appeal to host a congress that would build strategic, if often symbolic, alliances with a wide array of intellectuals, artists, and writers, technicians, doctors, and scientists.

“When They Denied Me Permission, I Decided to Come Anyway” In response to the wide range of invitations that Havana organizers offered to US citizens, the State Department and other government agencies used both existing and novel approaches to manage travel to Cuba, which impacted the composition of the US delegation at the CCH. The US government began restricting travel by US citizens to Cuba in 1961, after it ended diplomatic relations with the Cuban government. Like the economic embargo, travel restrictions were meant to isolate Cuba; they also perpetuated a cold war practice of controlling the travel of US citizens. While the State Department’s The Appeal of Cuba 63

blanket ideological passport denials of the 1950s had ended and the Supreme Court affirmed travel as a constitutional right for most US citizens in 1958, the courts also affirmed the executive’s prerogative to deem certain countries as “restricted areas” and limit citizens’ ability to travel there.31 In the 1960s, Cuba was not the only “restricted area”; US passports in this era were printed with a notice that they were not valid for travel to mainland China, North Korea, and North Vietnam. Exceptions were made for professional reporters, and by 1966 the secretary of state had the additional discretion to validate passports for doctors, scientists working in medicine and public health, scholars doing research in their fields, and American Red Cross personnel—as long as the trip would benefit the national interest of the United States.32 The State Department did not consider it to be in the national interest to allow every US-based invitee to attend the Cultural Congress of Havana. Instead, it limited permission to journalists, going so far as to require tax returns from applicants to prove that they made the majority of their income from journalism.33 In addition, the Passport Office required applicants to submit an affidavit promising that they would not participate in the Cultural Congress “in any way” and that their “sole purpose in visiting Cuba was to gather information for publication in the United States.”34 With this approach, which the State Department had started using during the Organization of Latin American Solidarity meeting in 1967, it severely limited the possibilities for US invitees attending or participating in the congress. Several individuals who were given permission to attend and report on the congress used their platform to publicize the passport process and its denials, including writer and cartoonist Jules Feiffer, on assignment for the Village Voice and Harper’s; editor and writer Helen Yglesias, reporting for The Nation; and pacifist and antiwar organizer David Dellinger, covering the congress for Liberation. According to Helen Yglesias and David Dellinger, there were a number of prominent writers and intellectuals who could not manage to convince the State Department of their credentials, including poet Robert Lowell, novelist and critic Susan Sontag, literary critic Philip Rahv, critic Dwight Macdonald, publisher André Schiffrin, dramatist Eric Bentley, and anthropologist Oscar Lewis, among several others.35 Dellinger, in particular, takes note that denials were meted out to individuals who were literary writers, indicating that the Passport Office did not just closely adhere to the journalists-only policy but actively prevented certain kinds of writers 64  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

from attending. Dellinger writes, “Lowell was told that he did not qualify as a journalist, despite the fact that his projected visit was sponsored by the New York Review of Books, where his poems appear frequently. If Lowell’s disqualification was that he writes poetry, Susan Sontag’s was that she spends more time writing books than magazine articles.”36 By denying permission to Rahv, Macdonald, Lowell, Schiffrin, and Sontag, the State Department guaranteed (whether or not by design is unclear) that the Havana Congress would not feature voices from leftist and liberal intellectuals who had been most closely associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Indeed, none of these rejected writers chose to travel to Cuba without permission. While the US State Department issued waivers so that Communist-affiliated Latin American writers could attend conferences in the United States, it effectively blocked anti-Communist leftists and liberals who wished to attend Cuba’s Cultural Congress. Many US-based invitees did attend the Cultural Congress without State Department approval, including the delegation from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) led by Ralph Featherstone; folk singer Barbara Dane; songwriter and editor Irwin Silber; poet, radical educator, and publisher Susan Sherman; and three scientists—MIT psychology professor Stephen Chorover, New York Medical College researcher Erwin Roy John, and Harvard biology professor Mark Ptashne. Poet and El Corno Emplumado editor Margaret Randall (who had given up her US citizenship and was living in Mexico City) was also in attendance. As soon as writer José Yglesias and several US scientists arrived in Havana, they held a press conference to highlight the State Department’s denials. Yglesias had permission to attend, but he explained that he had to “sell” himself as a journalist to gain travel permission, despite being primarily a writer of books. Roy John, however, reported that the State Department had deemed the congress a “propaganda event” and scientists’ attendance as against the interests of the United States, rejecting their applications. “When they denied me permission,” said Roy John, “I decided to come anyway.”37

“Americans Figure Everywhere” Altogether, the congress hosted close to six hundred delegates and nearly two hundred press delegates from seventy countries.38 More than thirty The Appeal of Cuba 65

US-based delegates did travel to Cuba for the CCH, with or without State Department permission.39 Unlike the 1967 OLAS Congress, where Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Turé) was named “guest of honor” and became a celebrity in Cuba, no single delegate claimed the spotlight at the 1968 congress.40 Rumored invitees from the US with star power—like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, or James Baldwin—were among those who never made it to the CCH.41 The most famous delegate from the United States was liberal political cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer, and he neither took center stage in Havana nor reported on his experience after returning.42 Many delegates did publish articles about their trips, and these articles take in a range of impressions about Havana’s cultural, social, and political life. However, only two of them—by Helen Yglesias and Margaret Randall—give details about the CCH Commissions (the official proceedings) themselves, and only two delegates—Irwin Silber and Susan Sherman—delivered official papers. Other clues about US-based delegates’ participation in the commissions can be gleaned by examining the Cuban press, especially Granma’s daily CCH coverage. US-based delegates had signed restrictive affidavits or had traveled without permission to a “restricted area,” and their travels were being tracked by the FBI, CIA, and State Department; these realities surely shaped their participation—as well as the documentation of this participation. At the same time, delegates were negotiating their own positions of national and cultural affiliation and disaffiliation both inside and outside of the CCH proceedings. Several of the thirty-plus US-based delegates used the CCH as an opportunity to survey both revolutionary social projects and attend cultural events like the Third World art exposition at the Pabellón Cuba, which showcased a Cuba that seemed to be on the cutting edge of both revolution and art. In her detailed account of the CCH in The Nation, Helen Yglesias wrote, “This open, grasping experimentation is evident everywhere in Cuba.” And while she acknowledged the “struggles” that had happened in Cuba to maintain this openness, she concluded that “at the moment the freest expression seems secure,” with politicos and avant-gardists sharing the stage at the CCH.43 Her impressions of Cuba’s openness were widely shared, echoing Jean Franco’s argument that the appeal of Cuba consisted in its apparent “alliance of the avant-garde with the political vanguard.”44 However, even as Yglesias acknowledges the controversy around the 1966 PEN Congress, she places Cuba in a US-centric Cold War frame for evaluation: “What is so attractive 66  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

in Cuba is the health a society generates when it is open to innovation and social experiment,” she wrote. “It was the quality most admired, I think, by the Americans present and most puzzling to delegates from the Socialist countries, who cannot reconcile Cuba’s revolutionary political stance with its relaxed cultural openness.”45 While she makes some effort to affirm Cuban self-determination in her article, she nevertheless assumes an “American” perspective to claim Cuba within a US cultural sphere of influence in a Cold War competition with the socialist delegates. For some delegates from the United States at the height of the war in Vietnam, the appeal of Cuba—as well as of North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (NLF)—was inseparable from a desire to disaffiliate from the United States government and its foreign policy, but also from US culture and “American” identity itself. This orientation is evident in the paper that songwriter and Sing Out! editor Irwin Silber delivered at the CCH, in which he set out to “tear away the mask and tell the truth about the culture of imperialism” in the belly of the beast. “The immoral aggression in Vietnam has accelerated the process of dehumanization in the USA. until it is now almost complete,” said Silber. “The plastic civilization of the North American ruling class has triumphed and visited upon its own people an intellectual and moral genocide so penetrating and so profound that it has poisoned the entire structure of social and human relationships in the United States.”46 While Silber acknowledged that there was “an eruption in the arts in America today,” as well as “a new underground,” he found those expressions cynical, self-mocking, alienated, and despairing, and easily co-opted and “fed back to the people—at a profit.” He is similarly pessimistic about revolutionary art: while he respects the work of black revolutionary artists, among white artists he saw nothing “capable of moving and inspiring a corrupted and demoralized people towards a position of genuine revolutionary struggle.”47 As a representative of the imperialist United States at the congress, Silber distanced himself both from its politics and its cultures, while being drawn to the revolutionary art of Cuba. For Ralph Featherstone—the leader of the African American delegation from SNCC, who had worked in southern Freedom Schools—internationalism had a different formation.48 When asked in an interview with Lionel Martin for the Havana-based magazine Cuba how SNCC developed its internationalist orientation, Featherstone mentioned members’ trips to Africa as well as the teachings of Malcolm X, and he added, The Appeal of Cuba 67

But this perspective had to arise from our own experiences in North America. It arose from our inability to gain our real freedom within the system of imperialism. It deepened after an analysis of how to gain it. We achieved the comprehension of the nature of oppression and that this is the same everywhere. We learned that the relation of the United States with innumerable countries is a relation of oppressor to oppressed.49 Featherstone’s response echoed Stokely Carmichael’s own speech to OLAS: “Our people are a colony within the United States, and you are colonies outside the United States”; this was a position Carmichael extended to “hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and American Indians.”50 In her report on the CCH, Margaret Randall pointed out that members of the SNCC delegation introduced themselves not as US or North American delegates, but as “overseas Africans,” making their affiliation with the colonized world and disaffiliation from the United States clear. 51 For Featherstone, speaking in the context of his role as SNCC delegation leader, solidarity with Cuba was lateral, from one colonized people to another, and he was drawn to Cuba by the promise of visiting the “only liberated zone in the Western Hemisphere.”52 Silber gave his paper to CCH’s Commission III, the theme of which was “The Responsibility of Intellectuals on Problems of the Underdeveloped World” and whose chair was Cuban writer Roberto Fernández Retamar— two facts I highlight now because I will return to them in the final section of this chapter.53 Commission III also included Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar, Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James, Jamaican poet Andrew Salkey, and Haitian writer René Depestre, and many others. There is some indication that other US-based visitors participated in that same commission; the evidence, however, is very scant. According to the coverage of the CCH in the newspaper Granma, Featherstone and Todd Gitlin (who was part of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) delegation, with Carl Davidson) were members of a working group, formed by Lajpat Rai of India, that would draft a resolution to “establish concrete means to fight the cultural genocide that the United States is carrying out.”54 The final resolution of Commission III includes many statements and recommendations, including one on cultural genocide. However, its call for a cultural boycott of the United States is most relevant for understanding 68  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

how a refusal of US imperialism and solidarity with intellectuals in the US were envisioned together: Every honest intellectual must refuse to cooperate—must not accept invitations or financial help from the U.S. Government and its official bodies or from any organization or foundation whose activities may give the impression that intellectuals participating in them approve U.S. imperialist policy. This call for boycott (which brings to mind again the open letter to Neruda) does not limit itself to invitations and aid that are directly tied to the US government, but extends to anything that “give[s] the impression” of approval of US policy. It goes on to call for solidarity with US anti-imperialist intellectuals: On the other hand, he must actively cooperate with U.S. intellectuals who are opposed to imperialism and who support the struggle of the Third World—including that of the Vietnamese people—and who support the struggle of the Afro-American people in the United States and encourage the young North American people not to enroll in the military service to fight in Vietnam.55 This full paragraph, encompassing the cultural boycott and the call for solidarity, was also included verbatim in the General Declaration of the CCH; the more widely circulated “Appeal of Havana” (llamamiento, or “call,” in Spanish) included a similar statement.56 This vision of solidarity, however, is clumsy on the level of syntax, both in its Spanish original and in its official English translation. The call is to support those anti-imperialist intellectuals who were supporting the struggles of others: the Vietnamese, African Americans, draft resisters. While affirming the internal colony thesis by creating a parallel between struggles of the Vietnamese and African Americans, it also preserved intellectuals as a separate category and did not grant “intellectual” status to those actively involved in these struggles. This awkward call reflects the difficulty of collectively articulating an intellectual solidarity between Third World intellectuals and intellectuals in the belly of the beast. One of the obstacles to solidarity was the very likelihood that US delegates were subject to—or complicit with—state surveillance. A passage from Salkey’s Havana Journal, describing his encounter with one of the US delegates in his commission in the lobby of the Hotel Habana Libre, gives some indication of the suspicious gaze under which US delegates operated: The Appeal of Cuba 69

I stood by the desk and talked to one of the American delegates in my commission. He leant against the grille of the Cashier’s barrier, sank his chin into the palm of his hand and told me, in the manner of the weary combatant, that our resolution had been passed at 1:45, after a series of fiery showdowns on the floor between the leader of the Russian delegation and three Frenchman, two Cubans, a Norwegian and a Dutchman. I thank him for the good news. He picked up a copy of El Mundo and said, “the press is pretty quiet about the oil story.”57 I nodded. “You read Spanish?” I asked. “I manage,” he said. He turned the pages quickly. His eyes darted over them with familiarity. “I see Fidel’s more or less expected to close the Congress.” “Why more or less?” “Well, things might be held up. There’s an old barn dance still going on in Commission I between your British playwright and the Arabs.”58 “And in which the Americans figure as the strolling musicians?” “Americans figure everywhere, strolling or not, invited or not.” He laughed. I left him reading El Mundo and nodding to himself, and wondered what sort of reception the over-intelligent State Department had in store for him on his return. Then, again, he might have a story or two to tell them. One can’t be sure about anything American.59 For the most part, Salkey uses the word “daring” to describe the US-based delegates, whether they were Feiffer, the SNCC delegation, Barbara Dane, or David Dellinger.60 Here—in a scene that evokes Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—he reminds himself, and his readers, that any US delegate still has a structural relationship to the US state, and that any US delegate very possibly could be a spy.

The Transnational Responsibility of Intellectuals While Commission III’s final resolution called for the “active cooperation” of “honest intellectuals” with anti-imperialist US intellectuals, it did not explain in what this “cooperation” would consist. Another exchange between 70  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

a US writer and a Cuban writer took up this question; like Ray Bradbury’s “appearance” in Cuba by way of “El Peatón,” this exchange did not involve a delegate to the CCH but it took place in periodicals published in its aftermath. In March 1968, Noam Chomsky’s 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was reprinted in the journal of the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba, Unión. That same month, in the March–April 1968 issue of Casa de las Américas, Roberto Fernández Retamar’s speech from the CCH, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in Underdeveloper Countries,” was published along with a number of other papers from Commission III. Read together retrospectively as a dialogue, these essays allow both the possibilities and also the limitations of intellectual solidarity between intellectuals in the United States and Cuba to come further into view. Cuban periodicals and presses were still printing both political and literary texts from the United States in 1968, and doing so with deliberate disregard to copyright.61 For example, the Cuban Book Institute published a collection of African American writing entitled Now, edited by Edmundo Desnoes, in 1967, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, in 1968.62 According to Astrid Santana Fernández de Castro’s study of the image of the United States in 1968 Cuba, these texts demonstrate that the Cuban cultural press was not exactly turning off the valve of culture coming from the imperial north as it was controlling the flow. Cuban publishers selected intellectual and literary works that represented the alienated, consumerist culture and violent, racist society of the United States, as well as paying attention to how movements and individuals were confronting the empire from within in increasingly militant ways.63 It is in this context that we can read the republication of Noam Chomsky’s essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” in Unión. Originally published in the New York Review of Books one year earlier, the Cuban version was a Spanish translation of the text that had appeared in French in Les Temps Modernes.64 Chomsky, a linguistics professor at MIT and an intellectual light of the antiwar New Left, argues that intellectuals’ responsibility is “to speak truth and to expose lies,” especially the lies of their own governments.65 The majority of the essay, however, examines the lies themselves, arguing that “experts” have constructed a web of deceit that has more to do with perpetuating an ideology of US innocence and moral leadership than with confronting the political situation regarding, most prominently, Vietnam. With heavy doses The Appeal of Cuba 71

of irony, Chomsky underscores the logic of the US refusal to negotiate a settlement with Hanoi and the NLF: “Recent history shows that it makes little difference to us what form of government a country has so long as it remains an ‘open society,’ in our peculiar sense of this term—that is, a society that remains open to American economic penetration or political control. If it is necessary to approach genocide in Vietnam to achieve this objective, than this is the price we must pay in defense of freedom and the rights of man.”66 Chomsky highlighted the imperial goal of United States government and its “expert” defenders when they promoted political freedom but sought, actually, political and economic control. Such an analysis paralleled CCH delegates’ critiques of the politics of cultural openness and freedom of expression: such ideas were tools the United States used to maintain its own control, even if it meant “cultural genocide.” Chomsky’s essay focuses more on these “experts”—such as Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol—than on the responsibility of “free-floating intellectuals” like himself, who openly opposed US policy but were not professional political analysts. Yet the question of responsibility is raised again in a letter from George Steiner, published in the Review a month later, and also reprinted in the Unión version, which ends by asking, “Does your essay not stop almost at the point where it ought to begin?”67 Steiner is asking, in other words, how Chomsky was performing the responsibilities of an intellectual. Chomsky’s response is searching and unsure, noting his refusal to pay war taxes, and venturing that “it is, for the present, not improper for an anti-war intellectual to stay here and oppose the government, in as outspoken a way as he can, inside the country, and within the universities that have accepted a large measure of complicity in war and repression.”68 Indeed, Chomsky’s university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the target of one of the first of the New York Times exposés on CIA connections in 1966.69 Chomsky’s position was to “stay here,” not denying complicity but affirming the role of the “free-floating intellectual.” While his essay traveled, he makes his statement from the heart of the empire rather than in Cuba.70 The same month that Chomsky’s essay appeared in Unión, Retamar’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in Underdeveloper Countries” appeared in the magazine of Casa de las Américas, one of a selection of papers delivered to Commission III of the CCH published in the issue. Retamar, who seems to be in conversation with Chomsky, addresses not US “experts” but those 72  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

leftist intellectuals who support the Cuban revolution without recognizing that their status as intellectuals in an “underdeveloper” (subdesarollante) country is made possible by exploitation:71 To be a leftist in those countries may mean nothing but to acquire firstly, the consciousness of his responsibility as a man that masters technique, science, knowledge, thanks to the exploitation that his society has exercised or exercises upon ours. Our peoples have supported and are still supporting in Europe and the U.S., universities, academies, and also antiacademies, vanguards, isms, conversions, commitments, audacities. Put succinctly, “The intellectual of these countries, therefore, achieves his knowledge mostly upon the exploitation of the Third World.” Retamar’s paper did more than highlight US cultural penetration in the Third World; it also indicated how “underdeveloper” powers built universities with (neo) colonial wealth and gained knowledge from research conducted in colonized spaces. Retamar’s paper went a step further to say that “underdeveloped” countries also supported “anti-academies, vanguards, isms, conversions, commitments, audacities”—in other words, he argued that the metropolitan avant-gardes and countercultures were built on the exploitation of the Third World. Retamar thus implicated the leftist and countercultural US delegates to the CCH in the same colonial and neocolonial relations that many of them had rejected. In his paper, Retamar acknowledges Chomsky—along with Peter Weiss and Jean-Paul Sartre—as some of the few “underdeveloper” intellectuals to understand this relationship, but maintained that the relationship between leftist intellectuals in the “underdeveloper” countries and the Third World has remained unequal and precarious. What would change this dynamic, and open space for Third World voices, he argued, would be an acknowledgment that “the science and art in the exploiting countries also belong to the exploited countries upon which they have been built.” His call, then, is for “restitution,” for such intellectuals to work to return to the “underdeveloped” world what rightfully belongs to it, especially in the form of technical assistance, help in learning indigenous languages, and, perhaps eventually, as “thinkers.”72 Taken together, this retrospective—and speculative—dialogue between Chomsky and Retamar extends the CCH’s possibilities for dialogue beyond the physical space of the Hotel Habana Libre. There are places where the The Appeal of Cuba 73

essays converge: Chomsky speaks truth to power without disowning his own complicity in the US security state, and Retamar implicitly critiques those leftist intellectuals and artists who refuse complicity, not acknowledging that even their “conversions” to anti-imperialism are a kind of neocolonial resource extraction. Simultaneously, while Retamar’s paper acts as a decolonizing supplement to Chomsky’s essay, Chomsky’s essay defends the “free-floating intellectual” who “speaks truth to power” in the context of the CCH where, as Desnoes wrote, Congress organizers “created that illusion . . . there existed unconditional freedom to express problems, for all opinions.”73 In considering the appeal of Cuba, I have played on the dual meanings of that phrase and how they resonate with the Cultural Congress of Havana. Most directly, the phrase alludes to the CCH document called, in English, the “Appeal of Havana.” I am also referring to an appeal, so to speak, that came before the “Appeal”: when Cuban organizers made a worldwide call to writers, artists, and scientists in the form of invitations to come to Havana for the Cultural Congress. I have tried to show how this appeal must be understood to follow three earlier congresses, OSPAAAL in 1966 and OLAS in 1967 in Havana, and the 1966 PEN Congress in New York City, and that with the CCH Cuban organizers sought not only to host a major international conference of intellectuals, but also to wage ideological battle within the global cold war. Additionally, I am referring to the appeal—the attraction, the draw—that Cuba had for the international left in 1968, an appeal that would shape their impressions on the island. Many delegates who attended the congress were impressed by what they saw as a spirit of open expression and experimentation (both political and artistic) at the CCH. Other visitors saw the congress as a model of revolutionary possibility lacking in their own countries. Ralph Featherstone, as delegate for SNCC at the CCH, evoked an imaginary of Cuba as sovereign and defiant when he said, “We feel like we are in the only free area in this hemisphere.”74 While the congress invited large numbers of delegates from the United States, the US State Department and security agencies sought to control or block Cuba’s appeal, in both senses of the term. Delegates who did come, then, were subject either to a signed affidavit or to legal repercussions when returning home. I have argued that the CCH was an occasion in which Cuban 74  m i c h e l e h a r d e s t y

intellectuals negotiated a solidarity with intellectuals in the belly of the neocolonial beast; however, those negotiations were shaped by the powerful appeal(s) of Cuba and the control of the US state on delegates. By turning to texts by Bradbury and Chomsky published in parallel to the congress, I have imagined these texts as spectral delegates that have eluded some— if not all—of Cuba’s appeal(s) and the US state’s control. Later in 1968, the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba (UNEAC) famously censured poet Heberto Padilla, and his arrest three years later in in 1971—the same year as the Congress of Education and Culture, which inaugurated a period of cultural repression often referred to as the quinquenio gris, or “gray half-decade”—prompted international intellectuals to break with their support for Cuba.75 The same year, however, a group of twenty members of Students for a Democratic Society would return to Cuba on a work trip in the summer of 1968, and by 1969 the first Venceremos Brigade, organized by a coalition of New Left and US Third World groups including SDS and the Black Panther Party, made their first trip of many to the island in defiance of travel restrictions.76 The Cultural Congress of Havana marked the beginning of the end for Cuba’s appeal to many leftist intellectuals, and for many young radicals the CCH marked a new beginning.

The Appeal of Cuba 75

Chapter four american Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime William V. Spanos and Adam V. Spanos

Regulating Reversion Since the colonial period American cultural practitioners have conflated the sheer power of the state with the nation’s world-historical destiny.1 Speaking with the confidence of a people elected by God to redeem the other nations of the earth, the American Puritans understood their relative power over the indigenous inhabitants of North America as a sign of their providential election. They then rationalized the immense task of colonization through an emergent and grandiloquent Americanist discourse, which functioned to shift their attention from the world-making scope of their ambitions to the divine sanction that seemed to give this mission its directives. This dissimulation of the object of their awe could not fully regulate the Puritans’ anxiety about the caprice involved in making their errand in the wilderness. Like Lot’s wife, they were tempted periodically to turn their backs in order to contemplate what had been sacrificed in their unerring rush toward deliverance. For all around them lay the signs of what they had destroyed and indications that the mission they had assumed was not destined but violently willed. If

they had been able to confront the ungrounded voluntarism that gave rise to this violence, they would have experienced the world-shattering force of the sublime and perhaps reconsidered their project. Instead, the spectacle functioned to manage this threat of regression. By construing the sublime as an experience of the nation’s plenitude rather than its proximity to the ontological abyss on which the nation had been conceived, American spectacle managed to convince citizens that its violence was always justified by the nation’s own glory. This glory took the place of a rational defense of policy. The displacement of the sublime by the spectacle fostered a culture of belief that allowed American citizens to overlook the fragile supports that national identity offered them. Remarkably durable over the course of several centuries, this settlement began to come undone in the late stages of the American war in Vietnam. In works of literature and the burgeoning culture of protest, a new attitude emerged that detached the spectacular display of US might from a saving power and identified it instead as an apparatus that operated to cover over the hollowness of the nation’s various claims to metaphysical transcendence. This critique in turn allowed for the disclosure of a primordial form of sublimity linked not to the glory of the United States’ purported achievements but to their absence. In the rift opened by the destruction of the American spectacle more fundamental questions were voiced about the context in which the United States had ascertained its dominance, the groundlessness of its claims to exceptional status, and the victims of the nation’s oversight. Those who responded to this epochal disclosure did so anxiously and uncertainly. They discovered not ready-made truths but potentialities that had lain dormant so long as the dominant culture spoke hegemonically of the identity of Americans’ interests and of American interests with those of other “freedom-loving” peoples elsewhere. One of the sites at which this novel interrogation materialized was the university, and especially the humanities, where entirely new fields and interpretive methods were born. New frameworks for studying the implication of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitical status in social and cultural affairs emerged as literature, not unlike being, came to be understood as implicated in the world.2 Established disciplines like anthropology and history were overhauled, too, as the investment of their earlier practitioners in transcendental conceptions of truth became increasingly apparent. In this transformation French theory had proven to be an important mediation, American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 77

although not because it addressed the relevant questions at the supposedly more fundamental philosophical level.3 French theory facilitated those American intellectuals struggling to come to terms with the conceit of their nation’s claims to destined status, for the French had only recently been forced to reckon with a spectacular enactment of imperial violence during the war against Algerian independence. That protracted slaughter had led many French thinkers to understand both the unfoundedness and the terrifying violence of national metaphysics. The agendas of US disciplinary research were in turn transformed as intellectuals came to recognize the blindness imposed by a national framework and reconceptualized their fields in line with the truths that were unconcealed in an allied research community. Among the last of these fields to separate its object of study from transcendental frames of analysis and reattach it to worldly methods was American Studies, and particularly US-based studies of American literature. Still, in the late 1980s, American critics could write as though there was no connection between the sublime and the administration of the world by American power.4 Yet it was not the case that these critics simply treated the sublime as an aesthetic category without political implication; in tethering the sublime to the “American” they tacitly endorsed the notion that both this literature and this nation were entities of such mystery and immensity that they surpassed the human faculties of representation and critique. This failure of the field occurred in spite of the latter’s proximity to the more radical efforts taking place elsewhere in the university. Since the announcement of the “War on Terror” following the bombing of the “American Homeland” on September 11, 2001, a similarly ambivalent relation to the fundamental question of America’s political ontology has taken place. If the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the Islamic world have not given rise to the same intensity of opposition as the Vietnam War, their disproportionate tactics and endlessness have nevertheless disclosed something similar to that which was revealed in the closing stages of the previous war.5 For the liminal extremity of this contemporary American initiative has not only revealed the usually disavowed violence of the United States’ “errand in the [world’s] wilderness” and the ideological status of America’s hegemonic self-representation as “exceptional.” In doing so, it has also brought to fulfillment the perennial use of the spectacle by the United States. 78  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

This chapter offers not a genealogy of the field of American Studies or of its failure to properly countenance the sublime, but rather a theoretical reflection on the relationship between the sublime and the spectacle as they pertain to the manner in which the United States has historically constructed its understanding of being. Given the triumph of the spectacle in a national culture that is self-righteously and unerringly bent on “Americanizing” the entire planet in the name of its redemptive exceptionalism, it becomes an urgent task of American studies to revisit these concepts. Only by identifying the logic that organizes the relation between them can an alternative polity be instituted. The central claim in what follows is that the spectacle and the sublime respond to the same fundamental condition—what Heidegger called the “thrownness” of being—but that the spectacle dissembles the stakes of an existential encounter with this condition whereas the sublime concedes to it. It has been the purpose of the spectacle, including the American jeremiad, to mask the nation’s own arbitrary existence and to suggest the possibility of ascertaining meaning by taking part in the nation’s rituals. This compact held for several centuries, with only minor disturbances, until the closing stages of the Vietnam War brought the dynamic governing this concealment into the open. This chapter constitutes a prolegomenal gesture in behalf of that urgent task of revisitation and retrieval.

The Sublime Disclosure of the Nothing The point of departure for this revisitation of what has been wrongly understood as the “American Sublime” will not be Longinus, who reduced his unknown Greek predecessor’s ontological account of the sublime to a system of rules for the composition of “sublime” literature; Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, whose versions of the sublime, along with those of Joseph Addison and Anthony Ashley-Cooper (third Earl of Shaftesbury), enabled the self-aggrandizing and imperialist “Romantic Sublime”; or Sigmund Freud, whose psychological “uncanny,” through the mediation of Harold Bloom, was harnessed to the American Sublime at the expense of its polyvalent “worldly” implications.6 Rather, our starting point will be Martin Heidegger’s postmodern ontological destruction of the Western philosophical (“onto-theo-logical”) tradition, an exceptionalist tradition, which, in thinkAmerican Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 79

ing the unnameable be-ing of being meta-ta-physica (from above or beyond the things themselves: panoptically), has had as its perennial purpose the spatialization or reification of its unpresentable temporal dynamics—i.e., the reduction of its anxiety-provoking and incomprehensible essence to comprehensible form.7 More specifically, we mean the exceptionalist Western metaphysical tradition that culminates in modernity with the apotheosis of Man, the Anthropologos, and his empirical scientific mode of knowledge production, which has willfully reduced the temporality of being to total “world picture,” and, in thus bringing the spatializing logic of anthropological thinking to its fulfillment (liminal point), has self-destructed: disclosed the radical temporality that is ontologically prior to Being. Heidegger inaugurated his de-struction of anthropological knowledge production and retrieval (Wiederholung) of the radical temporality of being in Being and Time, a destruction that simultaneously disclosed the nothing. But it is in the widely known but still to be fathomed essay “What Is Metaphysics?” that the “worldly” implications of this de-struction and retrieval begin to manifest themselves. In this essay, Heidegger begins by showing how obsessively the modern, anthropological West has been committed to the nullification of the nothingness of being by way of reducing “it” to something of which one can take hold, which is to say, how insistently the specter of the nothing continues to haunt modern Western Man’s reductive effort. Indeed, this compulsive effort to annul (the “play” of) the Nothing that haunts Western knowledge production assumes, for Heidegger, the telling proportions of paranoid monomania: “The nothing—what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it.”8 Modern Western knowledge production attempts to objectify the indeterminateness of the nothingness of being to render “it” comprehensible. What is it about the nothing that, according to Heidegger, precipitates this kind of obsessive will on the part of the modern scientific mind to nullify it? Here, Heidegger, taking his directive from the anti-Heglianism of Søren Kierkegaard, introduces his phenomenological account of the difference between anxiety (Angst, also translated as “dread”) and fear (Furcht).9 Fear is an emotion triggered by a threatening but determinate object. Anxiety, on the 80  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

other hand, has no (determinate) thing as its object: “The indeterminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it.”10 Anxiety, that is, has the nothingness of being as its “object.” In putting humanity’s primordial relation to the indeterminateness of the be-ing of being in this way, Heidegger underscores its primordial thrownness (Geworfenheit), its not-at-homeness in the world (Unheimlichkeit: the uncanniness that is the consequence of this thrownness).11 In so doing, he also foregrounds what previous versions of the sublime, whether Longinus’s, Burke’s, Kant’s, or Bloom’s, shrink back from: humanity’s radically secular ontological condition, the total untethering of its fate from any form of transcendental Higher Cause, whether Deity or History. Being is merely given, without any a priori purpose or significance, and this absence of sense or end accompanies the human in all of her pursuits. Even when she manages to construct something of her own autonomous will, this lack of fundamental reason reminds her of the basic contingency inherent in her efforts. Nothing she might do will allow her to evade the fundamental lack of preconstituted meaning that is a condition of her existence. Earlier theoreticians of the sublime had defined the concept in terms of a superordinate power understood as fully self-present. Whether this power was located at a site external to the human (as in Burke and the Romantics) or coincided with humanity’s own ability to reason about matters that were in excess of its perceptual faculties (as in Kant) the effect was to identify the sublime with the transcendence of mere earthly realities. Although Heidegger does not use the term, his innovation is to link the affective and aesthetic response that prior thinkers had called the sublime to an experience of decentering. But this displacement is not limited to that of the contemplative subject, as in Romanticism, for which it was only the solitary artist or intellectual in nature whose self was undone in an encounter with the immensity of Nature. In Heidegger, the disclosure of the nothing also implicates the ambient objects in one’s environment—all the various things that comprise one’s world. They too, have been thrown; their existence is as contingent as the subject that contemplates them. Anxiety names the sensation released at the moment that a subject recognizes the absence of any necessary and explicable rationale for the existence of things. To think this absence at the ground of every presence is to have a dreadfully sublime American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 81

experience, but one that inverts the traditional articulation of the sublime with presence by linking it to the nothingness at the foundation of being. This disclosure of the nothing does not, however, demand an espousal of nihilism. On the contrary, it is an occasion for positive thought. It is true, as Heidegger notes, that anxiety, instigated by the awesomeness of the sublime nothing, “robs us of speech.”12 This, however, should not be taken to mean that the encounter being described elicits aphasia. Rather, it ought to be understood as an incitement to rethink the metaphysical idea of language that has dominated the West since the Romans’ reduction of the creative errancy of the Greek aletheia (unconcealment) to the reductive unerring adaequatio intellectus et rei (the adequation of mind and thing: correctness). This latter, Roman conception of truth instrumentalizes language in order to annul the sublimity of the nothing by rendering everything present and accounted for. This totalizing model of truth aims, in other words, to represent everything; that which escapes its purview is construed as nonexistent. When this use of language fails, however, one is apt to experience something very much like anxiety. Here one might think of the famous scene in JeanPaul Sartre’s great novel Nausea in which Roquentin, Sartre’s postmodern anti-Adam, undergoes an estrangement from the tree under which he is sitting and recognizes the futility of the traditional linguistic tools used to cognitively emplace it: Oh, how can I put it in words?. . . . Absurd, irreducible; nothing—not even a profound, secret upheaval of nature—could explain it. . . . Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: “This is a root”—it didn’t work any more. . . . Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, half solidified, almost became a thing; each one was In the way [de trop] in the root and the whole stump now gave me the impression of unwinding itself a little, denying its existence to lose itself in a frenzied excess.13 As the absurdity of the word “root” takes hold within him, Roquentin suffers a disseveration from both the word and the thing to which it refers. But the loss of his lexical armature and his environmental immanence doesn’t simply reduce him to silence; instead it spurs him to reflect at extraordinary length on matters that had been unthinkable until this moment because self-evident. Following Heidegger’s directives, we are enabled to say that the 82  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

nothingness of the sublime is an ontological condition that instigates not a passive contemplation or awe but, as the early Greeks put it, an active wonder, the alienated (ek-sistent) faculty of the human that, in humility before its immensity, mobility, and variety, asks questions about being rather than, as in the Western tradition, imposes answers on its ontological indeterminacy. This retrieved sublime names both the abyssal ontological difference that, unlike its subordinated status in the Western ontotheological tradition, is prior to a sovereign transcendental Identity (or Principle of Presence) and the destabilized psychological condition that is its dislocating imperative— that is, the dreadful but also intensely pleasurable sense of possibility as such. The sublime, however dreadful, is the liberating affect of the infinite finitude of being that precipitates in humans not silence—the bereavement of language—but a wonder-full speech that renders the hierarchical binarist language of the Western tradition inoperative. And it draws forth this affect by transforming the prior universal Identity of the metaphysical tradition (the Truth) into a fiction or a construction (a re-presentation) that, in the name of the prior ontological difference, is open to reconstruction. The speech intrinsic to the sublime, that is, is a decentered speech, in which, like that of the Greeks, according to Heidegger, “thought and being are the same thing” (Parmenides: “To gar auto noein estin to kai einai”).14 As such, it frees potentiality—the question—from its traditional subordination to the Act (the Answer). And, in so doing, it renders dialogic speech the fundamental condition of human being-in-the-world: the sine qua non of a polity.

The Spectacular Conversion of the Sublime Whereas the sublime corresponds to an ontological condition of liberation from the Word’s will to power over difference, the spectacle is an insidious apparatus of capture that had its ontological origins in the West’s inaugural metaphysical will to “re-present” the nothing and substitute the spatial image for the dynamic and open-ended reality of being. This project has reached its culmination in the modern anthropological era, in which the temporality of being has been totally reduced to a static form. Heidegger, anticipating Guy Debord, has called the mind-numbing or speech-negating spectacle the “world picture” and demonstrated how its logic controls the modern American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 83

era. Heidegger highlights the sovereign power that “man” achieves over the temporality of being by re-presenting being as total image. In objectifying or spatializing being (by naming it, for instance), man becomes a “subject” and the master of being. But this is a self-deception. For in objectifying being as a world picture, he also objectifies himself and comes to resemble the object he has mastered. Through the spatializing device of enframement (Ge-stell), he becomes Bestand: standing-reserve, which is to say, a servile entity that is on call and imminently disposable: As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. . . . Man stands so decisively in attendance on the challenging-forth of Enframing that he does not apprehend Enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, from out of his essence, in the realm of an exhortation or address, and thus can never encounter only himself.15 Far from the sovereign master of the activity of enframing or representing being to himself, man becomes the object of his representational discourse and the figure to be laid bare. Under the aegis of this apparatus of capture, his life is utterly bereaved of speech and polity; or, in Giorgio Agamben’s later biopolitical formulation of Heidegger’s Bestand, ek-sistent/in-sistent man is reduced to bare life: life that can be killed but not sacrificed, who is exposed to death insofar as he taken outside of the jurisdiction of the normal legal order.16 Guy Debord carries forward Heidegger’s meditation on the transformation of the sublime into a spectacle to be looked at and mastered by the gaze of man, taking his directives from the Marxist interpretation of modernity as the late capitalist commodification—and quantification—of being. This 84  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

commodification of being, according to Debord, has its origins in the metaphysical West’s privileging of the panoptic spatializing eye: The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tradition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.17 The commodity comes to organize human perception and turn it away from its prior attunement to the processual and relational nature of phenomena; it transforms perception into a mechanism for fixing the flux of being and breaking it into isolated units. But, just as Heidegger demonstrates that “man” becomes the victim of his own effort to objectify all of being, Debord suggests that humanity experiences the atomization of that upon which it speculates as a radical alienation from the reality of being. When the representation of being is fully realized, the real becomes a (visual) simulacrum and the simulacrum the real; and humanity can no longer do anything but gaze from a distance upon that which it has elevated to the supreme principle of intelligibility. By the same token the human potentiality for action (praxis) is reduced to mere contemplation (theoria, seeing): “Images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream, and the former unity of life is lost forever. Apprehended in a partial way, reality unfolds in a new generality as a pseudo-world apart, solely as an object of contemplation.”18 Furthermore, the hypostatization of the spectacle demands from the spectator an acknowledgment of its “seeming incontrovertibility,” an attitude that in turn generates “passive acceptance.”19 Unlike the ontological sublime, which activates wonder in the human—the sense of potential and thus speech in the form of the anxious but pleasurable question—the spectacle is its simulacrum. It is a mechanism for taking hold of the viewer, in which the propensity to see temporal reality from the standpoint of its projected end produces the effect of enchantment—a shocking awe. The spectacle denies the historicity of being insofar as it represents its objects without reference to their temporal quality, and so suggests that these objects are not susceptible to change. This operation renders spectators mute in a literal way. They will have nothing to say about a reality that American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 85

admits of no transformation. Without speech, they are in turn deprived of a polity, if we recall Hannah Arendt’s insistence on the indissoluble relation between speech and act.20 Despite Debord’s insistence on the spectacular nature of contemporary power, the rhetoric he uses to characterize its effects—“contemplation,” “passive acceptance,” “negation of action”—obscures the spectacle’s apotheosis of the visual and its resulting annulment of human speech. It is this foregrounding of the visual and its negation of language that constitutes Giorgio Agamben’s significant contribution to the urgent task of waking up from the nightmare of the spectacle that Debord assigned his fellow Situationists in the 1960s: It is evident, after all, that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity and linguistic being of humans. This means that an integrated Marxian analysis should take into consideration the fact that capitalism . . . not only aimed at the expropriation of productive activity, but also, and above all, at the alienation of language itself, of the linguistic and communicative nature of human beings, of the logos in which Heraclitus identifies the Common.21 But this dire condition of the human species at this liminal conjuncture is, for Agamben, not necessarily the end of the matter. For, in fulfilling its spatializing logic, the age of the spectacle self-destructs. In doing so it discloses the very language, the “communicative nature of human beings,” that it must efface in order to triumph: But this [extreme form of the expropriation of the Common] also means that what we encounter in the spectacle is our very linguistic nature inverted. . . . [T]he age in which we live is also that in which for the first time it becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence—to experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but language itself, as well as the very fact of speaking. Contemporary politics is precisely this devastating experimentum linguae that disarticulates and empties, all over the planet, traditions and beliefs, ideologies and religions, identities and communities.22 Much as Heidegger spoke of a “saving power” that emerges from within the essence of technology, Agamben calls attention to a potential that arises 86  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

within the society of the spectacle for an emancipation of its terms.23 Because the society of the spectacle “empties and nullifies every real identity, and substitutes the public and public opinion for the people and the general will . . .[it] produces massively from within itself singularities that are no longer characterized either by any social identity or by any real condition of belonging.”24 In other words, the society of the spectacle recasts citizens as the passive and deterritorialized viewers of a common set of images, evacuating them of their autonomy and particularity; but in the same gesture it exposes them to their more fundamental nature as speaking beings. This is a universal ground that can neither be recognized nor mobilized by a state, and yet it is not a ground in the same way that a particular language, religion, race, or even ideology supplies the founding principle for all modern nation-states. Language as such “no longer reveals anything at all—or, better yet, it reveals the nothingness of all things.”25 In this way the spectacle discloses the possibility of a collectivity that holds together without any principle of inclusion or exclusion but only the pure medium of mutual self-presencing. The spectacle thus becomes, inadvertently, a stimulus to new forms of political speech insofar as it empties the “public sphere” of the preconstituted positions inherent in the world’s particular empirical languages (among which, for example, “Global English” occupies a place of conspicuous prominence).26 And the nonfoundational communities—the “whatever singularities”—expressive of this new speech will not hesitate to interrogate the nothingness of being as our society does, because they will not be founded on the suppression of the recognition that no principle can guarantee the meaningfulness, righteousness, or continued existence of a polity. Cognizant of their utter contingency, such communities will once again allow the interested questioning that the nothingness of being calls forth.

Simulacrums of US National Identity The United States has instrumentalized the spectacle as part of a twofold ideological strategy directed inwardly, toward the national community, and outwardly, toward its threatening enemy. The dominant exceptionalist culture’s representation of the wilderness of the world outside its borders functions as a means of gaining power over its alleged enemy. It has characterized this American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 87

appalling wilderness as the evidence of its Other’s civilizational inferiority. It has even managed to solicit the attachment of some sectors of these foreign populations to the American-legislated nomos of the earth and drawn them into subservience to this nation’s Higher Cause. For a domestic audience, this extraterritorial menace has been figured as a threat to the security of the covenantal people. But the invocation of this threat acts as a prompt to the citizenry to recommit its youthful energies and reconstitute its unity in the face of the recidivism—the backsliding and the splintering of the sovereign Logos—intrinsic to the “civilizing” process. This is the national ritual that the dominant culture perennially stages as spectacle, especially at times of national crisis and, above all, when the people’s dedication to the errand shows signs of flagging. This tactic, of converting what seemed hauntingly unmasterable about the world into an admonitory rhetoric that would incite aggressive reaction, had its origin at the time when the Puritans first encountered the vastness and indefiniteness of the terrain to which they had come as well as the inassimilable alterity of the people already there. These settlers had an uneasy experience of being unhomed; they found themselves face to face with the utter contingency—even arbitrariness—of their new situation. But the American Puritans did not understand the anxiety born of this deracination as an ontological imperative to rethink their Logos. On the contrary, as Sacvan Bercovitch has shown, they harnessed this anxiety to the tasks of reorienting themselves and establishing the transcendental significance of their place in the world: The American Puritan jeremiad was the ritual of a culture on an errand— which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. Its function was to create a climate of anxiety that helped release the restless “progressivist” energies required for the success of the venture. . . . It made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. . . . The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England’s Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome.27 In his capacity as Jeremiah, this spokesperson of God’s chosen people represented the New World wilderness in such a way as to foreground both the 88  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

promise inherent in his capacity to domesticate this terrain and the danger that constantly lurked. Furthermore, he separated those who attended to him from the temporality of being by reducing them to spectators of the alarming and captivating truth-image that he called forth. In his sermons, prose, and poetry, and despite a professed commitment to the “plain style,” he ritualized and staged the sublime, spatialized its unnameability into awesome spectacle. The basic problematic of the US spectacle—a central component of national identity from the Puritans through the contemporary moment—is the attempt to capture the encounter with being in its dynamic, errant, and totally unjustifiable givenness and to convert the wonder it evokes into awe. American spectacle supplies an illusory grounding for the nation’s existence, suggesting that the appearance and subsequent presence of the United States are divinely ordained; citizens access this meaning to the extent that they consent to the meaningfulness of the spectacle offered to them. This spectacle resembles the sublime experience of the absence of any such transcendental guarantee insofar as it forces the spectator to confront that which is beyond the pale of merely empirical knowledge. But whereas the sublimity of the nothingness of being calls forth questions—albeit ones that are finally unanswerable—the spectacle of US power functions to suppress the faculty of interrogation. It therefore involves a twofold displacement: in place of the nothing the spectacle offers the illusory presence of American power; instead of an inquisitive relation to what remains unknown the spectacle encourages acquiescence and silent marveling. The jeremiad constitutes a relay between the two points and functions to ensure that the spectacle doesn’t degenerate into the sublime.

Dejustification of Violence: Vietnam as Event The decisive event heralding the implosion of the American spectacle occurred at the conclusion of the Vietnam War, a turning point that has widely been identified with the breakdown of the country’s social order. Historians of the war have recognized this fact without identifying its proper ontological rationale. According to Marilyn Young, “the war opened up for debate not only the principles that had governed American foreign policy since the American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 89

end of World War II, but the larger structure of the nation and its political procedures.”28 Furthermore, “racism and poverty were being explained as endemic, the social system seen as inherently unfair to minority groups; natural resources were described as depleted and limited, and the Cold War as at least as much an American as a Soviet creation. . . . [F]undamental moral values connected to family, sex, and work that had only rarely been challenged in the past were held up to public scrutiny, even scorn.”29 Likewise, Christian Appy argues that the war forced Americans to reassess their national identity, in the process of which their belief in American exceptionalism was “shattered.”30 However one specifies the inception of this event—the student protests and teach-ins, the mounting resistance to the draft, the radicalization of the civil rights movement, the imposition of a tax increase to pay for the war, the public reaction to the Tet offensive, the revelation of the My Lai massacre, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, or otherwise—it is undeniable that a general symbolic crisis had taken place, one that rendered increasingly large domains of American life unjustifiable in the eyes of its members. But this event, most often referred to as the “Vietnam quagmire,” involved more than the collapse of previously hegemonic social structures. More fundamentally, it brought into question the political ontology on which the United States had predicated its very existence. Prior to this event, the US state had relied on visual technologies in order to foster public consent for the war. The fact that this was the first “postmodern war” and the first to be widely televised did not alter the fact that the state and national elites had long worked to solicit public acquiescence by way of imagery, even if the tools used to produce these images were primarily rhetorical and their manifestation largely confined to the collective imaginary.31 By the closing stages of the conflict, however, many American citizens (and others across the globe) came to recognize the emptiness of these images, their lack of historical referentiality. The end of the Vietnam War, then, did not only entail the withdrawal of consent for an imperial army’s occupation of a foreign territory. It also and more significantly involved a disclosure of the nothingness—the absence of ground—that had always haunted US pretensions to universalism. This culminating moment forced an encounter with the primal scene of the nation’s founding, a site at which this nothingness had been obscured by the spectacular imagistics of US ideology. When the spectacle’s history-destroying function became manifest to 90  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

viewers of the war at home, a rupture in the ordinary sequence of time took place that suddenly brought the life-destroying violence of American power into stark relief. The Vietnam War then became the untimely occasion for a rethinking of the very meaning of “America,” an event that continues to ramify into the present. Since the Puritans had announced their intention to redeem world history through the establishment of a polity with a universal mission, the temporality of US national life was determined by its adventist rhetoric and view of history.32 In announcing to the world the “good news” that the United States would have brought to all mankind, in the confident mode of the future anterior, its deputies took what had been a secularized version of the providential view of history (as given, for example, by Hegel) and retheologized it. The philosophers of US history married the progressive view of history to a messianic sense of their nation’s capacity to bring the flux of time to an end. The demise of this paradigm, however, was marked not by the anticipated triumph of liberal capitalism over its antagonists but by the defeat of American forces in Vietnam. Because US identity was so intimately bound up with this temporality— one that was simultaneously amnesiac, optimistic, and expectant—the recognition of the impending failure of US forces to overcome its putatively Communist opponent could not easily be metabolized. On one hand, the disclosure of the gap between the principles used to justify the war and the military’s actual conduct in Vietnam served to undermine domestic support for the war, which suddenly become comparable to other great atrocities in recent memory, including the genocide of Jews during World War II.33 On the other hand, the very historical context in which the Vietnam War was understood to inhere, as an event distinct from what came before because part of the nation’s linear movement toward a better future, no longer sufficed to orient Americans within historical time. The comfort provided by the idea that they were safely lodged on a determinate trajectory dissipated when the forecasted end of the war failed to materialize. Subsequently both the nation’s identity and the dominant understanding of how that identity would realize itself in historical time entered a period of crisis. It was not simply the US government’s justification of the war, the cold calculations of military planners, or the execution of the war by soldiers that came to seem morally wrong and indifferent to human life. Nor was it the case American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 91

that the war came to be understood as an exception to the basic principles undergirding US foreign policy, a ghastly aberration within an otherwise benevolent history of interactions with other peoples. Instead, this event reconfigured the national imaginary in a totalizing way. The nonlocalized nature of the critiques of the United States, the extension of these challenges to almost all components of American life, intensified the perception that a kind of generalized anarchy had been unleashed that threatened to undermine the nation’s existence. But the energies unleashed in this moment were not merely critical, and it is for this reason that the familiar historiographical trope of the war that comes home does not completely capture the dynamic of the event. For a new spirit of inquiry emerged simultaneously alongside the impulse to challenge existing practices of domination, one that worked to disclose truths that had previously been unthinkable. The Vietnam War came to be perceived as a part of an iterative temporal sequence rather than a unique occurrence. Suddenly an entire catalog of state violence became relevant to the effort to make sense of this war; those who immersed themselves in the event worked to retrieve these historical referents from the antiquarian status to which traditional historians and cultural critics had consigned them. Among these, the removal and genocide of Native Americans was among the most significant. Throughout the war, it was common for American soldiers to refer to the undefended zones outside of their fortifications as “Indian country,” which it was their job to clear and make ready for civilized, capitalist life.34 Although the pervasiveness of this metaphor initially served to conceal the violence at stake in both projects, finally the revelations about the sheer extent of the displacements in Vietnam—and the casualness with which Vietnamese civilians were killed—turned the metaphor into a metonymy. The distance between Indian removal and the devastation of Vietnamese communities collapsed as the war came to seem like merely one instance of a broader imperial project. Other events, too, flashed into view: Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec Empire using spectacular and demoralizing displays of force35; Manifest Destiny, the westward expansion that brooked no obstacle—ecological or human—set on the path of the settlers’ unerring mission; and the mass enslavement and subordination of peoples of African descent, which had its parallel in the disproportionate conscription of young black men to fight, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia 92  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

and East Harlem.”36 In some quarters these projects had long been the object of anguish and critique; as a consequence of the Vietnam War the dejustificatory violence they entailed for existing US narratives became ineluctable. The late Vietnam War was not the only such modern event in which a catastrophe had delegitimated regnant worldviews and discharged a wave of attempts to secure more livable forms of life.37 Nor was this the only such moment in American history. The domestication and instrumentalization of the sublime in the service of the US “empire of liberty” was synecdochically epitomized by the two writers who have been identified (contradictorily) as “quintessentially American novelists,” Herman Melville and Mark Twain, the one deliberately, the other inadvertently, in such novels as Moby-Dick (1851), where the sublime whiteness of the whale is staged as spectacle in behalf of imperial aggrandizement, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), whose narrative signature is the staging of illusion for effect.38 But whereas these writers discerned the nothingness that the preponderant national narrative had tried to obscure symptomatically in their texts—with differing degrees of lucidity—they remained essentially solitary voices in the wilderness: prophetic figures without followings. In the Vietnam War, by contrast, a mass movement emerged that was characterized by the perception that the spectacle had already effectively foundered. And while those attentive to this disclosure did not constitute a majority of the US population, they were especially importunate and expansive in their thinking. These protesters identified the spectacular logics of domination as they had manifested at sites all along the continuum of being: the glorification of the patriarch and such mediatic analogues as the cowboy, the lone ranger, and the crime boss; the hypostatization of the rugged individual over collective modes of being; the transfiguration of the labor relation into the commodity; the manipulation and devastation of ecosystems; the intense cultural visibility of white people and the penumbra cast around all others; and, of course, the pyrotechnics of US militarism. The Vietnam War disclosed the totalizing control that the culture of the US spectacle asserted not only over national existence but over all of these registers of being in the same instant that it unshackled the interrogative energies that had previously been labelled “divisive,” “obscene,” or “nihilistic.” This same event had an incredible effect on the composition and mission of the American university. Prior to and during the war, the spectacle of US American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 93

military might had served as a substitute for—if not a direct incentive to— a research agenda. Not only did this spectacle paralyze the public and encourage complacency about matters of citizenship, but it also offered the illusion of a complete set of answers to the problems of national existence. But when the compensatory function of the spectacle became recognizable, the questions it had been meant to allay suddenly took on renewed importance. Out of this new spirit of interrogation a number of intellectual projects emerged, among them ethnic studies, black studies, lesbian and gay studies, women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and—only much later—a new Americanist studies.39 In dialogue with new or reconfigured interpretive methods like semiology, deconstruction, reader-response criticism, Foucauldian genealogy, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, these inquiries formalized insights that had been intuited in the broader culture. These formations, like many of the new social movements that emerged concomitantly, have all too often been misunderstood as simple purveyors of “identity politics,” so it is worth briefly recalling their originary impulse. The US war effort marked the culmination of a long history that had already reduced large sectors of its population to mere “standing reserve,” an underemployed, systematically marginalized, unrecognized, and uprooted population whose only function was to respond docilely to the national calling (whether in the draft or another capacity). All of the constituent parts of this nameless coalition had been subjected to the spectacular authority of the country and denied a voice within the limited circle of US democracy. As speaking beings who were, however, not afforded the right to speak the nation’s political language—who were not allowed to utter its shibboleth of redemption or to participate in its empire of liberty—they were thrown back upon themselves as unhomed subjects. It was out of this condition of debarment from what was euphemized as the “national conversation” that the aforementioned intellectual and social movements invented new forms of speech capable of identifying the aporias in the nation’s discourses on freedom, inclusivity, and justice. Not efforts to constitute as identities what had been deconstituted by the nation’s white metaphorics, these “whatever singularities” devoted themselves to uncovering what had been obfuscated, even nullified, by the United States’ beneficent self-representation and its meliorative philosophy of history. In the process they produced universal logics of their own that offered the possibility of more livable lives: ones in 94  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

which sex will have been desublimated, freedom reconceptualized in more substantive terms, collective autonomy respected without exception. The Vietnam War did not cause the emergence of these intellectual movements but it catalyzed the oppositional forces that ultimately came to understand the Vietnam War in its longer and more encompassing history.

Ungrounding National Being The decomposition of the spectacular facade of US imperialism at the end of the Vietnam War was undoubtedly a transformative event, but it was not beyond the reach of the powers of restoration. Although it opened up new possibilities for thinking US social relations and incited the formation of new collectivities and cultural and intellectual initiatives in its wake, the partisans of this event did not abolish the spectacle once and for all. Afterward, state agents turned to the same technology in order to carry out the Gulf War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the more amorphous “war on terror” that continues across the globe. The “shock and awe” tactics employed in Baghdad in 2003, for example, suggested to Iraqis that the United States was so inordinately powerful that resistance was futile. But they also messaged to a domestic audience that the state’s will was “incontrovertible” and not to be questioned. Yet already in the first Gulf War, the United States was employing techniques which conveyed the impression that the war was not so much a life-and-death encounter or an invasion with real human consequences but a media event. When George H. W. Bush declared that through the conduct of this war the United States had finally “kicked the Vietnam syndrome,” he meant that the nation had finally overcome its anxious encounter with the emptiness of its own claims to legitimacy. The spectacle of the war covered over the nothingness that the sublime end of the previous war had precipitated. Recent US history has vacillated between the sublime and the spectacle, between the perception of the horrible nihilistic violence that undergirds US expansion and a stupefaction before the supreme glory and redemptive ends of this same power. Despite momentary fulgurations of resistance to US imperialism and its affiliated projects, most notably in Seattle in 1999, the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the global Occupy protests of 2011, and the Movement for Black Lives, today the spectacle prevails. Donald Trump’s American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 95

presidency, although founded in part on the claim that the neoconservative wing of the Republican Party has betrayed American interests, is in fact deeply committed both to the imperial conception of US identity and to governance through pacification by means of the spectacle. His invocations of American “greatness” in fact function to conjure a spectacular image, one designed to short-circuit inquiries into the unsavory histories of US injustices and to construct a community united around his jeremiad that acts to exclude numerous others. It is no coincidence in this regard that Trump has drawn the key phrase of his campaign from Ronald Reagan, whose central objective in his first campaign and afterward was to make Americans forget the violence they had perpetrated in Vietnam. And yet this historical parallel remains largely obscured in public discourse at present, as do the many others that link Trump to his forebears in the office. For it is in the nature of the spectacle to short-circuit history, to conceal the decisions, the agents, and the actions that led to the expropriation and subordination of human lives, and to proffer instead the illusion of a timeless truth that should be accepted as a matter of course. In this renewal of the spectacular culture of the United States, new victims are being made and old ones restored to their former roles. The Vietnam War teaches us, however, that the spectacle contains within it the germ of a more radical reckoning with the truth. Both the spectacle and the sublime constitute responses to the absence of any determining ground for being; but whereas the spectacle constructs an image meant to dissimulate this nothingness, the sublime disposition confronts it with what might be called an engaged reverence. Such a perspective understands that presence and absence belong together and that one cannot be extirpated without extreme damage to the other. The sublime task is not to calculate how one might most effectively transcend the nothing, but rather to reconstitute perception in such a way as to intensify one’s attunement to the nothing and proliferate the sites at which one is capable of discovering its insistence. In conclusion, then, let us revisit two locations at which this nothingness can be detected within the terms of US political ontology. First, the ambivalent universalism at stake in American exceptionalism—which describes the United States as a country both distinct from others and capable of transforming them in its image—entails a necessary violence against the “unexceptional.” These figures, including the Vietnamese during the war, comprise a category of beings whose existence is deemed contingent or altogether denied. Such 96  w i l l i a m v . s p a n o s a n d a d a m v . s p a n o s

a construal of the other then allows for their annihilation, the literalization of their representational nonbeing. By virtue, however, of their spectral status or unrecognizability to the exceptionalist outlook, they can act with a license denied to those who are more visible—as the National Liberation Front (NLF) did in Vietnam. Furthermore, this position of internal exclusion, of subjection to the universal norm without belonging to the community of subjects who are understood to be its addressers, constitutes a privileged epistemological position. It allows for the understanding and critique of a universalist discourse such as that of American exceptionalism insofar as it can testify to the violence to which the latter remains blind. Both the NLF and the various US social movements to which we earlier alluded undertook this critique in differing ways. The nothingness of national being manifests also in the recognition that the foundation and subsequent rise to global predominance of the United States was not predestined (no more than that of any other nation, or indeed of the nation-form itself). In both its mere existence and in the position that it has historically achieved, the United States is the consequence of accident. Like Heidegger’s being, it is “thrown.” The implication of this observation is not simply that the United States, however monolithic its appearance, is a historical object and so capable of being changed. That is true enough. The point is rather that, insofar as its existence has no transcendentally determining principle, the actions to which it commits itself are not preordained. This means that the deeds carried out in its name cannot possibly impute to the nation the spectacular glory and ultimate justification for its existence that its apologists so desperately desire. Nothing done in the name of the United States can supply that foundation. The United States, like every other nation, is condemned to search perpetually and in vain for the meaning that will give its presence in the world a permanent justification. The task for its citizenry today is to learn indifference to the lures of a spectacle that would prescribe meaning at the expense of an interested polity.

American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 97

part two

Solidarities: US Racial Politics and the Global Cold War

Chapter five From Kabul to Chicago The Limits of Global Imagination Kate Baldwin In the charm war with Russia, the natural arena is the so-called international trade fair which has become increasingly popular among the underdeveloped countries. Here the local people can see for themselves what the two competing worlds have to offer. Our own participation in these endless fairs makes an instructive story. —D a v i d C o r t , The Nation

In 1953, the year of Stalin’s death, the Voice of America could be heard in 46 languages in over 100 countries; the United States had information centers in 190 cites and 10,000 newspapers throughout the globe piped in dispatches from US newswires. With a communications tactic of inundation honed by the systems revolution of wartime technologies, the government-sponsored dissemination of pro-America messages sought to counter Soviet Communism with the allure of a bounty-oriented American Way of Life. Linking the economic system of capitalism to democratic principles, these messages announced consumer choice as synonymous

with individual liberties. “People’s capitalism,” as this agenda was dubbed, depicted the United States as a state of classless workers who prospered through ownership of the means of production not via the government, but through the stock market. As has been well rehearsed by cultural historians, the struggle with Communism was not only economic, but was also a battle over human desire. The aim of media bombardment was to align the American with the human universal, thus revealing an interdependence between the economic and the psychological. But airwaves and news blitzes only went so far. In 1956, with just weeks until the opening of the Jeshyn International Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, under pressure from its Afghan Embassy, the US government agreed to join its socialist counterparts in Kabul. The state department realized that the US lagged behind the Soviets, Czechs, and Chinese not only in relation to their sizable planned pavilions at Jeshyn, but also to participation in national exhibitions more generally. Signing on to Kabul signaled that the United States was launching its newest airstrike into the vibrant scene of international fairs and exhibitions already populated by the Communist nations.1 To help direct the participation of the United States in a global selfpromotion beyond the airwaves, the United States Information Agency (USIA) turned to some of the era’s most innovative thinkers—artists, designers, and communications theorists such as Charles Eames, George Nelson, and Buckminster Fuller to design national exhibitions in Berlin, Brussels, Kabul, Moscow, and elsewhere. Understanding their role as appealing to the “hearts and minds” of foreign nationals, these figures became leading advocates of people’s capitalism and universal humanness, and the exhibitions became extensions of these theories put into practice. As media critic Fred Turner has shown us, exhibition environments were created not to represent but to offer America through a kind of experiential verisimilitude.2 In these venues, foreign citizens were invited to practice the perceptual skills of individual democratic citizens. For example, with the Eames’s multiscreen projection of their film “Glimpses of the USA” in Moscow, visitors were implicitly encouraged to choose their own viewing sequence from a variety of possible combinations.3 However positioned as embodying ideals of democratic choice, though, this method of communication was also part of a postwar racial order that confined options by overlooking material inequities, flattening 102  k a t e b a l d w i n

over racial difference, and limiting terms of antiracism through an optimism of universalism. These modes of perception—sensual and cognitive—were offered as radically individuated, but they were also highly networked, part of a single order or set of processes. Less interested in specific messages than in the form of their presentation, these designers and thinkers focused on interactions—the honing of cognition and perception in terms of feedback that could be measured and modified. The antiracist liberalism of Eames and other exhibition planners is typified by what Jodi Melamed describes as new postwar racial orders.4 Melamed argues that in principle these systems promoted racial equality but in fact served as technologies “to restrict the settlements of racial conflicts to liberal political terrains that conceal material inequalities” (xvi). In place of addressing racial realities in the United States, such racial orders presented an official version of the nation that ignored material inequalities, restricted terms of antiracism, promoted progress narratives, and neutralized “race” (Melamed 190). While Melamed does not discuss the field of communications per se, her notion of a racial order corresponds to the kind of communications system endeavored in early US exhibitions, and in Kabul in particular. It is here that we see not only an official version of the United States, but also of related communications strategies that sought to link American human qualities with universal ones. Moreover, in laying the groundwork for faith in an ever progressing mode of comprehensive data sets for better and more refined knowledge of US citizens and others, government-funded forays into audience reaction also occluded racially biased understandings of selfhood. In other words, a data-oriented understanding of subjectivity augured in places like the Kabul fair cannot be disaggregated from its origin in ways of understanding selfhood through racial and ethnic difference. While I am indebted to other scholars who have worked on Cold War cultural diplomacy and media spaces, I am interested in the process of communication depicted here, within the US exhibition space in general and in Kabul, Afghanistan, in particular.5 More precisely I am interested in this practice of verisimilitude, particularly in the face of national, racial, and ethnic differences, and the space it opens up for thinking about a global communicative project based on a premise of “as if.” The modernizing technologies on display in Kabul highlight the way in which perception itself was being reconceived in the service of information: according to the OED, From Kabul to Chicago 103

verisimilitude is an appearance of reality, the property of seeming true, or bearing a resemblance to reality. A variant of mimesis, verisimilitude opens up a gap between performance or repetition and an outside or prior reality. This kind of mimesis foregrounds the possibility of masking the absence of realities contiguous but not coincident with the depicted one. What might it mean to use verisimilitude as a method for the amassing of information with which to understand, predict, and modify behavior? While communications theorists, mathematicians and designers were contending with cybernetics and the computing possibilities augured during World War II, authors and artists were likewise struggling to come to terms with the complexities wrought by wartime shifts (economic, social, racial, institutional, and representational, to name only a few). While much has been written about the historiography of postwar science in relationship to art and visual culture, less attention has been directed to communication theories of the postwar period and African American letters. Given the persistent and necessary interest in excavating the depths of what W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed the “problem of the twentieth century,” the color line, it is surprising that these fields are rarely thought together. Questions of pattern, information, image, interrelationship, and knowledge production inundate scholarship in postwar African American literature, but rarely in conjunction with the epistemologies being developed by key communications theorists and designers of the period. This chapter seeks to address this gap by offering what may seem at first appear a jarring juxtaposition. Zeroing in on the postwar period, I suggest Gwendolyn Brooks’s first and only novella Maud Martha as a means of unpacking the concept of verisimilitude from a different but critical angle. Written in the year of Stalin’s death, 1953, this modest novella appears on first blush only to plumb the depths of the individual psyche of its eponymous protagonist. However, on closer reading, Maud Martha challenges the erasure of a black urban reality required by the American story to win over foreign citizens to US democracy. While the USIA sponsored exhibitions abroad to promote the practice of democracy’s perceptual skills, Brooks’s novel enumerated an alternate version of the ways such democratic verisimilitude might move an audience—or not. While both texts—broadly speaking—rely on the production of an imaginative “as if,” Maud Martha offers an implicit critique of the universally human propounded by exhibi104  k a t e b a l d w i n

tion and fair discourses. In Maud Martha, an orientation of identity toward universal human feeling and algorithmic flattening is the problem: for Maud Martha the character, the idea of human metrics divest an individual from what makes herself herself. In brief, the novel short-circuits aesthetic terms of empathy required by verisimilitude: one cannot offer theories of universal humanness when these theories are grounded within a racial totalitarianism. If we understand communications writ large as helping to produce some of the larger paradigms of postwar neocolonialism described throughout the present volume, Maud Martha offers a small yet sharp prism through which to animate and interrogate these paradigms. Maud Martha is generally read as a parable of the indignities of racial oppression engendered through white standards of beauty, “pale and pompadoured” (262). To be sure, an attention to Western aesthetics in the novel plays out through various iterations of oppression—from the incidental to the institutional. However helpful these kinds of interpretations are in parsing the optical racial fields of the novel, they fail to address the novel’s deep engagement with its institutional coordinates. Maud Martha offers a meditation on the city of Chicago, in particular the microcoordinates of particular post–World War II South Side institutions (the movie theater, the church, the jazz club, the beauty parlor, the university, etc.). As literary historian Mary Helen Washington puts it, “The entire city, from the downtown department store to the university campus, serves up ammunition for Maud’s racial critique.”6 Alongside these spaces, one cannot overlook the kitchenette—“grayed in, and gray”—as Brooks described it in her poem “Kitchenette Building.” Set in the context of a bourgeoning obsession with the postwar kitchen as mission control for a sleek Cold War womanhood, Maud Martha offers an alternative theory of race, detailing how race shifts as bodies and their attendant perceptual skills move through particular spaces. In so doing the book details how bodies come to know and occupy racial subjectivity through sensate mechanics, mechanics that are profoundly in evidence within the kitchenette building. These mechanics refute the trend during this period of communications-based theories of social knowledge and information exchange to reduce individuals to their communicative relationships, or a vision of felt order. The novel thus participates in a postwar tendency to explore empathy as a means of communicating the particularities of mid-century US racial From Kabul to Chicago 105

subjectivity. In this way, the novel opens up conversations in which communications theorists and designers, such as Charles Eames, George Nelson, and the designers at Kabul, were immersed—namely, the project of connecting the world through empathic structures based on experiential verisimilitude. As Orit Halpern has argued regarding visual culture and communication during the 1950s and 1960s, “As cognition, perception, and the body (both social and individual) came to be redefined in terms of feedback and patterned interactions between objects and subjects (as a communication process), what it meant to produce a truthful account of the world (or a product) shifted, becoming no longer about hidden truths, invisible elements, or psychological depths, but rather about affect and behavior.”7 But while these theorists attended to affect and behavior, their disregard for the hidden, the invisible, and the deep performed a racializing discourse of its own. Much work has been done on structures of empathy in racial discourse, notably by Saidiya Hartman, who discusses it in the context of nineteenth-century abolitionism. But here I return to a relatively simple notion of empathy as “in pathos,” or “in feeling” with someone else, the idea that you understand and share someone else’s feelings or that you have the ability to understand and share them. By rupturing the ideals of interracial harmony based in the kind of empathy put forth by these and other social theorists, Brooks’s Maud Martha discloses the limits of discursive structures based on ideals of unity in diversity. The novella also shows us how life grounded in the South Side kitchenette can reveal the disjuncture and blindness inherent to the project of flattening psychic space to create a subject who is also a smooth channel, a conduit for information exchange and data restructuring—the neocolonial project of modern international communications. As Maud Martha opens, the first of thirty-four chapters informs us that “she” is a character defined by her everyday external objects. Maud’s selfhood is presented in its most quotidian sense: she is an archive of the ordinary, coupled with the domestic labors unremunerated in the market—dusting, mopping, shopping for the day’s meal, etc. Rather than mentioning race, the narrative juxtaposes Maud with her sister, Helen. Far from ordinary, Helen commands admiration, even idealization. Helen, like a lotus or Japanese iris, is an object of desire: “Oh, to be cherished!” thinks Maud (139). Maud’s complex consciousness, her awareness of being common, is situated within a discursive field of “race,” defined not by skin color per se but by sensation 106  k a t e b a l d w i n

linked to the spaces she occupies and that come to occupy her: “There were lives in these buildings. Past the tiny lives the children blew. Cramp, inhibition, choke” (141). In this sense, the perceptual skills Maud Martha has honed as a young black girl are based in two registers: the notion of herself on display, and an inner sense of self as discontinuous with that externalization. A predicament occasioned by experiential verisimilitude, these registers suggest a sense of living in a space of “as if” in which self-management seems like the only option. These are the overlapping registers of selfhood that clog the machinery of empathic structures put into play by antiracist liberalism and postwar exhibition tactics. “Cramp, inhibition, choke.” These very words exert pressure on the idea that individuals can be likened to “communicative organisms” comprised of information exchange. And yet this was precisely the way in which human interaction was being presented globally, to advertise the bounty of the American Way of Life. While Gwendolyn Brooks was composing Maud Martha, communications theorists were linking new modes of information relay to the possibilities for a comprehensively inclusive democratic world. Early in 1953, George Nelson and Charles Eames devised their “Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course” in communication that Nelson eventually nicknamed “Art X.” Devised for students at the University of Georgia in Athens, the aim of this course was to increase communication between people and things by creating a presentation that activated all the senses. Using “high-speed techniques for exposing the relationships between seemingly unrelated phenomena,” the approach included film, music, graphics, and slides, as well as synthetic smells, all backed by commentary from Nelson and Eames.8 This sample lesson was later developed and expanded into Ray and Charles Eames’s film A Communications Primer (1953).9 A Communications Primer drew on an input/output diagram proposed by Claude Shannon in his Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which messages are transmitted by a signal through a channel to a receiver. According to this diagram, while in the channel, the message may be distorted or changed—this is called the effect of “noise.” The key to good communication is reduced noise and a simplified message. The aim of US cultural exhibitions was to draw on these insights, reduce noise, and streamline messaging, through subject channels. Logical as this systematization of subjects into machine-like interactions may seem, the variability of feedback as a basis for increased awareness of From Kabul to Chicago 107

the other should give us pause. Feedback can be shown to be highly preordained or orchestrated, at the very least hard to gauge, particularly in the exhibition format.

Case Study: The Kabul Fair The American exhibition at Jeshyn is best remembered for its Buckminster Fuller dome. The 100-foot frame of aluminum tubes and nylon skin was packed up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and flown to Afghanistan, where it was pieced together by local men. Visited by over 200,000 Afghans, the dome has been described as quintessentially American, a “symbol of American technical expertise, but also of new ways of thinking about the world” (Masey 85).10 An emphasis on architectural design set the tone for exhibitions to follow: Bucky’s dome was used in Moscow, Brussels, and elsewhere. It also occasioned the comment from Jane Fiske Mitarachi that such collaboration between designers and the government was unprecedented: designers were being asked “to become propagandists,” responsible for presenting America and “formulating America’s approach to other nations” (62). Design as communication became a key principle in Kabul. Inside the dome, visitors found a plethora of Americana: Lionel toy train sets, bouncing ball bearings, life-sized mechanical farm animals, black and white panoramas of American landscapes, a centralized TV studio in which visitors saw themselves looking at the screen, movies of American football games, and photographs of America and Americans hung from metal balustrades to inundate the visitor with views of America they could not possibly have imagined. Agricultural exhibits included an egg laying mechanical chicken and a “talking” cow, tractors, plows, and other farm equipment—as Fred Turner eloquently phrases it, “Images, artifacts, and the dome collaborated to invite Afghans into a 3D representation of a world of commercial, perceptual, and ultimately political possibilities: a world in which you could see what you had never seen before and do what you had never done, a world in which you could experience yourself as modern, driven by your own desires, supported by a well designed aesthetic infrastructure and a powerful mass-production economy” (222). Turner’s argument that the staging invited visitors to place themselves in America, to try on the perceptual skills of democracy, is compelling. At the same time, however, the form relied on a presumption of 108  k a t e b a l d w i n

verisimilitude between a narrative of life in the United States and actual life in the United States, a presumption that covered over social and political contradictions by using visual evidence of shared beliefs about gender and race with which Afghans were asked to identify. Positioned as a smooth space for the transfer of objective information, the subject became the object. In offering a narrative of distinct visions of the United States, the dome at Kabul seemed to reiterate all that was grand about American democracy— belief systems that cherish and uphold diversity and difference. This very same plurality not only masked the absence of noncoincident realities, alternative versions of life in the United States, but also helped to create the necessity of silencing other modes of subjectivity. In the context of a mood of appeasement, reassurance, and unification, the dome established a kind of affective attunement, as if to say, “We are the same.” But what happened outside the dome or posterior exposed the inherent logic of this statement. Consider, for instance, the way in which the USIA tabulated visitors’ experiences. In order to ascertain the “success” of the fair, the USIA sent in opinion poll expert Emily Jones, who hired twelve university professors from Kabul to make a “before and after” survey for local visitors. According to Jack Masey, Jones declared that it was “easier to get an opinion by asking indirectly, through images of the fair, rather than by direct question” (84). Jones drew three sketches depicting turbaned men in various states of emotional response, and the Afghan visitors were asked to gauge their response to the fair through these drawings. This configuration of response required an identification of the viewer with the figural drawing, setting up an implicit one-to-one correspondence between onlooker and representation. This mirror relationship presupposed a continuum of selfhood predicated on mood—emotional response—as an antecedent to identity. In other words, viewers were asked to see through the “noise” created by the drawing itself to get to the “root” of universal emotion. This was a visual approximation of the rhetorical strategies outlined by Shannon and then by Eames in his communications primer that sought to simplify the message and likewise the response. Visually, however, the complexity of these drawings was overwhelming. Among this complexity, not least remarkable was the fact that all the figures were poorly sketched caricatures, all were men, all wore turbans, all had beards, and two of the three superimposed the Fuller Dome above the figures’ heads as a kind of talismanic halo or pith helmet emblazoned with From Kabul to Chicago 109

the Great Seal of the United States. Given these broad strokes of disorienting misrepresentation, how might an Afghan audience member see him or herself in these pictures? And then how would this response be tallied so as to create a formula of reaction? These questions return us to a dilemma of empathic structures based on experiential verisimilitude. If Afghan audience members were invited into a perceptual experience of America in Fuller’s dome, their response could hardly be accounted for through drawings that emphasized their non-Americanness. As a very basic point, these drawings declare a shortcoming in imagining the other: if empathy means sharing someone’s feelings or an ability to understand them, then empathy cannot hold when it requires using an already othered version of the “other” with which to identify, empathize. The drawings, like their related tabulation, are never outside a US frame of reference. Indeed they can only refer back to the US and thus back to American corporate interest veiled as liberal democracy. The viewing structure here required that the self orient herself toward images that were already othered, created by pollsters to represent a collectivity to itself. But how could an Afghan recognize herself in a collectivity reduced to caricature? Asked to see herself in hyperbolically constructed emotion, the viewer was already positioned as an other. If the self of emotion or universality of emotion was meant to shine through the noise of otherness, this required a cognitive stretch to say the least. This suggests not a continuum of feedback, but rather an integral, and critical, break in the feedback loop. The breakdown in empathy is thus consistent across all three drawings, although each creates its own disidentification. And yet reaction—identification with mood no matter how in or out of sync with verisimilitude’s resemblance of reality—was formulated as “data.” Guided by a select few, whose aim was to counter the top-down experience of totalitarianism allegedly experienced in socialist nations and their exhibitions, the experiential mode developed in Kabul encouraged visitors toward a positive impression of the US, and the hope was that audience response, once tallied, would help the US to better understand how to appeal to the next set of visitors. Likewise, the method of using these drawings as emotional measures of reaction curtailed the space of openness and possibility advertised as the “pleasure dome” experience. Inasmuch as the dome opened the possibility for multiple interpretations, these avenues of possibility were routed through 110  k a t e b a l d w i n

the constraint of sentiment meant to ensure social unity and universal emotions, as evidenced by the reduction of self to emotional caricature. It is in this sense, then, that we can begin to see how the experience of the dome could only work as universal by suppressing its others: it bespoke a racial order. The dome’s alleged openness to plurality actually created the conditions for the curtailment of diversity and difference, and the necessity of stymying dissent.11 This concealment is nowhere better represented than in Jones’s drawings. In vibrant yet subtle ways Maud Martha takes up the problems inherent in orienting oneself toward images made by mass communicators. For example, Brooks describes Maud Martha’s teenage visit to the Regal Theatre to hear a singer named Howie Joe Jones: “The applause was quick. And the silence—final. That was what Maud Martha, sixteen and very erect, believed, as she manipulated herself through a heavy outflowing crowd into the lobby of the Regal Theater on Forty-seventh and South Park” (151). Although the audience enjoys “fairy gold” during Jones’s act, it is returned post-show to itself, “and it was not going to spend the rest of its life, or even the rest of the night, being grateful to Howie Joe Jones” (152). The novella describes a theory of communication discontinuous with Shannon’s formulation: Although the audience had hooted and yelled and applauded, giving the impression of positive feedback, in the end its silence is a more adequate measurement of reaction: “For a hot half hour [the audience] had put that light gauze across its little miseries and monotonies, but now here they were again, ungauzed, self-assertive, cancerous as ever.” While Jones’s goal is stardom and financial profit, Maud Martha “did not want fame.” Juxtaposed to the performance of self as leading to empty profit is the self, Maud Martha’s “most treasured object,” her work of art. In fact, her experience of Howie’s performance almost redoubles the self-assertive monotonies of everyday life. Unlike Howie, “what she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha” (22). Maud Martha is essaying to create a selfhood aestheticized beyond measure, outside a feedback loop of digital data sets and accruing profit. (The irony is that even Maud Martha’s turn to self-betterment, while aesthetically based, may bespeak an entanglement in capitalism’s grasp, in which the self is made to feel responsible for curing systemic ills.) Similarly, at the picture show, the World Playhouse, another venue of mass communication, the perceptual skills that construct and are required by the From Kabul to Chicago 111

film experience trouble the notion of an easily graspable verisimilitude.12 Quite the contrary: first, Maud must contend with the “people in the lobby try[ing] to avoid looking curiously at the two shy Negroes wanting desperately not to seem shy” (190). Then, the movie: “You felt good sitting there, yes, good, and as if, when you left it, you would be going home to a sweet-smelling apartment with flowers on little gleaming tables; and wonderful silver on night-blue velvet, in chests; and crackly sheets; and lace spreads on such beds as you saw at Marshall Field’s. Instead of back to your kit’n’t apt” (191). Suspended briefly in the upper class luxury of a temporal no-woman’s-land of “as if,” the nonwhite, nonwealthy viewer experiences a fleeting moment of transposition not felt as transformation, but as discontinuous with reality. Again, an instance of verisimilitude in which perceptual skills honed are not those in line with what it means to be a “democratic citizen,” but rather with the deprivations of what it means not to be a democratic citizen, “with garbage of your floor’s families in a big can just outside your door and the gray sound of little gray feet scratching away” (191–92). The novel opens up this space between form and representation, between a world in which you could “do what you had never done,” and a world which reiterates what you can never do. In so doing the novel uses flat, descriptive prose to attend to lives necessarily curtailed by Kabul. If the experience of Kabul was a kind of pleasure dome of Americana for its visitors, the idea of trying to correlate this experience with a given template of emotional responses (depicted with a visual rhetoric in which one had to identify first as an other, then as a self) comes closer to the experience of Maud Martha, following the movie’s end: “When they stood up the lights revealed them for what they were, the Negroes stood up among the furs and good cloth and faint perfume” (192). In this passage, we read that the house lights reveal a discontinuity between the images reflected on the screen and the bodies inhabited by “them,” “the Negroes”—designated by the generic third person, rather than a first-person consciousness through which the narrative occasionally lets us witness Maud Martha. (The use of free indirect discourse interspersed throughout the novel highlights this sense of being distanced and interior simultaneously.) Like the commandment behind Jones’s drawings that required identification with an already othered version of Afghan selfhood and emotion, the movie positioned the viewer in a space of incongruous identification. Lost for a moment in the sensorium, 112  k a t e b a l d w i n

the moviegoers are described as “so happy, they had enjoyed the picture so, they wanted to laugh: They wanted to say good, huh.” But this enjoyment is undercut by the realization that “this of course they could not do.” Like the experience of Howie’s performance, the experience of the movie as pleasurable is partially undercut by the realization of impossible enjoyment. In place of “a world in which you could see what you had never seen before and do what you had never done, a world in which you could experience yourself as modern, driven by your own desires,” the audience experiences the denial of democracy and its perceptual overtones. Not one to be deterred, Maud Martha is again resilient to these constant indignities, these assaults upon her sensibilities. We learn that she was learning to “love moments. To love moments for themselves” (78). Rather than reaching back to an aesthetics of self-betterment, this love of moments in and of themselves bespeaks a desire to be outside motion and the forward-drive ethos of modernity’s verisimilitude, beyond data-driven accountability. And thus it is here, at the site of feedback, that Brooks’s Maud Martha wedges herself. She reveals the feedback loop as discontinuous. In one chapter, in anticipation of a visit from her schoolmate Charles, Maud Martha readies herself for white scrutiny: “She sniffed a couple of times. Often it was said that colored people’s houses necessarily had a certain heavy, unpleasant smell. Nonsense, that was. Vicious—and nonsense. But she raised every window. Here was the theory of racial equality about to be put into practice, and she only hoped she would be equal to be equal” (149). In trying to imagine herself as a universal human type, Maud Martha can only play in the gap between image and self-perception. She can only become the “representative” Negro, “testing the liberal notions of accommodation.”13 The slickness of the mass communications urge for universal human feelings is resisted, revealed as a problem that denies a societal gulf separating black and white. Instead, contemplating that divide, Maud Martha seems to ask: How can I be in relation to an other, how can I be in relation to myself? These questions are addressed most vividly in “Brotherly Love.” In “Brotherly Love,” Maud Martha fights with a chicken in the kitchenette of her urban apartment. The setting is a space which will become one of the most overly identified symbols of American bounty following Nixon’s pronouncements in the Moscow kitchen of the American National exhibition (later known as the “kitchen debate”). In Moscow the kitchen became From Kabul to Chicago 113

emblematic of America’s postwar economic boom. In Maud Martha’s tale the kitchen is both more modest than its Moscow counterpart and more palpably violent. “Another hack—another hack—STUFF! Splat in her eye” (243). In the context of wartime, Maud meditates on her aggression toward the bird: “People could do this! People could cut a chicken open . . . could feel that insinuating slipping bone, survey that soft, that headless death.” Voluptuous and poetic, Maud’s description of encountering the carcass of another entertains the anthropomorphic: “And yet, the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity. The difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you, you could deal with violently” (244). Maud Martha opens up this space of empathy within wartime verisimilitude, documenting how relations to others can be characterized by ignorance, and stock characterizations that pave the way for easy violence. At the same time, Maud Martha is not innocent of these temptations, smacking her lips at the thought of her coming meal. Still, the novel offers us a different “communications primer” that forwards the fact of human complicity in neocolonial racial orders. This conjuring of cruelty is followed closely by another, related scene of kitchen violence in the suburban town of Winnetka: the chapter titled “At the Burns-Coopers’.” Maud Martha, as domestic servant, comments to her employer, “It’s quite a kitchen, isn’t it?” Her employer replies, “ ‘Really, I hadn’t thought so. I’ll bet’—she twinkled indulgently—‘you’re comparing it to your own little kitchen’ ” (249). After a series of indignities and slights, Maud Martha vows never to return to the job, and wonders, “One walked out from that almost perfect wall, spitting at the firing squad. What difference did it make if the firing squad understood or did not understand the manner of one’s retaliation or why one had to retaliate? Why, one was a human being” (251). The allegorical violence of a firing squad (one thinks of Tolstoy and the war) summoned here is stark; it can only be countered by refusing feedback. This refusal echoes the silence of the audience after Howie Jones’s performance, seen here as a repudiation of knowledge. Putting Maud Martha outside a progressive narrative of racial unity, this exchange jams the idea of a continuous feedback loop that arcs toward better and more complete mutual understanding. It reveals the inhumanity of discourse that ignores material inequalities while claiming to neutralize race. Rather, like the scene with the chicken, this kitchen exchange raises the question of difference. “The 114  k a t e b a l d w i n

difference was the in knowing” becomes “What difference did [knowledge] make?” For communications theorists knowledge as information made all the difference. But this was a particular kind of presupposed and anticipated knowledge. When knowledge went off-kilter, refused to align with expectation, or refused response, period, a logjam resulted. Information exchange capsized by the refusal of information exchange. Maud is not a communicative organism, first and foremost, but a contemplative one. A desire for reduced noise and simplified messages exposes a system’s reliance on silencing other modes of subjectivity not accountable to or accounted for in the feedback matrix. In other words, the quotidian violences of US racial regimes can not be ignored or escaped, but they can be revealed as reliant on a failure to imagine the other. If empathy requires a capacity to feel for others, to understand their emotions, then Maud’s encounter with the chicken, like her encounter with Mrs. Burns-Cooper, reveals empathy’s limits in a way not unlike the limits encountered in Kabul. Until we live among those we have not been willing to consider fully human, the novel suggests, we are all just clawing through ignorance and reproducing violence toward the other. Mary Helen Washington notes that Maud Martha disrupts on every front images of “family tranquility with the woman’s place in the home and family, good wars, and the harmony of racial integration, racial cooperation, and black docility” (191). Maud Martha offers a discursive index of race through sensation: experiencing the “dome” of American culture throughout the city of Chicago, Maud Martha practices the perceptual skills of a democratic citizen, yet repeatedly exposes their denial to her. In so doing she reveals cracks in the edifice of verisimilitude as an “as if” space intended to produce racial unity, but which instead produced, and reproduced, racial terror. Like the experience of particular South Side institutions, including the theater, the movie house, and the kitchen, the experience of the dome could only work as universal by suppressing its others. Similarly, the alleged openness to plurality that these institutions professed helped to construct the conditions for the restriction of difference.

From Kabul to Chicago 115

Chapter six The Unyielding Earth Women of Color Feminism and Cold War Fiction Crystal Parikh

At the outset of Toni Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), the first-person narrator Claudia MacTeer is already an adult recalling from many years hence how “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” Reflecting on this barren year of her girlhood, Claudia reveals the novel’s scandalous open secret, that her friend Pecola Breedlove “was having her father’s baby.” Yet this opening moment casts its view both more narrowly and more widely than that secret of incestuous violence and the ill-fated pregnancy that follows. On the one hand, Claudia and her sister Frieda remain more concerned with why the seeds they had planted fail to bloom than with Pecola’s fate, and, on the other, that failure is attributed to a more general blight beyond the girls’ capacity to comprehend: “It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding” (5). Ultimately, there is little distinction between the marigolds that fail to bloom, the sisters’ personal failings, the transgressions of Pecola’s father Cholly, and the broader sweep of history, all of which conspire to remainder Pecola as a sign of the excessive damage that has insinuated itself into their lives: “What is clear now is that

of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth” (6). Observing that everything else “is dead,” Claudia transitions to the narrative of the past, and while the girls seem insensible to the unyielding earth that serves as the novel’s setting, it comes to overdetermine the future for everyone involved. How might Morrison’s postulation of this “unyielding earth” rescript a narrative that has been consistently received as one of domestic racism, sexual violence, and individual development (or the failure thereof) as global in scope and significance?1 Since the late 1970s, many women of color writers like Morrison began to enjoy a broad national readership and a good deal of scholarly attention.2 Nevertheless, this literary production has been considered primarily in terms of the domestic “culture wars” and the intraracial conflicts between feminism and heteropatriarchal nationalist politics. A global Cold War analytics instead reveals how, as they gained a considerable audience in the United States, women of color writers responded to the radically altered political landscape of the late or “second” Cold War, where the strictures of the national state severed transnational solidarities and dramatically limited the forms of racial justice available in the United States. From the perspective of the global Cold War, we may discern how fiction by women of color grappled with the breach between radical race politics in the United States and revolutionary movements in the Second and Third Worlds as an effect of the neocolonial logic of containment and integration that domesticated politics by rendering the national form as the horizon for all politics. In considering The Bluest Eye as well as Chicana author Helena María Viramontes’s first novel, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), I explain how this fiction negotiates the dialectic of exclusion and incorporation to which people of color in the United States have been subject during the twentieth century. This literature tracks the young woman of color as the forerunner of a radical worldliness that might arise from the remains of local and global postwar political struggles.

A Global Cold War Analytics Against the yet-unfulfilled promises of American integration, the fictional practices of women of color feminists provide an archive of the broader political aspirations of revolutionary movements, dissident activism, and The Unyielding Earth 117

social protests that surged across the globe during the 1960s and 1970s.3 With virulent counterinsurgency campaigns carried out by authoritarian postcolonial regimes, resurgent surveillance, and repressive tactics (e.g., the FBI’s COINTELPRO) against activists in the United States, various international economic crises, including those in the Soviet Union that would fuel Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika by the end of the 1980s, and the popular appeal of the “Reagan-Thatcher project” of neoliberalization, the United States emerged as the victor in the Cold War by 1989, and possibilities for political agency contracted to those processes, parties, and institutions sanctioned or condoned by sovereign state authority.4 Recent renewed interest in the Cold War has revealed the global implications of the decades-long conflict for the decolonizing and postcolonial nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.5 An expanding body of scholarship in American Studies has likewise examined postwar US social movements and domestic reforms from the perspective of the global conflict. This approach has made visible a genealogy of “Cold War civil rights” that embeds liberal civil rights reforms within the global conflict and, concomitantly, discloses the transnational alliances and exchanges that informed struggles for social, political, and economic justice in the United States.6 Yet, while any number of these studies might include women as participants, only a very few, such as Keith Feldman’s A Shadow over Palestine, Cheryl Higashida’s Black Internationalist Feminism, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu’s Radicals on the Road, take gender and sexuality as primary axes of investigation. For the most part these scholars have focused on internationalist, anticolonial, and liberationist politics as women of color explicitly thematize them in their writings, at the height of revolutionary struggle, and on active participants who cast their sights outwards to places like the Soviet Union, Palestine, and Vietnam. I ask instead how such an analytics bears on literatures that seem to turn back inward, toward the quotidian concerns of domestically racialized communities at the seeming expense of more transnational and global horizons. In the final years of the Cold War and thereafter, how might the failures of the “unyielding earth” retrain our critical gaze on the home fronts of US empire and global capital, where women of color documented feminist internationalism not as overtly thematic concerns but in the formal practices by which they render the lives of young girls meaningful and promising? As with the unyielding earth that serves as both metaphor and setting in the 118  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

scene with which I opened this chapter, a global Cold War analytics requires equal attention to formal and aesthetic practices to excavate the alternate historical genealogies and desired futures that cannot cohere as realist political narratives in the present. In particular, reading for traces and remainders, for the seeming “waste” and detritus of history—e.g., minor characters, fleeting references to other times and places, and catachrestic production of meaning—that litters fiction by women of color, divulges and animates forms of affiliation and justice otherwise deemed implausible in the era of neoliberal multiculturalism.

The Waste of History Bookending the image of the unyielding earth with which Claudia introduces The Bluest Eye stands the unforgettable image of Pecola as a fully abjected figure, lost to madness and living at the edge of town with her mother: “The birdlike gestures are worn away to a mere picking and plucking her way between the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world—which is what she herself was.” Claudia levels a searing condemnation of the entire community of Lorain, Ohio, in which the girls have lived: “All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness” (205). In her rebuke to “all of us,” Claudia denounces the racist and patriarchal violence that imbues the individual plots recounted in the novel. But while Claudia eventually accuses a wide ensemble of perpetrators, black and white, for Pecola’s predicament, the judgment remains bound to the domestic life of the nation, and the critical reception of the novel has hewed to those limits as well. However, from an internationalist perspective of the global Cold War, during which Morrison wrote, the dystopian tableau of Pecola “searching the garbage” and absorbing all “our waste” readily calls to mind another famous “garbage” or “waste” heap of political history, the one to which Leon Trotsky rhetorically consigned his Menshevik adversaries as they walked out of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets in 1917. If Trotsky’s outburst marked the dissolution between moderates and the more militant socialThe Unyielding Earth 119

ists, which brought Bolsheviks into power in the October Revolution and began the Soviet era in Russian history, the image of Pecola not only subtly conjures the abject upon whom such scorn is heaped, but reinscribes such abjection in terms of an essentially gendered dynamic of racial resistance in the American domestic scene. This is of course not to conflate racial segregation and dispossession in the United States during and after World War II with the material conditions of late imperial Russia, nor to suggest that centering US women of color might deliver up a unilateral solution to the many thorny questions that dogged socialist and anticolonial movements.7 Nevertheless, to the extent that other internationalist critiques of colonial history, neocolonialism, and global capital were unable to articulate the specificity of US women of color’s subjection, they could only ever render her an abject afterthought of their idealist projects. In the closing pages of the novel, Claudia also observes that “some of us ‘loved’ her,” even as she discerns that such “love” proved at best useless and at worst, as in the case of Cholly, “fatal” to Pecola (206). Here Claudia also, rather unexpectedly, names the Maginot Line—one of the three prostitutes whom Pecola had befriended—as another of those who had “loved” Pecola. To return to this otherwise quite minor character in the penultimate paragraph of the novel seems precisely to invoke the costs of a totalizing politics, whether a masculinist nationalism, a militant Marxism-Leninism, or bourgeois respectability, when “all of us” abandon the most vulnerable in order to sustain our own heroic image of self. Jennifer Gillan has persuasively argued that, by setting her novel over the span of 1940 to 1941, during which the United States deliberated about and decided to intervene in World War II, as well as naming the three friendly prostitutes China, Poland, and the Maginot Line, who are abjured by the rest of the town, Morrison counters the “positioning of the United States as the crusader against racialized forms of nationalism abroad.”8 In naming the three prostitutes, the only “positive domestic influences” in Pecola’s life, after specific Asian and European fronts of World War II (“China” and “Poland”) but also pointedly calling attention to the “wrong front” with the “Maginot Line” (the state-of-the-art barrier built by the French along its border with Germany, which proved useless when the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940), Morrison evokes how the US war effort established “the nation’s respectability abroad,” while racial injustice at home 120  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

persisted unabated.9 Morrison suggests how gendered and sexual norms of bourgeois respectability reproduce the systemic deprivations doled out by white supremacy but displace them onto marginalized individuals. Critics have therefore stressed how the novel effectively historicizes the conflicts it depicts, not as solely internal to the African American community, but as overdetermined by the disciplinary force of racial segregation, discrimination, and violence that unfold in the stories of Pecola’s parents.10 The Bluest Eye tackles the social fictions of “racial capital,” capitalism’s creation of and dependence upon racial differences that sustain antiblack racism, where all conceptions of liberal personhood, personal property, and individual rights also remain deeply racialized, even in an era of desegregation and so-called “colorblindness.” This ongoing dispossession renders Pecola’s desire for the bluest eye, which she hopes will offset her ugliness and undo the sexual violence she has suffered, as more than a historical artifact from the 1940s. In short, Pecola’s story has never been (only) about the injuries that violent black men do to poor black women. Rather, racial and class hierarchies continually render black women as disposable “waste,” well into the post–civil rights era of colorblindness. Yet critical accounts of the novel stop short of identifying the possible affiliations that might serve as dynamic alternatives to the domestic citizenship that costs the characters so dearly. These are alternatives only momentarily glimpsed at the margins of black life in Lorain, before rapidly receding from view as prospects left unpursued. As I have already suggested, China, Poland, and the Maginot Line serve as instances of “race rebels,” whose practices of pleasure “carved out social space free from the watchful eye of white authority or . . . the moralizing of the black middle class,” while housing “an alternative culture that placed more emphasis on collectivist values, mutuality, and fellowship.”11 Yet, as hospitable as this women’s community is to Pecola, the respectability politics of those surrounding it brand the women as “ruined” (104).12 Another seemingly minor character, that of Soaphead Church, opens the novel’s gaze onto the more worldly linkages that might be forged across transnational spaces of anticolonial and antiracist struggle, before retreating back to the US homefront. Elihue Micah Whitcomb, who comes to be known in Lorain by the mocking nickname of Soaphead Church, lives at the edges of the town’s civic life, serving as a “Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams.” A The Unyielding Earth 121

misanthrope and pedophile, he traces his lineage back to a “a Sir Whitcomb, some decaying British nobleman, who chose to disintegrate under a sun more easeful than England’s,” and who in the Caribbean fathers the “mulatto bastard” that establishes the Whitcomb family line. Soaphead eventually arrives in the United States, searching for work after being financially cut off by his father. His role in Pecola’s demise is pivotal, as he promises he can bestow on the now pregnant young girl the bluest eye for which she longs. As he explains in a letter he writes to God, Soaphead rationalizes his deception of Pecola as a kind of correction for the flaws in a providential design that have given rise to his own illicit desires and Pecola’s abhorred existence. He opens this letter by recalling his youth: “Once upon a time I lived greenly and youngish on one of your islands. An island of the archipelago in the South Atlantic between North and South America, enclosing the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico: divided into the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Bahama Islands. Not the Windward of Leeward Island colonies, mark you, but within, of course, the Greater of the two Antilles.” He further concedes that “while the precision of my prose may be, at times, laborious,” it is of utmost importance to his task “that I identify myself to you clearly,” and then turns to censure the second-hand notions of respectability that “We in this colony took as our own,” modeled on “the most dramatic, and the most obvious, of our white masters’ characteristics, which were, of course, their worst . . . we were not royal but snobbish, not aristocratic but class-conscious; we believed authority was cruelty to our inferiors, and education was being at school. We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom. We raised our children and reared our crops; we let infants grow, and property develop. Our manhood was defined by acquisitions. Our womanhood by acquiescence. And the smell of your fruit and the labor of your days we abhorred.” (177). The reproach Soaphead Church levels at his fellow West Indians anticipates and parallels the one that Claudia makes of the townsfolk in Lorain, the latter echoing closely in form and content the catalogue of accusation that the former delivers unto God. The narrative thus splits Soaphead’s perspective between Claudia’s authorial voice and Pecola’s abjection, even as he absorbs for himself an omniscient role to (attempt to) rewrite Pecola’s fate, to utterly devastating effect.13 Although the adult Claudia adopts the first-person “we,” which includes herself as the object of critique, her character’s fierce resistance to hypocritical adult mores, 122  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

her staunch loyalty to Pecola and to her sister, and her sheer naïveté nevertheless seems to distance her from the collective failures that the narrative documents. In contrast, as he readily admits that to repeatedly molesting young girls, Soaphead can in no way share Claudia’s innocence, even as he justifies his actions through the language of purity. In other words, young girls’ innocence and spotlessness appeals to his own desire to be “what one might call a clean old man” (167). Like their narrative perspectives, Claudia and Soaphead’s histories parallel one another but remain entirely separated. A politics of national integration thus ultimately precludes the more fluid, heterogeneous, and even queerer possibilities that the internationalist solidarities of the postwar era seemed to augur, in the process converting the possibilities of desire into scenes of violence and abuse.14 The “green” promise of flourishing with which Soaphead’s bildung begins gives way to Claudia’s blues, the melancholic setting of the unyielding earth with which she opens and closes the novel.15 The void between the personal and historical narratives preserves the hidden crossings that might have replenished black life in the United States against the narrower options that racial liberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism make of it.16 Emptied of any significance and made over into a space of deferral and transition, Soaphead Church proves less an antagonist who leads to Pecola’s downfall than a transactional figure through whom her abandonment comes to completion. He hence uses the curious spatial metaphor of an empty hotel room to describe himself in relation to his estranged wife, signaling the evacuation of such transnational endeavors: “Does anybody regret leaving a hotel room? Does anybody, who has a home, a real home somewhere, want to stay there?” (178). Soaphead’s mapping of his original location, on “an island of the archipelago” in the Caribbean Sea, summons the absent presence of the black Atlantic, a spatial imaginary that draws together this diasporic cast of characters but that ultimately remains inaccessible, and thus unyielding, for Morrison’s subjects.

Culture Wars on the US Homefront In the summer of 1982, Ronald Reagan ironically invoked Trotsky’s famous image in an address to the British Parliament, morphing the original translation of waste, trash, or dust to “ash,” and prophesying the fate of the Soviet The Unyielding Earth 123

Union and the eventual outcome of the Cold War: “What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”17 The Westminster Speech, as it has come to be known, ushered in the Reagan Doctrine, the administration’s express move away from détente with the Soviet Union in favor of armed anti-Communist, neocolonial campaigns across the globe, especially through proxy forces in the Americas, Middle East, and Africa. In this “second Cold War,” the political logic of containment, already established in the 1950s, also had indelible effects for racialized populations at home. The Reagan-Bush administrations continually invoked racialized images of pathology—the welfare queen and the monstrously violent criminal (i.e., Willie Horton)—to ramp up a social common sense that had its roots in the 1960s liberal response to social dispossession and unrest.18 Targeting “cultural” deficits as the source of poverty and criminality, from the 1980s into the twenty-first century, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have advanced an economic and political agenda that laid most of the nation’s social ills at the feet of African American men and women who failed to abide by the prevailing terms of decent and responsible sexual and social mores. Under the mandate of promoting “personal responsibility” as well as “law and order” solutions to social ills, liberals and neoconservatives at all levels participated in the dismantling and privatization of public programs meant to provide some modicum of social and economic security, including in the areas of education, housing, and employment. The succeeding decades saw significant increases in levels of poverty and even more spectacular increases in rates of incarceration, both dramatically and disproportionately affecting African American and Latino populations.19 Yet, as cultural critics and political historians have determined, this logic of containment has functioned in tandem with its necessary complement, that of integration.20 That is, the routing of radical political movements and the expansion of US economic and geopolitical power entailed the integration of other nations, especially postcolonial ones, into a new world order of formally free and independent states. Decolonizing societies were therefore also pressed into taking up the sovereign state form, the latter serving as the container for what were considered to be the lower-level politics of ethnic, 124  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

racial, class, religious, and other social difference.21 In this emergent world order, the national horizon constrained political ambitions, and peaceful relations between states were meant to foster liberal democracies and economic trade and development across the globe. In the waning years of the Cold War, the politics of integration proceeded on the US domestic front by way of an ascendant rhetoric of multicultural tolerance that accompanied the mounting backlash against civil rights gains. In fact, the endorsement by liberals and then neoliberals of a pluralist conception of national unity stoked the so-called culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, magnifying intranational divisions, while occluding the profound narrowing of political imagination.22 Liberal multiculturalism channeled much antiracist energy into a representational politics of diversity, tolerance, and inclusion, while disengaging them from the structuralist critiques of racial capital at the heart of radical and socialist black freedom struggles. In the field of literature, this conflict played out as the “canon wars,” where the inclusion or exclusion of particular writers and artists from publications, educational curricula, prizes, and other venues became the primary object of racial politics, almost entirely detached from communities of color, the material conditions in which minority populations lived, and social struggle on the ground.23 Outside of university spaces the canon wars constituted a split between neoconservative calls for racial and ethnic minorities to assimilate to “colorblind” and “universal” values and multiculturalism’s celebration of diversity. But, as Jodi Melamed argues, inclusion in a multicultural politics of representation “became the horizon for knowing race and antiracism,” such that “the new knowledges produced by social movements” were made to ”accommodate post-Keynesian social and economic imperatives”: “It thus became possible for multiculturalism to become a strategy for racial abandonment.”24 Morrison rose to prominence during this moment of political realignment and the consolidation of liberal multiculturalism, and her career would seem, at least on the surface, to verify how integrationist reforms, even or especially those of a pluralist character, managed to contain the radical energies of antiracist struggle at the end of the Cold War. The relative visibility of women of color writers in the United States, and the feminist critiques to which their writing gave expression, became the object of attack by those who saw them as “airing dirty laundry.”25 Parallel controversies erupted during this time, involving highly personalized attacks, where the very commerThe Unyielding Earth 125

cial success of women’s literary works (those by Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston, for example) seemed to provide evidence that they had sold out “their communities.” Moreover, since the poststructuralist turn in literary and cultural studies in the 1990s, women of color feminism has proved an especially salient target for theoretical critiques of identity politics and identitarian thought. Although the roots of “identity politics” actually reside, as Leerom Medovoi has demonstrated, in mainstream commercial culture’s imagining of teenage rebellion (especially against constructions of Communist authoritarianism) during the late 1940s and 1950s, by the 1970s “identity increasingly became a matter of minoritarian recognition, one whose aims always referred to the ultimate horizon of the American polity . . . nesting particular acts of identitarian recognition within more generalized others.”26 Thus, while women of color feminism simultaneously challenged the racialized presumptions of the second-wave feminist movement and the heteromasculinism of the black, brown, and yellow power movements, it was mostly cast as bemoaning how these political projects “split” the identities of such women. Against the caricature of women of color feminist practice as a narrow politics of identity, however, scholars like Grace Kyungwon Hong have argued that it constituted “a complete critique of . . . the white supremacist moment of global capital organized around colonial capitalism.”27 Women of color feminism, that is, gave precise expression to how a global regime of capital continually emptied women of color of value, but also obscured that process in its production of surplus value across the globe. Because women of color feminists articulated such political and economic truths across entrenched borders of race and nation, their foundational philosophies and writings actually advanced “not a reified subject position but a reading practice, a ‘way of making sense of’ that reveals the contradictions of the racialized and gendered state.”28 As Melamed further explains, women of color feminists thought through social crises by forging collectivity and constituting “women of color as a community of friendship and solidarity, a political movement, and a new subject position, ‘something else to be.’ ”29 Certainly, no such remaking of black women’s lives was forthcoming within the diegetic world that The Bluest Eye depicts. Instead, Morrison performed women of color feminism as a formal and fictional practice that ultimately designated the absence of other, transnational imaginaries at the moment of 126  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

her writing, spaces from which such worldliness might still be conceived. Such authorship—along with many other cultural and political activities—then actually created the differential consciousness that has consistently gone by the name “women of color” since the 1990s.30 Departing from a framework of US identity politics, I suggest that not only does women of color fiction offer up a dialectical critique of the contradictions that state sovereignty, racial capital, neocolonial geopolitics, and liberal individualism cannot but fail to reconcile, but that a global Cold War analytics can locate in that literature the remains of transnational solidarity and political aspiration made otherwise inaccessible in the neoliberal time and space of the post–Cold War nation. In her debut novel Under the Feet of Jesus, Helena María Viramontes (like Morrison) attends to the possibility of the young American girl of color as the agential subject of political history, although the worldly past to which Viramontes turns is not that of the black Atlantic but a borderland history of anticolonial revolution. In this case, the earth proves not “unyielding,” but productive of the differential consciousness by which women of color feminists engender the political communities necessary to sustain them into the twenty-first century.

Learning to Read In the opening scene of Under the Feet of Jesus, Perfecto Flores brings his longtime companion Petra and her five children to a rural California town to work on its farms. Estrella, the thirteen-year-old protagonist and oldest daughter of the family, surveys the landscape, marked by a barn, which is later also described as a “cathedral of a building”: “The silence and the barn and the clouds meant many things. It was always a question of work, and work depended on the harvest, the car running, their health, the conditions of the road, how long the money held out, and the weather, which meant they could depend on nothing” (9, 4). Viramontes thus immediately establishes how the material conditions of their labor, the “question of work,” drastically diminishes the “many things” that the landscape might otherwise signify to ultimately “nothing” very stable or secure for Estrella and her family. From the outset, then, Viramontes characterizes her subjects’ relation to the world as a deeply belabored one, depicting the unrelenting physical movement to which the Mexican American family of farmworkers are subject The Unyielding Earth 127

and the ruinous impact of contemporary industrialized agribusiness that disables its subjects as they eke out a living among contaminated irrigation canals and poisonous pesticides that rain down from the sky. As numerous critics have pointed out, Viramontes consistently shows this embodied relation to labor as constituted through gendered racial difference, especially in her portrayal of Petra, whose body bears the marks of destitution from having been abandoned by her first husband and obligated to the care of Estrella and her siblings, who remain dependent upon her.31 Petra also cares for the novel’s other main character, the adolescent Alejo, an intelligent and sensitive boy from Texas who works in the same fields as Estrella’s family, when he falls ill. Described as “shackled” by the scars of fieldwork and childbearing, Petra typifies the woman of color at once abjected and necessary for the productive and reproductive labor she sustains on minimal resources. For women like Petra, the family proves the site of her incorporation into the stratified labor market, rather than a space of protection and respite from it, and the care she performs in the family essentially reproduces the labor force upon which capital depends.32 A global Cold War analytics, however, allows us to envisage further the kinds of political community necessary to offer more robust forms of social and cultural citizenship to these subjects. Access to those alternate lifeworlds entails reading against and beyond the naturalized political horizons of the national state and masculinist nationalisms, as Estrella learns to do over the course of the novel, especially in her ambivalent relations to the men around her. As she regards with uncertainty the role of Perfecto, who is portrayed as a type of “substitute” father, a man old enough to be her grandfather and who secretly plans his abandonment of Petra’s family, the narrative tangentially recounts how Perfecto has already lived an entire life’s story, before his “second” life with Petra and her children, and finds himself overwhelmed by the responsibility of the new family. In his facility with the necessary tools of his handyman trade, Estrella sees (and resents) a masculinist knowledge that sets Perfecto apart from her mother and herself. Yet, unbeknownst to Estrella, as an undocumented alien, Perfecto lives “a travesty of laws” that makes him an unwitting outlaw presence: “He knew nothing of their source but it seemed his very existence contradicted the laws of others, so that everything he did like eat and sleep and work and love was prohibited” (83). Viramontes underscores the older man’s subjection to 128  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

what Nicholas DeGenova and Nathalie Peutz call the “deportation regime” of the modern security state. Encompassing the institutional mechanisms, policing processes, and administrative practices by which the state responds to incursions against its sovereign authority, deportation regimes make visible “a volatile world of restless bodies” that challenge “the capacities of nation-states to define their subjectivities, command their loyalties, and contain their energies.”33 The brief exposition of Perfecto’s character spans the arc of a century and the range of the US-Mexico borderlands in which he has lived. He compares his own (again, in DeGenova and Peutz’s words) “impulses, needs, desires, and capabilities” to return “home” to “a tumor lodged under the muscle of [his] heart,” adding urgency to the extra jobs he takes on, such as tearing down the dilapidated barn, needing the money to “get home before home became so distant, he wouldn’t be able to remember his way back” (83). Perfecto has “no record of his own birth except for the year 1917 which appeared to him in a dream. He had a history that was unspoken, memories that only surfaced in nightmares” (25). This passing reference to 1917—the year in which the current constitution of Mexico was adopted: the first constitution in the world to grant citizens social rights such as the right to a free education, the right to land, and the right for workers to organize and to strike (additional rights, such as the right to health care and the right to housing have also been subsequently added to it)—remains mostly overlooked in the novel’s critical reception. Implemented during the Mexican Revolution, in which nationalists fought bitterly against the neocolonial economic and diplomatic relationship arranged by Porfirio Díaz between the newly independent nation and the United States, the 1917 Constitution of Mexico also served as a model for the Russian Constitution, adopted after the October Revolution. The reference to Perfecto’s birth thus draws continuities between revolutionary struggles across national borders, made visible by the global Cold War analytic. As Emma Pérez argues, the Mexican Revolution was a “constitutionalist revolution, in which feminist activities were by no means promoted,” but nonetheless “women as agents have always constructed their own spaces interstitially, within nationalisms.”34 Under the Feet of Jesus animates this “feminism-in-nationalism,” which remains dormant as part of Perfecto’s “unspoken” history, but vital to the novel’s catachrestic construction of Estrella The Unyielding Earth 129

as the emergent political subject who will have to assume the unfinished struggles of the past. As he enlists her to help him with his work, he also begins a course of instruction of sorts: “Perfecto Flores taught her the names that went with the tools . . . names that gave meaning to the tools. Tools to build, bury, tear down, rearrange and repair, a box of reasons his hands took pride in. She lifted the pry bar in her hand, felt the coolness of iron and power of function, weighed the significance it awarded her, and soon she came to understand how essential it was to know these things. That was when she began to read” (26). Because Perfecto is unable to tear down the barn alone, his “training” Estrella to use the tools affords her the “language” with which to “read,” and to re-reread, and ultimately rewrite her world of work. The practical literacy that Perfecto imparts thus locates Estrella in a longer history of materialist thought, whose presence otherwise surfaces only in a single understated reference to the United Farm Workers, a brief mention of the “white leaflets with black eagles on them” that Estrella saves “for later reading” (84). Significantly, Perfecto chooses Estrella instead of Alejo to help him, so as not to have to share his proceeds. In any case, Alejo is incapacitated soon thereafter, exposed to a shower of airdropped pesticides that leave him sickened and unable to take even basic care of himself, much less take on wage work. Thus, as the traditional agents of nationalist politics are incapacitated by a combination of age, legal status, and what the other piscadores refer to as the “daño of the field,” the woman of color’s subjectivity emerges both in difference to but inextricable from those of the men around her (93). The third person narrative accordingly moves fluidly between the various characters and, in particular, couples Estrella’s memories of the past and Alejo’s imagining of the future in its telling of the present. The culmination of both the narrative and Estrella’s emergence as a political agent turns on the constitutive relations of knowledge, work, and care in which they are all situated, plotted carefully through a series of recurring tropes that ultimately transforms the meaning of the gendered, racial, and national difference that defines them. Alejo’s budding interest in geology offers a vocabulary for describing the natural and human energy reserves upon which the nation draws, carelessly depleting them in its production of surplus value and social goods on behalf of its most prized citizens. Caught in the pesticides, Alejo imagines himself to be “sinking in the tar pits” with 130  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

“[b]lack bubbles erasing him,” leaving nothing but “[t]housands of bones, the bleached white marrow of bones” (78). Similarly, when her family’s station wagon becomes stuck as they transport Alejo to a clinic, Estrella recalls Alejo’s story about a girl whose remains had been found in La Brea Tar Pits: “she felt as if there wasn’t any solid earth to ground herself” and the family watches “as the tire spun and spun without moving an inch” (129–30). When they do finally get Alejo to the clinic, a nurse (one of several models of white middle-class femininity depicted in the novel) informs them that he is too sick to be treated there and will need emergency care at a nearby hospital. As Estrella realizes that they have handed over to the clinic the last of the money they will need for gas to make the trip to the hospital, she undergoes a crisis of signification that overrides the conventional relations of labor, value, property and rights, as the literal and metaphorical dimensions of “energy matter” begin to shift and slide into one another for her: “She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. . . . Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her” (148). Reading Alejo’s lessons against the grain, Estrella not only determines that gasoline is the poisonous fuel that keeps her own family on an endless move (while at the same time keeping them socially “stuck”), but identifies herself literally as the energy matter that is consumed and wasted by other “people [who] just use you until you’re all used up, then rip you into pieces when they’re finished using you” (86, 75). Demanding their money back as she threatens the nurse with the pry bar, Estrella transvalues the very terms by which debt and interest are derived. Identifying the migrant laborer’s body with and as the nation’s fuel sources, she learns to reread what Melissa Wright calls the “myth of the disposable woman,” the way in which racial capital, in its global iterations, posits an ever-replenishing supply of Third World women and women of color who simultaneously “personify the meaning of human disposability: someone who eventually evolves into a living state of worthlessness” but also possess “certain traits that make their labor particularly valuable to global firms that require dexterous, patient, and attentive workers.”35 Estrella feels “like two The Unyielding Earth 131

Estrellas,” split between docility and ferocity, and her differential consciousness materializes as a dialectical response to the contradictory gendered and racialized norms ascribed to her (150). The imperative to provide care and the assumption of criminality literally move her to act in a way “unlike” herself but also to transform the meaning of that action in its performance. Returning to Perfecto’s perspective at this pivotal moment to ponder the forms of disposability and deportability he has been made to inhabit, Viramontes further illuminates how such deportable alienage constitutes a structure of feeling that shapes and constrains the migrants’ daily lives in the borderlands. As they deliver Alejo to the hospital, Perfecto finds himself unexpectedly moved when Estrella offers thanks to the older man: “He had given this country his all, and in this land that used his bones for kindling, in this land that never once in the thirty years he lived and worked, never once said thank you, this young woman who could be his granddaughter had said the words with such honest gratitude, he was struck by how deeply these words touched him” (155). Because the effectiveness of deportation regimes inheres not so much in the execution of literal deportations as in the production of “deportability” as a way of life, the construction of persons by the law as illegal and disposable renders them a docile labor force.36 Hence, while no overt threat ever literally appears in the novel, Petra at one point identifies the edginess that Estrella feels as “la Migra”: “It’s La Migra. Everybody’s feeling it,” and Perfecto’s tractability proves the orientation necessary for survival, where not only is gratitude (and just recompense) for his capacities and work never supplied, but is never expected in the first place (61). Against the plight of Perfecto’s deportability, then, a scene in which Petra insists that her children have a right to the nation also informs Estrella’s emergent political consciousness. Even as she carefully stores the documents proving her children’s birthright citizenship under the small statue of Christ in her home altar, Petra advises Estrella that, in the case that the latter is detained by immigration agents: “Don’t run scared. . . . Don’t let them make you feel you did a crime for picking the vegetables they’ll be eating for dinner. If they stop you, if they try to pull you into the green vans, you tell them the birth certificates are under the feet of Jesus, just tell them.” While she instructs her daughter where to find the birth certificates, Petra also articulates her children’s claims to political standing and social security through her own maternal affections, embodied labor, and personal sense of dignity: “Tell 132  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

them que tienes una madre aquí. You are not an orphan, and she pointed a red finger to the earth, Aquí” (63). In what Mitchum Huehls describes as one of the novel’s many moments of catachrestic representation (including Estrella’s later identification of herself as the fuel that powers other citizens’ social and economic mobility), Viramontes “yokes together two particulars with little concern for whether their union is true, proper, or endurable.”37 Forgoing any fixed certainty about the essence of things upon which figuration (i.e., metaphor) depends, her subjects nevertheless effect meaning in a world where “the only operative universal is the absolutely unknown,” as in the case of the “many things” surrounding Estrella’s family that always amount to “nothing,” and the absence of any “solid earth” to ground them.38 Claiming a natal tie to the earth evokes the history of dispossession and dislocation of mexicanos from their lands in the decades following the appropriation of Texas and the Southwest territories by the United States at the close the Mexican-American War and the restructuring of agricultural economy thereafter. But the scenes in which Petra and Estrella articulate a feminist ethic of care also respond to the institutions of state security—especially the mechanisms of immigration enforcement and policing—established at the height of the Cold War that eventually consolidated representations of alienage as criminal and moral failing. In particular, the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which has been conventionally regarded as a liberalization of prior and patently undemocratic immigration policies that had been in place since the early twentieth century, simultaneously established a new set of criteria for exclusion around Cold War exigencies.39 Therefore, in addition to excluding from entry an expansive list of undesirables, the legislation permitted the exclusion and deportation of those engaged in activities thought to be subversive to national security. As they simultaneously named those to be regarded as threats and those considered (newly) assimilable, the mid-century immigration reforms worked in concert with US Cold War policy and legislative efforts, such as the Internal Security Act of 1950 (also drafted by Senator Pat McCarran), which required members of the American Communist Party to register with the Attorney General and provided for the building of the internment camps for the detention of those identified as “dangerous individuals” during states of emergency, as well as national loyalty programs to vet government employees. These measures hardened the boundary between a domestic national identity The Unyielding Earth 133

and its alien others, the latter regarded as legally and morally suspect.40 In so doing, David Campbell contends, US officials extended and intensified the domain of the state’s interest, as they “multiplied the dimensions of being along which threats to security could be observed.”41 Yet liberals promoted reforms in immigration policy as an integrationist resolution to domestic racial divisions, of a piece with efforts to desegregate the unevenly racialized distribution of civil and political rights, while also seeking to contain those political and ideological differences that might undermine the national unity in whose interest the security state operated. Set against the model of multicultural consumer citizenship that neoliberalism holds out as the spoils of national integration, Viramontes enacts an alternative formulation of rights and belonging for those whose very presence in the nation is cast under the signs of “alien,” “illegal,” and “criminal” (even as their labor is indispensible to sustain the lives of those others). In yet other instances of catachresis, from the perspective of her younger twin sisters, Estrella appears, as she walks through the sliding glass doors of the hospital after she has deposited Alejo in the emergency room, to possess “the magic and the power in her hands to split glass in two,” and the novel ends with an image of Estrella, surrounded by birds, climbing the roof of the barn, where she “remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed” (156, 176). As she perches on the precipice of differential political consciousness and transforms the meaning of “home” that has become increasingly elusive for Perfecto, the narrative reimagines “alienage” as, in Joseph Keith’s terms, a “radical form of worldliness” that counters both the politics of national containment and the neocolonial forms of globalization that prevailed during and after the Cold War.42 Under the Feet of Jesus thus harbors memories of early twentieth-century revolutionary struggles, and even (by way of its recourse to tropes from the nation’s petroculture) of a paleontological time and space in which bodily detritus and waste come very slowly to constitute the black gold by which almost all modern global life is organized and fueled. Assembled through the perspective of the young Chicana woman—or, in Pérez’s words, by “sexing the colonial imaginary”—the narrative fundamentally shifts the scales and terms of analysis, to make legible otherwise inaccessible lifeworlds as well as the essential work, actions, and words of Mexican and Chicana women 134  c r y s t a l p a r i k h

who have continually been rendered as backdrop to the class and nationalist interests of others.43 As such, Under the Feet of Jesus renders its feminist vision of survival, care, and flourishing as an aesthetic practice. Its intersubjective narrative perspective arises from the extremely limited resources afforded to migrant laborers, which nevertheless eventually amass as a differential political and critical consciousness and the catachrestic production of knowledge, in which the continual slippage between the literal matter of the signified and the “vehicle” of representation devise a literacy suited to the world in which these subjects live and struggle. If in The Bluest Eye the earth remains unyielding, as the aspirations for social and economic justice are pared away from the terms of integration for racialized peoples in the United States, the women of color feminist movement—which Morrison’s literary practice participated in and contributed to—gave rise by the end of the twentieth century to the methods and subjects necessary to imagine that ground in starkly differently terms. Under the Feet of Jesus recovers the transnational histories of revolutionary affiliation that had been rendered alien in the postsocialist, neocolonial new world order of the 1990s. Reading women of color fiction through the histories and aspirations of the global Cold War thus animates the political imaginaries by which these authors have written, across a host of social differences, in order to do justice to those consigned to the many waste heaps of history.

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Chapter seven “Home is Where the Hatred Is” Housing, Race, and Cold War Internationalisms in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Raisin in the Sun Cheryl Higashida I think housing is so important I wrote a play about it. —L o r r a i n e H a n s b e r r y 1

Of Suburbs and Slums As battlegrounds that focalized much of the worst of US racism, suburbs and slums became international issues as well as intertwined processes during the Cold War. Cold War America fetishized the suburban home as a bulwark of democracy, enshrining private property rights. Yet racial contradiction warred within US liberal democracy: while professing universal rights and values, the US in fact upheld “whiteness as property.” Developed by Cheryl Harris, the concept of whiteness as property refers to the investment by “custom, command, and law” of rights, liberties, and powers exclusively in white identity and whiteness.2 The US does not simply defend private property but whiteness as property. One major result of this is spatial segregation,

the construction of racially identified spaces whereby the value of white space depends on the devaluation of black space. Throughout the twentieth century, white suburban development was contingent on the underdevelopment of black urban ghettoes—a dual process fraught with violence. Yet this racial exclusion and oppression became the basis upon which liberal and left movements pushed for substantive democracy in the US linked with national liberation in the Third World. Against US Cold War internationalism, black anticolonial internationalism presented more expansive visions of freedom. These competing internationalisms fundamentally shape two iconic texts of 1950s US domesticity: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In what follows, I explore the Cold War internationalism of Wilson’s novel and the black internationalism of Hansberry’s play in order to excavate the global dimensions of their concerns with households and housing: a wartime affair between a US soldier and an Italian woman that allegorizes US global hegemony in Wilson’s novel; the linking of desegregation with decolonization in Hansberry’s play. It is necessary to read housing development in relation to global geopolitics in order to understand how these texts responded to the Cold War pressures that informed both suburbanization and ghettoization. Finally, I argue that housing development/private property is as important as home ownership/ personal property in literature of the suburb and the ghetto. Although literary and cultural critics privilege the latter, real estate is integral to the Cold War Americanism of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and to the internationalist critique of the American way in A Raisin in the Sun. Wilson’s novel proposes that it is not home ownership but home entrepreneurship—the building and selling of houses—that redeems the organization man, the ethnic American, and war-torn Europe. Private property generates the profit necessary to save families of all colors and nationalities from both Communism and the extremes of capitalism. Moreover, the novel naturalizes the racial exclusion and oppression that enable the security and profitability of suburbanization. Consequently, I argue that The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a “fiction of neocolonialism” or, in Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith’s words, a version of “the exceptionalist narrative of American anti-Communism and anticolonialism . . . that insists on freedom and independence while concealing and indeed enabling the darker reality of economic subjugation.”3 "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 137

By contrast, Raisin exemplifies the capacity of literature to critique neocolonialism’s fictions through dramatizing the connections between ghettoization and free enterprise and between desegregation and decolonization, and through imagining new forms of black subjectivity and citizenship.4 Scholarship on Raisin views its pan-Africanism more so in cultural than in political economic terms, or else has not yet apprehended how the Youngers’ move to a house in Clybourne Park, a white neighborhood, hinges on African anticolonialism. Greater appreciation of this connection is especially pressing given that recent productions of Raisin, such as the 2008 television movie, obscure the play’s black internationalism. Hansberry’s humanist black marxism is also rejected by Bruce Norris’s “response” to Raisin in his 2011 play Clybourne Park, which illuminates the pitfalls of integration in an era of late capitalism haunted by traumatic histories of Cold War US neocolonialism. But in challenging the latest forms of segregation that come with diversified suburbs, slum “redevelopment,” and twenty-first-century US wars in the Middle East, Hansberry’s realist, materialist, black internationalist vision retains its critical force.5

The Home and the World The era of race restrictive covenants—contractual agreements among property owners that they would not sell or rent their premises to certain racial or ethnic groups—lasted from 1917 to 1948. In response to internal migration and overseas immigration, builders and later the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) engineered homogeneous, exclusionary neighborhoods and suburbs that invested value in white-occupied spaces through the devaluation of nonwhite spaces.6 Mass-produced single-family housing, associated with the post–World War II Levittowns (which consistently used racial covenants), had started becoming prominent two decades earlier in the 1920s. By 1928 housing subdivisions across the country relied on deed restrictions, including race restrictive covenants, as their legal architecture.7 As the Committee on Negro Housing pointed out in 1932, “Whereas it is now unconstitutional to legislate against one element of citizens, the law permits individuals to enter [discriminatory] contractual relationships and offers machinery for punishing violators of the contracts.”8 To enforce restrictive covenants, developers created homeowner associations to sue violators. Enforcement measures also entailed intimidation and violence. By 1945, sociologists Horace Cayton 138  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

and St. Clair Drake would assert that “the main focal point of anti-Negro sentiment in Midwest Metropolis, and by far the most important one, is a loose association of neighborhood property owners’ associations aided and abetted by the Chicago Real Estate Board and the Chicago Title and Trust Company.”9 The racism of the real estate business infected national policy through the FHA, which was dominated by private real estate and banking interests.10 FHA support of race restrictive covenants critically shaped urban development at the moment “the biggest wave of housing construction in American history was taking place” following World War II.11 The effects of the ghettoization that resulted from race restrictive covenants are vividly illustrated through the paradigmatic case of mid-twentiethcentury Chicago, where eighty-five percent of the city was covenanted by 1948.12 Within its burgeoning ghetto soared crime rates, death rates, infant mortality, juvenile delinquency, disease, school overcrowding, inadequate sanitation services, and police brutality.13 Segregationist thought elided the state action that gave rise to urban blight, attributing it instead to private individuals in order to shore up racially identified spaces of black valuelessness and white value.14 As Cayton and Drake wrote in 1945, “The existence of these [ghetto] conditions has become a convenient rationalization for keeping Negroes segregated.”15 Under these worsening conditions, resistance to legal segregation intensified as black leaders, the black press, and the NAACP encouraged African Americans to purchase or rent property in restricted areas. Carl Hansberry, father of Lorraine Hansberry, launched one such campaign that led to the 1940 Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. While the ruling enabled Hansberry to keep his house in an all-white subdivision of Chicago, it skirted the question of the covenants’ constitutionality. Nonetheless, Hansberry v. Lee and the activism out of which it grew paved the way for a series of cases in which the Supreme Court unanimously struck down restrictive covenants in 1948.16 This legal victory was part of a broader landscape of civil rights struggles that shaped and were shaped by the Cold War. Thomas Borstelmann points out that the major American Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s and early 1950s—the Truman Doctrine, the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and National Security Council document 68 (NSC 68)—emerged against a background of mounting demands for racial equality and national autonomy.17 "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 139

Even as American Cold Warriors sought to placate Dixiecrats, they understood that the US civil rights record was increasingly subject to international inspection, something that left and liberal interests strategically exploited. If the US wanted to lead an anti-Communist coalition of decolonizing nations as well as former colonial powers, it could not afford to condone—or appear to condone—white supremacy. US Supreme Court cases were one of the most visible barometers of the nation’s democracy. The year after Truman’s March 1947 speech to Congress outlining interventionist US policy to contain the Soviet menace, it was important that the Supreme Court outlawed racist restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kraemer (the pro–civil rights message of which echoed through other historic rulings of the period, including Brown v. Board of Education). The international reverberations of US civil rights and housing in particular become more apparent through other aspects of the US government’s response to racial restrictive covenants. Leading up to Shelley and the other restrictive covenant cases, Truman underscored his commitment to racial equality by forming the President’s Committee on Civil Rights in late 1946, shortly thereafter becoming the first US president to address the NAACP in June 1947. Reiterating that Jim Crow damaged America’s reputation abroad, Truman’s committee presented forty recommendations, three of which unanimously attacked racial covenants (other items had divided support). The committee’s report was timed to counter a humiliating blow to the Truman administration in the form of an NAACP petition to the United Nations, one of three major U.N. petitions that civil rights organizations would file during Truman’s presidency documenting racial injustice in the US and seeking international aid in ending it.18 Coming out six days after the NAACP petition, the report of the President’s Committee on Civil Rights also became the occasion for the Department of Justice to file an amicus curiae brief in the restrictive covenant cases.19 Seeking to “promote civil rights within the United States [that] were consistent with, and important to, the more central US mission of fighting world communism,” Cold Warriors discredited the anticolonial internationalism that had been previously embraced by a wide spectrum of African American organizations, institutions, and individuals.20 The Cold War’s domestic framework for civil rights literally focused on family and the home. “Within its walls,” Elaine Tyler May writes, “potentially dangerous social forces of 140  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

the new age”—the atomic bomb, political subversiveness, consumerism, white-collar alienation—“might be tamed, where they could contribute to the secure and fulfilling life to which postwar women and men aspired.”21 As William Levitt claimed in championing his tracts of suburban housing, “No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist.” Sloan Wilson cogently illustrates the domestic containment of “potentially dangerous social forces” in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955). For Wilson, however, the power of home lies not in personal ownership but private entrepreneurship: that is to say, in the real estate business. Wilson’s protagonist, Tom Rath, is a traumatized World War II veteran who is alienated by suburbia and corporate America. As Catherine Jurca contends, home does not enhance white middle-class security but rather “endlessly replicates the homelessness it is supposed to resolve.”22 Tom overcomes his alienation from work and wife by summoning the courage to meet various obstacles—his crumbling marriage, his overtaxing job, the discovery of an illegitimate son fathered while fighting overseas—with honesty and integrity: a feature of domestic containment was to resolve social problems with private solutions, undergoing self-transformation rather than organizing for social transformation.23 The material basis for this integrity, the linchpin for making everything work, is cashing in on suburban development. Tom realizes: “How interconnected everything is! If we could get the school, maybe we could get the housing project through and really make some money. Then maybe I could find and help Maria [his Italian lover], and maybe I could work something out with Hopkins [his boss]. Maybe I could find a good honest job with him which would pay me a decent living, but not require me to work day and night.”24 Having inherited from his grandmother a large estate in an affluent coastal town, Tom is persuaded by his wife Betsy to divide the property into eighty lots and build single-family residences on them. As the brainchild of the mother-wife, this entrepreneurialism conveys that postwar suburban development is about supporting (white middle-class) American family life.25 The Raths’ housing project further features as a micro-level version of the European Recovery Plan or Marshall Plan, the economic wing of Cold War America’s battle against Communism. As Emily Rosenberg contends, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit echoed arguments on behalf of the overt and covert assistance extended to sway Italian politics in a pro-US direction "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 141

from 1947 through the 1950s.”26 Having fathered a son with an Italian woman during World War II, Tom prepares to set up a trust fund for the boy with money from his real estate venture. Such efforts evoke the Marshall Plan’s billions of dollars of aid to support devastated Western European nations in exchange for capital investments, free trade, and, of course, the reduced threat that turmoil and insecurity would drive these nations into Soviet patronage. This threat was especially urgent in Italy, which had one of the largest Communist Parties; as a result, the US subjected Italy’s 1948 general elections to intensive political and economic pressure.27 In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, American money is a stabilizing force against the “Commies in Milan” who “make a lot of trouble” that results in the death of the stepfather of Tom’s Italian son.28 Whereas Communism destroys families, American capitalism protects them. Redemptive Cold War domesticity and the free market are conjoined through suburban development, which not only builds homes but also rebuilds dehumanized organization men into champions of American democracy.29 The real estate business additionally provides stability for Italians in America, exemplified by the elevator man Caesar Gardella. Caesar encourages Tom to support his struggling family in Italy, to whom Caesar himself, having married the cousin of Tom’s mistress, is related. For serving as Tom’s conscience, the novel rewards Caesar by granting him and his wife some modicum of the social mobility that their occupation (elevator operators) seems to metaphorize: they become custodians and inhabitants of a new apartment building in Brooklyn. Real estate provides homes, work, and security for Italian Americans for whom, Caesar tells Tom, “it’s a hell of a lot better than we’d have had if we’d stayed in Rome” (141). In representing suburban development’s role in rehabilitating organization men and ethnic Americans, Wilson celebrates Cold War liberalism’s limited framework for civil rights. Obscuring the fact that it will entrench racial segregation, Tom and Betsy Rath’s campaign for their housing project is perversely depicted as a quasi-civil rights struggle. The Raths’ subdivision is contingent on more schools to handle an influx of new families, as it turns out that the suburban public school oddly evokes a ghetto school with its claustrophobic overcrowding, aging structures, and “zoo-like” fencing.30 The Raths’s fight for suburban development is thus a fight to alleviate slum-like school conditions, the legality of which is affirmed by the novel’s key figure 142  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

of ethnicity and ethicality, Judge Saul Bernstein. Despite the fact that he and his wife are socially ostracized in “the small, hidebound Connecticut town notorious for its prejudice against Jews,” Bernstein impartially approves the suburb’s growth.31 And the novel makes it clear that development will not change the suburb’s exclusionary nature, exemplified by the fears of one long-term resident that “with housing projects, South Bay will become a slum within ten years—a slum, I tell you, a slum!” Tom insists, “We won’t let the town become a slum.”32 That is to say, even after race restrictive covenants are no longer legal, de facto racial, ethnic, and class exclusions remain in force to keep out unwanted residents like the working-class Italian American Gardellas—or the African American Youngers of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun.33

“I Like the Look of Packing Crates” Four years after the publication of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Raisin (1959) powerfully challenged the domestic containment of civil rights within Cold War liberalism’s enshrinement of private property. It is commonplace to observe that Hansberry drew on her family’s pioneering battle against racial restrictive covenants, culminating in Hansberry v. Lee, to plumb the ramifications of an African American family’s quest for decent housing. The Hansberrys experienced firsthand the violent repercussions of daring to challenge segregation: Hansberry’s mother kept armed watch at night in their suburban home to protect herself and her four children from “hellishly hostile” white neighbors. Even so, Hansberry came within a hairsbreadth of losing her life to a brick thrown into their window.34 In Raisin, the Younger family defies the bribes and threats of segregationists to leave the Chicago South Side tenements for suburbia in a bid to tear off the “highly concentrated, universal, and deliberate blanket of oppression” of African Americans.35 But to appreciate Raisin’s critique of capitalist property relations that fueled and were fueled by racial inequality, we would do well to pause on the real estate empire of Carl Hansberry, Lorraine Hansberry’s father, who made a fortune from subdividing tenement apartments and renting these “kitchenettes.”36 This unsavory part of Lorraine Hansberry’s black bourgeois background has been used to discredit her, notably in Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.37 Understandably, Hansberry scholars have "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 143

refuted or glossed over the Hansberrys’ slum property holdings, preferring to focus on their historic fight against segregation—which was ironically funded by their kitchenette empire.38 But Hansberry’s unintentional intimacy with profiting from ghettoization undoubtedly heightened her critique of American free enterprise and private property rights. Their contradictions are perhaps best expressed in Raisin by Asagai: “Isn’t there something wrong in a house—in a world—where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man?”39 Asagai refers literally to the perversity that Walter and Beneatha Younger benefit financially from their father’s life insurance policy after he has “worked hisself to death . . . fighting his own war with this here world” of the ghetto.40 However, the question can be posed to anyone whose American dream is sustained through ghettoization. This includes the black bourgeoisie. George Murchison, Asagai’s rival for Beneatha’s affections, most fully represents this class to which Walter aspires. Complimenting George on his father’s plans to buy a hotel on Lake Shore Drive, Walter adds, “I mean he thinks big, you know what I mean, I mean for a home, you know? But I think he’s kind of running out of ideas now.” Real estate development, Walter makes clear, is not about creating homes but profits: “Invest big, gamble big, hell, lose big if you have to.”41 Raisin shows that such profits are contingent on black superexploitation and segregation through Walter’s quest to co-own a liquor store. As Ossie Davis pointed out, Walter’s venture would “exploit the misery of his fellow slum dwellers like they were exploited by everybody else.”42 This exploitative structure is not specific to selling liquor; Walter’s proposed enterprise is a small-scale version of Carl Hansberry’s slum property business. Attacking the entrepreneurialism and private property rights affirmed in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Raisin makes it clear that they are not paths out of the ghetto but, to the contrary, that they entrench segregation and black immiseration. What Michelle Gordon calls the play’s “aesthetics of segregation” are embedded within an international framework of the Cold War and African decolonization connecting US and global black revolution.43 Scholars have examined Raisin’s anticolonial pan-Africanism through the character of the Nigerian intellectual Asagai, and through the striking scene in which an inebriated Walter Lee enacts his African warrior alter ego.44 Nonetheless, it is still necessary to make the case that the play’s critique of segregation and private property fundamentally hinges on Cold War political exigencies and 144  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

African decolonization, especially Ghana’s achievement of independence in 1957.45 In doing so, we see how Raisin was part of, and helped to shape, a broader politico-cultural shift within black America in the late 1950s that returned to internationalist models of civil rights struggle. The centrality of anticolonial struggle to black American housing rights is crystallized in Raisin’s climactic final act, when Walter Younger faces the fateful decision of whether to recuperate the loss of his father’s insurance money by accepting the neighborhood improvement association’s offer to buy the Youngers’ new house in the suburbs for more than they paid for it, in order to maintain segregation. Crucially, Walter’s refusal to profit from white supremacy, and the Youngers’ triumphant move, are framed by the dialectical African anticolonialism of Asagai. Act 3 begins with Asagai’s arrival to help with packing for the Youngers’ move: “Ah, I like the look of packing crates! A household in preparation for a journey! It depresses some people . . . but for me . . . it is another feeling. Something full of the flow of life, do you understand? Movement, progress. . . . It makes me think of Africa.”46 The connections between the Youngers’ move out of the ghetto, the broader civil rights movement, and the movement of African nations toward freedom are developed in the subsequent dialogue. First, Raisin establishes that critiques of Third World national liberation constrain the African American political imaginary. In Beneatha’s despondency over the lost money upon which her own future had depended, she attacks Asagai’s faith in African independence: “What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before—only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new Independence—WHAT ABOUT THEM?!”47 Beneatha’s cynicism about African liberation clearly parallels Walter’s subsequent dismissal of freedom struggles: “There ain’t no causes—there ain’t nothing but taking in this world, and he who takes most is smartest—and it don’t make a damn bit of difference how.”48 This justifies Walter’s intention to take the homeowner association’s “thirty pieces,” the dehumanizing implications of which he readily acknowledges: “You people just put the money in my hand and you won’t have to live next to this bunch of stinking niggers!” His planned treachery evokes that of the “servants of empire” paid off to kill revolutionaries.49 It is Asagai whose epistemic position as an African revolutionary enables him to see through the present political morass. The message with which "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 145

Asagai leaves Beneatha (and us) is that “my own black countrymen,” who “have always been there” and “always will be,” are the determining force of social transformation that cannot always be seen yet is always in motion.50 In the wake of this speech, Walter’s repudiation of the segregationists’ buyout affirms Asagai’s claims about the black masses who give rise to historical change, as the Youngers advance the battle for racial equality by proceeding with their move. The play further urges us to read desegregation in the US in terms of African decolonization, and vice versa, through Asagai’s repeated invocation of “home,” as in his proposal to Beneatha “that you come home with me . . . I do not mean across the city—I mean across the ocean: home—to Africa.”51 Raisin encourages us to think about Asagai’s own impending move back home to resume the fight against British rule in Nigeria, in relation to the Youngers’ impending move to their new suburban home to join the fight against segregation. Fleshing out the anticolonialism of Hansberry’s housing play—indeed, thinking of it as an anticolonial housing play—is essential to appreciating her radical vision of civil rights. Against US liberal democracy’s gradualism, Hansberry demanded African Americans’ “birthright of full citizenship from a laggard and oppressive nation.”52 For Hansberry, the full citizenship of African Americans entailed the extension of human rights, decolonization, and self-determination beyond the US nation-state. As Fanon Che Wilkins argues, “A small, though enduring black Left” sustained this radical vision even as the Cold War successfully discredited it in the late 1940s through the 1950s.53 And, by the late 1950s, black America was rekindling its relationship to anticolonialism, influenced by the Defiance Campaign in South Africa, the Mau Mau in Kenya, and especially Ghana’s independence in 1957. Of Ghana’s influence on African Americans, James Meriwether writes: “The broad anticolonialism that for a decade commonly had been tied to anti-Communist arguments shifted to a more specific anticolonialism tied to Africa. In this reframed anticolonialism, African Americans more often remarked on how liberation struggles in Africa aided the struggle in America rather than on how African Americans could aid and uplift Africans.”54 Raisin spoke to shifts in African American thought about how Africans could inspire and guide black struggle in the US, explaining why a Nigerian revolutionary would be Hansberry’s philosophical and political mouthpiece for her play about housing rights.55 146  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

“Or Does It Explode?” Titled after the fictional suburb where the Youngers relocate, Bruce Norris’s play Clybourne Park (2011) takes Raisin as its springboard for exploring outcomes of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement that are traversed by Cold War geopolitics. Norris depicts the entrapment of twenty-first-century Americans, black and white, within racial-national histories, languages, and spaces: foreclosed are the competing visions of progress and international identifications that we find in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and A Raisin in the Sun. Taking place in 1959, the year that Raisin was first produced, the first act of Norris’s play dramatizes the events leading up to the Youngers’ move to Clybourne Park, from the perspective of the white family whose house they have purchased. Bev and Russ have sold their house to the Youngers in an effort to make a clean break from their son Kenneth’s suicide. Kenneth had killed himself in the house after being discharged from the US Army for going on a rampage while serving in the Korean War, murdering Korean civilians. Kenneth’s suicide, the murders of Koreans, and the Cold War military action that led to these tragedies haunt Bev, Russ, and their neighbors in the 1950s, but they are unable to comprehend the past’s ramifications in the present. As the characters of Clybourne Park engage in geographic trivia, they bandy about the names of various cities and countries, reducing them to nonsensical sound (e.g., the pleasure that Russ gets from saying the name of Mongolia’s capital, “Ulan Bator,” over and over). In this context, the Korean War signifies yet one more foreign site that means little to Americans. Unlike the heroics of US efforts to reconstruct Europe that Sloan Wilson celebrated in The Man with the Gray Flannel Suit, US intervention against Soviet influence in Korea leads to defeated alienation and incomprehension in Clybourne Park. The traumatic aftereffects of Cold War US imperialism continue into the present-day setting of Act 2. Inverting the premise of Raisin, the second half of Norris’s play depicts a white couple trying to move into gentrifying Clybourne Park. They meet resistance from the homeowners association (HOA), led by Lena, the namesake and great-niece of the Younger matriarch of Raisin. Lena is concerned about Steve and Lindsey’s plans to expand the house beyond HOA code, likely instigating a series of expansions that will destroy the suburb’s character—its “distinctive collection of low-rise single"Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 147

family homes” that embody its history of desegregation. As the parties go back and forth, a contractor reports that he has unearthed something in the backyard: a footlocker containing Kenneth’s suicide letter. The play concludes by returning to the morning that Kenneth killed himself. The circular structure encloses the present of Act 2 within the past of Act 1, rejecting narratives of progress (reinforced by the fact that the same actors from Act 1 all portray the different characters of Act 2). Like their 1950s predecessors, Clybourne Park’s twenty-first-century white and black characters are still struggling across faultlines of race traversed by traumatic histories of US military intervention in the Third World. They constantly interrupt and insult each other, and dialogue devolves into babble. Although suburbs have become more diverse in the twenty-first century, Norris mocks (neo)liberal multicultural ideals from the outset. As Russ reads National Geographic while eating Neapolitan ice cream, his wife Bev idly questions the origin of “Neapolitan,” suggesting that “neo” plus “politan” signifies “new city,” manifested by the chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry coexisting in one container. This utopic image later melts in the heat of acrimonious exchanges over race, class, political orientation, and sexuality when white upper-middleclass Steve and Lindsey seek to move into Clybourne Park. The “new city” is in fact Babel. Clybourne Park punctures neoliberal fantasies of a postracial world, and shows how uneven and uneasy interactions across borders of race, class, sexuality, and physical ability challenge complacent notions of identity. However, the play’s “shoe on the other foot” scenario—blacks can exclude whites, too! We are all oppressed in our own ways!—and its focus on racism as individual prejudice rather than structural oppression mystify the processes of segregation. Critical race theorist Richard Thompson Ford writes, “Residence is more than a personal choice; it is also a primary source of political identity and economic security. Likewise, residential segregation is more than a matter of social distance; it is a matter of political fragmentation and economic stratification along racial lines, enforced by public policy and the rule of law.”56 Consequently, desegregation is not about giving individuals the free choice to coexist in geographical proximity; this overlooks the structural material realities that afford certain individuals mobility while denying it to others on the bases of race, nationality, class, sexuality, and physical ability. Desegregation entails the leveling of hierarchies based on such group identities “so that presently disempowered and subordinated communities are no longer 148  c h e r y l h i g a s h i d a

systematically deprived of the political and economic resources that would allow them to thrive rather than merely to survive.”57 Today the systemic enforcement of segregation continues through ostensibly race-neutral federal policy, law, policing, city planning, mass incarceration, and real estate development.58 That these domestic matters are still shaped by US foreign interventions is exemplified by the police militarization spectacularly on display during demonstrations in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, after Michael Brown—a young black man who had just graduated from high school—was killed by a white police officer. Images of US police in mine-resistant armed vehicles confronting peaceful demonstrators have shed light on the government’s program to transfer surplus military equipment to local and state police. Even as crime rates have fallen, US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have fueled these transfers. This is indeed our neocolonial wars in Asia coming back to haunt our cites and suburbs, as depicted by Norris through the excavation of the Korean War veteran’s suicide letter in the Youngers’ backyard. When the white woman who wishes to buy the Younger house hears that something has been dug up, she asks if it is “dangerous,” if it is “going to explode.”59 This reference to Langston Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” which gave A Raisin in the Sun its title, poses a question about the outcome of American histories of segregation entwined with Cold War and black internationalisms. In response, contemporary urban uprisings and the Black Lives Matter movement recall Hansberry’s internationalist vision, fusing an understanding of the home and the world, for achieving civil rights: It’s going to come from 20 million discontented black people who, however, must be led by a new and presently-developing young Negro leadership – a leadership which must absolutely, if the present Negro revolt is to turn into a revolution, become sophisticated in the most advanced ideas abroad in the world, a leadership which will have had exposure to the great ideas and movements of our time, a Negro leadership which can throw off the blindness of parochialism and bathe the aspirations of the Negro people in the realism of the twentieth century, a leadership which has no illusion about the nature of our oppression and will no longer hesitate to condemn, not only the results of that oppression, but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society.60 "Home Is Where the Hatred Is" 149

Chapter eight Returning from the Unending Korean War Toni Morrison’s Home Donald E. Pease

In the 1950s, cold war ideology offered US citizens a narrative frame capable of making sense of even the most mundane of their everyday experiences. The Manichean logics embedded within this frame narrative exercised an officially sanctioned monopoly over the symbolic representations returning combat veterans used to communicate what happened during their tours of duty in the Korean War.1 However, Frank Money, the African American protagonist of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home, differs from most Korean War combat veterans in that he is ignorant of the core tenets of Cold War ideology. This matter becomes all the more significant when we recall the importance of the desegregated military that recruited Frank Money to the cold war’s ideological imperatives. As the first military campaign the United States conducted under its banner, the Korean War marked the inaugural event of the cold war. The Korean War was in fact a continuation of the long history of colonial-imperial, racially marked violence that dated back to the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876.2 But after the newly formed Department

of Defense described the United States as an antiracist state charged with safeguarding liberal humanity from “Communist slavery,” racial desegregation emerged as an essential component of the United States effort to win the hearts and minds of populations in the decolonizing world.3 President Truman intended the desegregation of the United States military in Korea as the ideal way to implement this cold war strategy.4 The State Department’s expression of its desire to conquer Koreans’ hearts supplied a cover story for the ferocious military campaign it waged to gain control over Korea’s newly industrializing economy.5 The fact that Frank Money does not regard the psychic and physical scars incurred on Korean battlefields as insignia of his courageous defense of American freedom confronts the narrator of Home with the extraordinary challenge of telling Frank Money’s Korean War story without the benefit of the narrative frame that would make ideological sense of it.6 In addition to situating the Korean War within the cold war bipolar frame, Korean War novels were typically expected to secure the boundary line separating two globally encompassing historical realities: the largely imaginary war in Europe and North America on the one hand, and on the other the fierce militarized conflicts actually taking place in decolonizing countries across Asia, Africa, South America, and the Middle East.7 Lacking the cold war narrative frame that inscribed this geographical boundary, Frank Money experiences what happens to him when he returns home from war as a continuation of the colonial-imperial violence that confronted him in Korea. Instead of inserting this frame, Home stages a narrative process involving Frank Money and his narrator-transcriber in an ongoing struggle over the narrator’s effort to accommodate Frank Money’s lived experiences within preexisting narrative tropes. Home uses these two narrator-interlocutors to tell two incompatible narratives: one narrative revolves around the intrapsychic ruminations of the black Korean War veteran; the other transcribes the psychogeographical trajectory of this combat veteran’s lived experiences. The veteran’s italicized self-narration at times emerges within the free indirect discourse of the Other narrator. Their novel-long dispute over the narrative’s conditions of representation enables readers to recognize how a subaltern figure might participate in the production of colonial-imperial regimes of knowledge—rather than, as is more frequently the case, being silently written out of them. Returning from the Unending Korean War 151

The stakes of this contest become apparent in the novel’s opening pages, when Frank Money struggles to recall the details of a traumatizing childhood event that he and his younger sister Ycidra witnessed on a stud farm not far from their home in Lotus, Georgia. Frank took Cee there to enjoy the mating rituals of a herd of beautiful bay horses that “stood like men. . . . They bit each other like dogs but when they stood, reared up on their hind legs, their forelegs around the withers of the other, we held our breath in wonder.”8 On their way home, the sojourners became helpless onlookers to a horrifyingly lurid spectacle of violence. The figures in this scene—an African American father and son, compelled to fight each other to the death with knives (“the game was set up so only the one left alive could leave. So one of them had to kill the other”); white spectators who coerced them; and a dying black man buried alive with “one foot stuck up over the edge” of a shallow grave—participate in a world-constituting ritual.9 Although Frank Money will require the remainder of the narrative to recall the details of this primal scene of antiblack violence, it nevertheless preconditions his lived experience of everyday colonial violence in 1950s US culture. In the remarks that follow, I intend to elaborate on the significance of Frank Money’s effort to remember this traumatic scene from 1950s culture of the Korean War era without the aide-mémoire of the hegemonic cold war master narrative. This effort will oblige me to engage a question that is central to this inquiry: Since the cold war’s bipolar frame customarily regulates the what, when, where, why, and how of Korean War memoirs, what anamnestic procedure has Morrison invented to replace the master narrative? My attempt to answer this question perforce requires a consideration of the anomalous relation of Toni Morrison’s Home to the archive of Korean War literature.

What the Archive Of Korean War Literature Remembers to Forget The Korean War has outlived the planetary rivalry that regulated early accounts of its cause, and yet, as Steven Belletto has persuasively demonstrated, the cold war bipolar frame has continued to exercise a monopoly of explanatory power over the sundry works assembled within the archive of Korean War literature. In “The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel,” Belletto divides Korean War novels into two phases that reflect the novelists’ 152  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

differing attitude toward cold war epistemology.10 The white male novelists Pat Frank (Take Back the Night, 1952), Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate 1959), and Francis Pollini (Night, 1960), whom Belletto has selected as representative of the first phase, all endorsed the cold war ideological frame that represented the Korean War as a proxy for the United States’ endeavor to contain Communist expansion. However, the second-phase writers Richard E. Kim (The Martyred 1964), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Dictee 1982), Ty Pak (Guilt Payment 1983), Susan Choi (The Foreign Student 1998), Chang-rae Lee (Native Speaker 1995 and The Surrendered 2010), to whose novels Belletto devotes most of his interpretive attention, do not view the war as a distant synecdoche for the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. These first- and second-generation Korean Americans depict the Korean War as a devastating historical catastrophe that “shaped the most intimate aspects of material and psychic life for tens of millions of Koreans, including millions of Korean Americans, touching even those born long after the armistice or living on distant continents.”11 In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot has reminded us that archives do not exist simply as repositories of works from which historical truth can be extracted; archives are part of the epistemological process that determine how historical processes can be understood.12 Jodi Kim has drawn inspiration from this insight to explain how the archive of Korean War literature produced by the writers in Belletto’s second phase offered a counterpedagogy designed to uncover the hidden history of US colonial-imperial violence in Asia.13 Their representations of the Korean War as an East Asian “triangulation” of its bipolar frame challenged cold war orthodoxy. Building on Kim’s insights, Belletto portrays these novelists as individually and collectively committed to disrupting the cold war frame that restricted the meaning of the Korean War to US geopolitical imperatives and to exposing the damage this frame caused to Koreans and Korean Americans. Although these novels do not exactly suit this description, Belletto nonetheless completes his survey of Korean War literature by citing Philip Roth’s Indignation (2008) and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite (2009) as comparable examples of critique, in that neither Roth nor Phillips can find an ethical justification or political rationale for the lives lost in the war. Belletto’s selection of novels, his tacit method of periodizing them, and his accounts of their significance are themselves a function of changes in official Returning from the Unending Korean War 153

representations and public attitudes toward the cold war. The Korean War novels written in the 1950s and 1960s viewed the Korean War as a stand-in for the planetary rivalry that set liberated humanity in opposition to enslaving totalitarianism. Novels published during the Vietnam War era critically interrogated cold war ideology. Korean and Korean American novelists who wrote about the Korean War after the fall of the Berlin Wall tended to follow the example set by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who, in Dictee, described the war as the imposition of an artificial division between the North and South: “We are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance, Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate.”14 US novelists, like Philips and Roth, who reimagined the war after September 11, 2001, foreground the ways in which the Manichean logics, structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture installed at the outset of the unending Korean War were granted a protracted afterlife in the so-called Global War on Terror: “It’s all one war,” Corporal Robert Leavitt realizes in Lark and Termite while trying to protect South Korean refugees getting fired on by US troops “despite players or location, war that sleeps dormant for years or months, then erupts and lifts its flaming head to find regimes changed, topography altered, weaponry recast.”15 As we have seen, Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home—which, curiously, Belletto does not discuss—differs from the Korean War novels categorized in Belletto’s taxonomy, in that her narrator neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a critical metaengagement with cold war ideology. Returning to the nation’s Korean War past without the Manichean writing practices that congealed events into authoritative history, Morrison instead conjures figures and events that Cold War official history has forgotten. Moreover, although Morrison sets her novel in the 1950s moment of origin of the national security state apparatus, she does not correlate the optics that shape the black Korean War veteran Frank Money’s mode of seeing and knowing himself with cold war perspectives. Frank Money was recruited to join a desegregated military, yet race restricts the range of his possible movements and choices from the moment he lands back in the United States.16 Morrison links his dislocation with the racist social logics of the five-centuries-old project of Euro-American colonial imperialism that the cold war purportedly supplanted when it declared war 154  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

against a totalitarian power rather than an enemy race. The significance of Morrison’s refusal to corroborate representations of cold war ideology as “color-blind” requires a brief genealogical sketch of the relationship between the Korean War and colonial-imperial racism.

How the Korean War Reveals the Colonial-Imperial Racism Inherent in the Cold War In one of his several—at times contradictory—accounts of the phenomenon, Michel Foucault described racism as primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control; the break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described as inferior: all of this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls.17 According to Foucault, racism also instigated a definitive change in the basic structure of relations of war. Whereas the traditional rationale for war could be phrased as “In order to live you must destroy your enemies,” racism replaced this formulation with the statement “If you want to live, the other must die” (256). Foucault cast this revision as an epistemic shift in that racism supplied territorial states with alibis for the exercise of biopower: “The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole. . . . the death of the bad race, of the inferior race . . . is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier and purer” (255). In “The Race War Within: Biopolitics of the Long Cold War,” Leerom Medovoi labels Foucault’s biopolitical account of racism as the historical rationale for the colonial-imperialist enterprises that divided the human species into races that were fit to colonize or fit only to be colonized.18 Imperial agents viewed colonial war as itself a means of race-making that sought to improve the health of the human species by segregating the imperial body politic from an enemy race. As a perpetual civil war of humankind, the imperialist Returning from the Unending Korean War 155

project of waging a militarized competition among the various races initiated a globalized biopolitics of the species.19 Medovoi goes on to argue that the cold war changed the colonial model of the race war when it declared war not against an enemy race but a nonhuman totalitarian power. According to Medovoi, the biopolitics of the cold war was founded upon the representation of totalitarianism as a political-cultural surrogate for a degenerate race. In place of an “Enemy Race,” cold war ideologues declared war against strictly ideological enemies whose inward lives reproduced totalitarian beliefs, emotions, and affective attachments that spread vast dehumanized zones of life across the Second World. Whereas biologistic and embodied semiotics of the color line had projected codes of superiority and inferiority onto the terrain of colonial-imperial warfare, the Euro-American cold warriors under Medovoi’s inspection imagined themselves struggling against a “dogma” line of interiorized totalitarian creeds and loyalties rather than the “color” line comprised of race, blood, and physiogonomy (168). However, the Korean War that Frank Money experiences in Home complicates Medovoi’s account of the distinction between the “biological” racism of colonial imperialism and the cold war’s totalitarian surrogate by turning the former—the “biological” racism of colonial imperialism—into the precondition for the representation of the latter. After World War II, the US imperial state incorporated South Korea and other decolonizing countries across the Global South as peripheries within a world system governed by the logic of capital accumulation.20 The imagined geopolitical line delineating the countries enclosed within these peripheries reinscribed W. E. B. Du Bois’s “color line.” Insofar as the coloniality of power continues to determine what Du Bois dubbed “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” the problem of the color line has extended its reach into the twenty-first century.21 When Frank Money returns home to a 1950s US culture that has come unstitched from the cold war bipolar frame, he cannot discern salient differences between the colonial settler violence he encounters across US Southern culture and the colonial-imperial violence he practiced in Korea. Frank does not explicitly correlate his participation in the forcible dispossession of peasants from their huts in South Korea with the Klan’s violent takeover of his family’s home and belongings in Banderas County, Texas. But the North/ 156  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

(Global) South geohistoric color line supplies the narrator with the interpretive frame interconnecting Frank Money’s lived experience of these events.22 The reader’s first encounter with the Global South does not take place in Korea but in the Pacific Northwest, in Seattle, where Frank reads the sign that bears the injunction “No part of said property hereby conveyed shall ever be used or occupied by any Hebrew or by any person of the Ethiopian, Malay, or Asiatic race excepting only employees in domestic service” (73). In the United States, as this sign makes clear, Jim Crow inscribed the spatial disjunction and temporal nonsynchronicity that the Global South perpetuates within this series of racialized categorizations. It is this sign, moreover, that brings home to Frank Money the dual recognition that the coloniality of power cannot be restricted to events in the Korean War, and that Choisin, Korea, and Lotus, Georgia, are comparable sites of colonial violence. The Korean War is commonly recognized as the historical landmark for inaugurating the cold war in East Asia. Cold war ideology was the external force responsible for the division of North and South Koreas into types of totalitarianism or democracy. Yet the territorial division the cold war etched across the Korean peninsula cannot be separated from the long history of colonial imperialism that began with prewar Japanese colonialism. The Korean people’s loss of national sovereignty originated under Japan’s colonial rule and continued when the cold war state represented the United States as regional successor to the Japanese empire in East Asia. The “liberation” of Korea from Japanese occupation and the partitioning of the peninsula accompanying it did not mark the end of empire but the transition from Japanese to US iterations of colonial imperialism.23 When the US imperial state declared the Korean War the inaugural event in its superpower rivalry with the Soviet Union, it disavowed colonial violence in Korea as the precondition for representing democratic capitalism as the genuine alternative to the totalitarian race. Despite protestations to the contrary, however, official portrayals of the Korean War as the struggle of native-born democratic capitalists against the cataclysmic predation of a totalitarian power have not effaced US racialized colonial violence. The Korean War was one of the most destructive wars of the twentieth century. Called a police action at its inception on June 25, 1950, it became a limited war in the 1960s; more recently it has been characterized as a forgotten, unfinished, unknown, or unending war. As an unwon war, the Korean War Returning from the Unending Korean War 157

was deeply demoralizing for the Americans brought up to believe in the United States as a victory culture. American troops arrived on the Korean peninsula in September 1945; over twenty thousand are still there. July 27, 1953, stopped the gunfire but brought no peace.24 Two of the chief effects of the Korean War involved securing US hegemony in East Asia and reincorporating Japan within the world system. The Pacific War began in 1931 and ended in 1945; the Korean War began in 1945 and has never ended. 2.3 million Japanese were killed during the Pacific War; at least half of the close to 3 million Koreans who died during the Korean War were civilians. South Korea established normal diplomatic relations with Japan in 1965, but government officials in Pyongyang have never built diplomatic ties with Tokyo.25 It was the Korean War and not WWII that instituted the establishment of a permanent standing army; that authorized the formation of the national security state; and that transformed the United States into an empire of military bases abroad and a vast military-industrial complex to service it at home. Between 1945 and 1948, Truman’s postwar demobilization program had introduced drastic reductions across the US armed forces: the army shrank from 11 million soldiers in 1945 to 554,000 soldiers by 1948; the navy fell from 3.4 million sailors and 1000 ships to 493,000 seamen and 300 ships during the same period; the air force underwent comparable contraction.26 Defeats suffered by US-supported South Korean and allied troops at the hands of Chinese and Korean peasant armies in 1950 led Truman to declare a national emergency that quadrupled the national defense budget. By December 1950, the United States’ military expenditures exceeded the combined defense spending of the next eighteen ranking military powers.27 After the movement of vast battalions of the Chinese Army caught the US intelligence community unawares, the Pentagon responded by consolidating its disparate intelligence services into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whose surveillance networks have defined global power ever since.28 In a televised talk outlining the principles of the so-called “Truman Doctrine,” President Truman characterized the Korean War as a limited war intended to secure the unlimited reach of the cold war peace. But how could the horrific activities that killed close to three million people in East Asia be described as a limited war? Why should the deadly combat in East Asia be celebrated for having protected lives across Western Europe and the United 158  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

States? If the Korean War was responsible for inaugurating the cold war, why was it largely forgotten? Why does it continue to erupt into memory at the turn of the twenty-first century?

The Other Cold War For Europeans and Americans who thought of it in terms of a peaceful, balanced contest of power, the cold war was a strictly imaginary battlefield. But Korea and decolonizing countries across Africa Asia experienced it as a form of political terror propagated through what the Korean anthropologist Heonik Kwon describes as “seismic death events.”29 In addition to being an ideological struggle, the cold war was militarily intertwined with processes of decolonization in the Global South. The cold war’s temporality, spatiality, and geopolitical import underwent significant variations depending upon how people felt its impact. To write about “after 1989” is to embrace a Euro-American view of world history. Because it cannot be distinguished from colonial-imperial dispossession, in many parts of the world the cold war has not ended. The major difference is that the cold war that Europe and the US experienced was a semistable prewar. But for Koreans (and denizens across the Global South) the cold war was a total war that resulted in mass carnage.30 Euro-Americans typically conceptualize the cold war as enclosing an imaginary geopolitical space. Most of cold war history has been studied through this optic. What has gone missing in this perspective is an account of the cold war’s on-the-ground violence in much of the Global South. Kwon’s “other cold war,” which the Korean War veteran Frank Money experiences in Toni Morrison’s Home, continues to embroil its participants in deadly violence and destruction at the grassroots level. Kwon diagnoses the absence of such violent (post)colonial experiences from Euro-American cold war history as symptomatic of the need to disavow the cold war’s complicity in this violence. In extending his account of the cold war beyond Europe, Kwon focuses on small communities in South Korea for whom “the cold war was, in fact a ‘death-world’,” amid which its victims struggled to preserve their authentic life-worlds (157). The cold war may have ended in Europe, but the colonial-imperialist dynamic informing it has not yet disappeared. Indeed, the cold war conReturning from the Unending Korean War 159

tinues to mediate the continuity between the colonial and postcolonial history of East Asia.31 The United States acted upon a colonial cultural imaginary in the construction of an empire of military bases—in Guam, the Mariana Islands, the Philippines, Okinawa, Tokyo, Seoul, Taiwan, the Bikini Atoll—that state historians push hard to consign to the shadows of the nation’s history. The so-called insular cases resulted in a series of geopolitical entities—unincorporated territories, neocolonial wards, unassimilable protectorates—that disclose the United States’ anomalous relationship to the Asia-Pacific. This topsy-turvy world operationalizes jurisdictional entities, military practices, and geostrategic policies that cannot be synchronized with the post–cold war mentality underpinning Euro-American relations.32

Toni Morrison’s Korean War Novel If the Korean War instituted the cold war that reorganized the geographies of the decolonizing world, then Korea’s condition of perpetual war also names the geo-onto-political condition of this “third” world whose countries have not yet undergone actual decolonization. Toni Morrison’s Home in part bears witness to the refugees from the unending colonial wars occulted by cold war ideology. When the narrator removes the bipolar cold war narrative frame from the narration of Home, the reader encounters profound similarities between Korean War refugees and the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, who, like his Korean War counterparts, finds himself embroiled in an unending cycle of colonial-imperial violence.33 The Korean War is not a historically completed state of affairs, but a constantly restructuring field of symbolic and actual violence. The Korean War names the obscene colonial race war supplement to cold war ideology. As a permanent war that resists the cold war’s triumphalist periodization, the Korean War reveals the colonial-imperial violence the cold war state perforces disavows. Rather than acceding to such a disavowal, Home introduces a topography interconnecting catastrophized landscapes that bear traces of colonial-imperial violence in the United States to geographies of violence in Korea. Whereas the generalized forgetting of that violence was the psychosocial precondition for the formation of the national security state, Toni Morrison creates a narrative apparatus that compels the black 160  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

Korean War veteran, Frank Money, the novel’s protagonist, to remember what the cold war state wanted forgotten. The Korean War was the first US war fought under military desegregation, as directed by executive order 9981, partly under pressure from the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training formed by A. Philip Randolph and Grant Reynolds. Black enlistment rose to the point where, by the end of 1953, ninety percent of African Americans were serving in integrated units and the armed forces were now more mixed overall than any civil institution, not counting prisons.34 President Truman made desegregation part of his Korean War strategy to render African Americans dependent on the military in distant places, where they were expected to take part in battles against racially marked persons constructed as inhuman and unassimilable to the domestic society.35 The desegregated military itself thereby became a zone of colonial imperial violence. As the sequestered colonial space for the limited application of the policy of equal opportunity, Korea became the unacknowledged signifier for the colonial geography in which desegregated blacks would be assembled. Upon his return home, Frank Money rendered both of these zones of colonial imperial violence—Korea; zones of militarized desegregation—hypervisible within the domestic sphere. Underpinned by the matrix of antiblack violence that Frank and Cee witnessed fifteen years earlier on the stud farm, the desegregation of the military neither suspended nor deactivated the state’s racism. When the state recruited Frank to engage in “men-treated-like-dogs” battles to the death with racially marked enemies in Korea, it did not promise to integrate him as a citizen at the war’s conclusion. If, as NSC (National Security Council) 68 proposed, Korea should be understood to be “an experimental war, one being fought back and forth for the purpose of testing men, weapons, materials and methods, on a continuing basis,” these same men and methods were often being tested on black bodies within the domestic United States as well.36 The state regarded Frank and his sister Cee as supernumerary, extraneous bodies that could be repurposed as specimens for either scientific experimentation or incarceration. Korean War veterans Robert F. Williams, Bobby Seale, James Forman, and Amiri Baraka credited the similarity they perceived between the zones of colonial-imperial violence in Korea and the network of disciplinary, punitive, Returning from the Unending Korean War 161

and militaristic institutions awaiting them on their return to the United States as the catalyst for their transformative social commitments to the civil rights and black power movements. Here is how an Associated Negro Press wire service distilled their insights: “America is the last bulwark of the colonial powers. . . . In Korea in Indo-china in Tunisia in South Africa in India, the West Indies South America, and the United States the magic that made chattel slaves of some, peons of many and sharecroppers of others is furiously losing its charm.”37 Morrison’s narrative of Frank Money’s return from Korea adds unforgettable representations of racially marked colonial settler violence to the official narrative of the 1950s. In a 2013 conversation recorded in Interview magazine, Toni Morrison said she decided to write about the 1950s because she regards it as a decade in which somebody was hiding something—and by somebody, I mean the narrative of the country, which was so aggressively happy. . . . And I kept thinking that kind of insistence, there is something fake about it. So I began to think about what it was like for me, my perception at that time. Then I thought about what was really going on. What was really going on was the Korean War. It was called a “police action” then—never a war—even though 53,000 soldiers died. And the other thing going on in the ’50s was [Joseph] McCarthy. And they were killing black people right and left. In 1955, Emmett Till was killed, and later there was also a lot coming to the surface about medical experimentation. Now, we know about the LSD experiments on soldiers, but there was experimentation with syphilis that was going on with black men at Tuskegee who thought they were receiving health care.38 The cold war produced a generalized substitution of symbolic ideological violence for real colonial violence. Home disrupts and detotalizes the hegemonic cold war narrative that had monopolized understanding of the 1950s at home and abroad. Events and referents like The Morrison Case (a play by Alfred Maltz, who was imprisoned and blacklisted because he refused to testify before Senator McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee) come untethered from the narrative that had formerly endowed them with ideological significance and historical intelligibility. 162  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

In seeing the 1950s through the eyes of a black veteran of the Korean War who had not internalized cold war ideology, Morrison removes this scab to expose the congeries of racist logics the cold war claimed to have superseded. Home returns us to a 1950s past that was not yet saturated in the cold war script which cast it as the greatest decade. She thereby remembers much of what the narrative of the “greatest generation” consigns to forgetting.39 Morrison uses a series of specters emanating from the afterlife of racial slavery—a ghost in the zoot suit, an image of a boy pushing his own entrails back inside his torn body, an African American migrant worker killed in a “men-treated-like-dog-fight” and buried in a shallow grave—as figures through whom Frank Money can encounter the psychic violence of state racism.40 Frank Money belongs within the terrain of an ongoing colonial imperialist formation in which the figure of the fugitive slave serves as the quite literally vanishing mediator interconnecting the black Korean War veteran and Korean refugees and participants in the African, Asian, and Middle Eastern diasporas. As Frank travels along a twentieth-century version of the Underground Railroad, we bear witness to a series of scenes of antiblack violence: the exodus of a black community under threat of attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Bandera County Texas; the stoning of a black couple for daring to order coffee at a roadside diner; Frank’s arbitrarily being stopped and frisked; and the prevailing anxiety among black Americans that “being outside [isn’t] necessary for legal or illegal disruption . . . [that] men with or without badges, but always with guns, could force you to move” (46). Frank Money’s return home as a refugee from the Korean war triggers spontaneous memories of the fugitive slave past because colonial settler violence constitutes the terrain for both forms of fugitivity. Frank Money does not exactly return home with, he returns home as the embodied memory of the impossible object-cause—the racialized violence of colonial-imperial war—of 1950s US cold war culture. The narrator’s representations of Frank’s battlefield encounters in Korea assume the form of involuntary flashbacks to scenes of colonial racial violence—the aforementioned ritual slaughter of an African American man by townspeople in Lotus, Georgia; Frank’s killing of a young girl while serving on guard in Korea—that had taken place years earlier. Returning from the Unending Korean War 163

Cathy Caruth has described a flashback, what Morrison elsewhere refers to as a re-memory, as the sudden and unexpected recurrence of a traumatic event. As an involuntary recurrence of an unrecoverable memory, a flashback paradoxically intertwines two incompatible elements: the repetition of the scene of a trauma along with the inability to have conscious access to its contents. As the spontaneous repetition of what returns, a flashback is not simply an overwhelming experience that has been obstructed by a later repression or amnesia. It is, more importantly, “an event that is itself constituted, in part, by its lack of integration into consciousness.”41 It is the fact that the costs of recollecting such traumatic memories are catastrophic which requires their segregation within the chronotopical phenomena called flashbacks. The history that a flashback tells “is therefore, a history that literally has no place, neither in the past, in which it was not fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its precise images and enactments are not fully understood” (156). Frank Money’s flashbacks reveal his awareness of the transcontinental reach of the colonial-imperial apparatus that is capable of reterritorializing Lotus, Georgia, within the terrain of Choisin, Korea, and of treating them both as more or less interchangeable locales in Heonik Kwon’s “Other Cold War.” The difference between these sites, as Frank explains, is that “at least on the battlefield there is . . . some chance of winning along with many chances of losing. Death is a sure thing, but life is just as certain. Problem is, you can’t know in advance,” whereas “in Lotus, you did know in advance since there was no future, just long stretches of killing time. There was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else’s quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for” (83). In a variation of call and response, the narrative intersperses italicized pages in which Frank Money interrupts the narrative to correct the narrator’s version of events, or to question the narrator’s qualification to tell his story. The social contradictions and the cultural difference between the First World and the Global South animate the disjunctive spatial and temporal interactions between the narrator and the narratee, Frank Money. The narrator’s third person account of Frank Money’s narrative supplies the basis for reclaiming the regulative political concepts of the supposedly authoritative First-World narrative whose rules of reproduction were prescribed in cold war ideology. Frank’s contestation with the narrator over the conditions of his representa164  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

tion alienates him from the narrated simulacrum the narrator has imagined and enables him to change the subject position from and about which he speaks. Frank’s interruptions of the narrator’s discourse also permit him to negotiate the conditions of his narrative within the enunciative present of the narrator’s discourse so as to revise the version of past to which that narrative has recalled him, and thereby recount new histories and, from them, new presents and new futures. The ongoing dialogue between Frank Money and his narrator specifically disrupts the narrator’s effort to conscript Frank to a political and ontological continuation of the order of colonial settler violence that has rendered Frank Money a refugee. In reference to Korea, Frank warns, “You can’t imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it” (93). The narrator of Home occasionally uses free indirect discourse to bear secondary witness to the traumatic events that Frank cannot or will not recall. Unlike direct discourse, which reports speech as the unmediated expression of a speaker’s own thoughts, and unlike the indirect 
discourse that entails a second person in the citation of the speech of a first person to a third person, free indirect discourse restages a first person’s speech and thought as a third-person narration. According to Martin Jay, free indirect discourse accords the narrator an impersonal power—a subject without a subjectivity—that
is authorized to penetrate the psychobiological processes of the characters under its provenance.42 At moments when Frank Money construes the narrator’s free indirect discourse as a biopolitical apparatus that would regulate his psychosocial behavior, he understandably berates the narrator for this intrusion: “Earlier you wrote about how sure I was that the beat up man on the train to Chicago would turn around when they got home and whip the wife who tried to help him. Not true. I didn’t think any such thing. What I thought was that he was proud of her but didn’t want to show how proud he was to the other men on the train. I don’t think you know much about love. Or me” (50). Mary Dudziak views Frank’s hostile questioning of the narrator’s presumption of the ability to know how Frank thinks and feels as Morrison’s exploration of the limits of fictional empathy.43 Frank Money also criticizes the narrator’s imaginative rendering of his traumatic experiences. Frank Money’s recollections of the Korean War instigate what Shoshana Felman Returning from the Unending Korean War 165

and Dori Laub have referred to as “crises of witnessing.” Activated within events that cannot be assimilated by a subject whose identity is predicated on its continuity throughout disparate experiences, such crises occur when an experience is undergone whose radical alterity poses an insuperable challenge to the limits of human comprehension.44 Restoration of a traumatic event that cannot be articulated to the socio-symbolic order requires a retroactive encounter—between the survivor, the primary witness to the experience, and a belated listener, whose bearing of secondary witness keeps a record of the survivor’s testimony. As substitute for the absent historical witness, the narrator as secondary witness must become the bearer of responsibility for an event, like the primal scene of antiblack violence at the beginning of Frank Money’s narrative, a narrative that can be assimilated neither to the socio-symbolic order nor to the subjectivities that order legitimates. In a sense, Frank Money’s narrative in its entirety can be understood as his effort to return home safely with his sister Cee from that primal scene of antiblack violence, which they witnessed on the stud farm fifteen years earlier. However, since antiblack violence saturates the social symbolic order of 1950s America, as Frank and the reader discover, Frank cannot remember that primal scene within the order that it founds. But he does not experience the need to find an alternative to that order until he realizes that he has reperformed the act of racist violence, when he murdered a young girl in Korea. That memory is so difficult to acknowledge as his recollection of that he recalls it twice. In the first reminiscence he tell the narrator that his relief guard killed her: “My relief guard comes over, sees her hand and shakes his head smiling. As he approaches her she raises up and in what looks like a hurried, even automatic, gesture she says something in Korean. Sounds like ‘Yum-yum.’ She smiles, reaches for the soldier’s crotch, touches it. It surprises him. Yum-yum? As soon as I look away from her hand to her face, see the two missing teeth, the fall of black hair above eager eyes, he blows her away. Only the hand remains in the trash, clutching its treasure, a spotted, rotting orange” (95). Following his confession that it was he and not the relief guard who shot this girl, Frank admits his responsibility for a repertoire of scenes of racialized colonial violence. He realizes his military service in the Korean War had turned him into a willing participant in the acts of colonial settler violence that forced him to flee from his home in Bandera, Texas, rendered 166  d o n a l d e . p e a s e

him a perpetrator of race murder comparable to the one he and Cee witnessed on the stud farm, and made him a party in “men-treated-like-dogs” fights he would later find abhorrent. These scenes recover the disavowed histories of racialized colonial violence previously disallowed representation within the archive of Korean War literature. Frank Money knows that the recovery of the truth of such stories materializes the only pathway that will enable him to return from the Korean War without getting “buried alive” within a social order that is founded upon the continuation of the Korean War’s regime of racial colonial violence. In providing this alternative narrative of the Korean War, comprised of the restoration of scenes of action, persons, and events omitted from the archive of Korean War literature, Frank Money has opened up a space that, insofar as it cannot be included within the social order founded upon the primal scene of antiblack violence, takes the place of Home.

Returning from the Unending Korean War 167

part three

Realignments: The Global Cold War and Changing Forms of Empire

Chapter nine US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War John Carlos Rowe

In the fifteenth panel of his monumental fresco in the Reserve Room of Baker Library at Dartmouth College, The Epic of American Civilization (1932–34), José Clemente Orozco represents six masked academics overseeing a skeleton in academic robes delivering books from a large reclining skeleton, surrounded by fetal specimens wearing small mortar boards in small glass cases. Only four panels away from his representation of Hernan Cortés’s arrival in Mexico, “Cortez and the Cross,” Orozco’s satire of academic learning is integral to his criticism of Western colonialism as a culture of death.1 The great Mexican muralist’s indictment of how academic knowledge helps legitimate state-sponsored violence is conventional, especially in the context of Orozco’s Marxist argument in this fresco. But despite our familiar complaints regarding the close relations of universities with their national and local governments, we rarely do much more than offer impressionistic responses to what I have termed elsewhere the “state-scholarly complex.” In what follows, I propose a more material history of various aspects of the cooperation between the academy and the state.

In this chapter, I am interested in the political functions of cultural attachés, whose governmental offices are intended to help promote the cultural identities of the nations they represent. Although these purposes are overtly political and usually treated as relatively modest forms of state-sponsored propaganda, they can also be used as convenient covers for activities as diverse as academic program building abroad, espionage, and other forms of “intelligence” gathering. Many nations have cultural attachés as part of their diplomatic corps, but I will focus on the specific office of the US cultural attaché to the United Kingdom in the period of the Cold War. In two case studies of actual cultural attachés, Carl Bode and Sarrell Everett Gleason, I contend that the state-scholarly complex works through a broad spectrum of political positions and material practices that bind the federal government, higher education, and scholarship closer together. However intrinsically valuable such an examination of the cultural and macro politics of cultural attachés may be, it does not fit obviously the focus of this volume’s title: Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War. Yet, cultural attachés helped promote certain conceptions of both the discipline of “American Literature” and its appropriate contents in the authors and works taught, studied, and even shared internationally as speakers and physical objects. Crucial to the public work of a cultural attaché was the invitation and hosting of representative American authors for lectures, readings, and visits, as well as the routine distribution of books by such authors (living and dead) to libraries and universities in foreign countries. Cultural attachés also had access to well-funded governmental agencies, such as the US Information Agency, with the means of disseminating cultural values and standards through public programs and publishing initiatives. I am proposing, then, broader studies of the governmental and academic institutions that play crucial roles in our understanding of what constitutes “fiction,” “US literature,” and even the “Cold War.” Such institutional study is now commonplace in scholarship on television, film, and the internet. We cannot understand a particular film’s importance simply by studying its director, cinematographer, and scriptwriters. The economics of its production, its independent or studio production, and a host of other factors influencing that film’s circulation—its success or failure—must be taken into account. Such historical and analytic work needs to be done more frequently in literary studies, especially as our interests in cultural politics broaden to 172  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

include literature’s role in foreign and domestic policies. Even more urgent is our attention to the ways academic institutions and education in general are shaped by government policies and in some cases cooperative projects between the government and educational institutions. This chapter, then, contributes to the aims of the editors to understand literary culture’s abilities to produce “oppositional narratives” as well as to help obfuscate and mask histories of minoritized groups and regions. Without the sort of material history of governmental cultural work I offer in these pages, we risk reinstating divisions between culture and politics that characterized an older and now ineffective American Studies. Sarrell Everett Gleason (1905–1974) succeeded Carl Bode as US cultural attaché to the United Kingdom, serving from 1959–61, which Gleason describes as the “happiest two years of my life.” I begin with Gleason, rather than his predecessor Bode, because Gleason is such an obvious example of an academic whose government service involved intelligence gathering in the names of conservative politics and defense of the national interest. Gleason fits the stereotype of the intellectual who eagerly serves the state-scholarly complex. In short, Gleason’s contributions to US state policies, both foreign and domestic, during his career as a government employee are part of the public record, even if some of his actual activities are still classified. Thus Gleason’s appointment as cultural attaché to the United Kingdom from 1959–61 makes perfect sense from a State Department perspective. Cold War international relations were punctuated by espionage scandals involving spies, double agents, and moles in US, British, and Soviet intelligence services. In 1961, for example, the British double agent, Kim Philby, defected to the USSR and Anatoly Goitsyn, a major in the KGB, defected to the United States, providing the CIA with the names of Soviet agents in US and British intelligence. Gleason grew up in Evanston, Illinois, earned his BA (1927) and PhD (1934) from Harvard University, where he taught from 1931–38. Trained in medieval history at Harvard, he accepted a position as professor of history at Amherst College in 1938. Shortly after the United States entered World War II, Gleason joined the US Army Air Corps in 1942 and then the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943. “Ev” Gleason never returned to Amherst or academic life following the war, but with William L. Langer he published two influential books (whose research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation) about World War II: The Challenge of Isolation, 1937–1940 (1952) and US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 173

The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (1953), the latter of which won the Bancroft Prize for History for 1953.2 Both books were part of a larger project, The World Crisis and American Foreign Policy, on which Gleason worked while serving in the Historical Division of the State Department at the end of World War II and to which he returned after his two years as cultural attaché, serving in the division from 1962 to 1970. Gleason’s coauthor, William L. Langer (1896–1977), was another academic historian, who had served as deputy chief and then chief of the Research and Analysis Branch of the OSS during World War II. Beginning his career at Clark University (1932–36), Langer accepted an position as assistant professor of history at Harvard in 1936, overlapping with Gleason’s postdoctoral teaching at the university. Langer would retain his position as chair of Harvard’s History Department during World War II, but was on official leave, assisting the recently organized CIA in 1950 to establish the office of National Estimates, a forerunner of the National Intelligence Council (established in 1979). Shortly after his postwar work for the US Department of State, Langer would return to his academic position at Harvard, publishing a long list of scholarly essays and textbooks, primarily on European history. Langer and Gleason’s two books on the US entry into World War II are intended as authoritative histories, but they are also arguments in favor of the postwar foreign policies of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. Overturning public attitudes favoring isolationism following World War I, advocating the difficult international relations required for a successful military and diplomatic alliance to fight and win World War II, and insisting that the “world crisis” is by no means over, the authors provide a scholarly foundation for Cold War policies. Based on the files of the US State Department, to which the authors had unique access, both volumes combine the authority of the authors as professional historians and intelligence officers.3 Gleason was named in 1950 deputy executive director of the National Security Council (NSC), serving as second in command to James S. Lay Jr. In his NSC position, he was a crucial member of the “Solarium Committee,” formed by the National Security Council during the Cold War. By virtue of his membership on this committee, Gleason was a key player in “Operation Mockingbird,” the secret campaign of the CIA to influence US and global media in the interests of US foreign policies. The apparent “code name,” Operation Mockingbird, is in fact the term Deborah Davis uses to describe 174  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

the work of the Solarium Committee in her 1979 book on the committee’s infiltration of the Washington Post—Katherine the Great: Katherine Graham and Her “Washington Post” Empire.4 Little has been written about Langer or Gleason’s roles in the scholarly-state complex, despite Langer’s return to Harvard and his continuing influence there from 1961 until his retirement in 1970. Gleason never returned to the academy, and his career in government service could be protected by various covers of “confidentiality” in the interests of national security.5 It is nonetheless interesting that they are best remembered for The Challenge of Isolation and the prizewinning The Undeclared War, both written under the auspices of the Historical Division of the US Department of State and then published by Harper and Brothers “for the Council on Foreign Relations,” the nonprofit Washington, DC, think tank founded in 1921 to study foreign relations and advocate on behalf of specific foreign policies. I have argued elsewhere how nonprofit foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) were involved in the US governmental efforts to redefine “area studies” during World War II and in its immediate aftermath.6 We know what a profound impact nonprofit but clearly partisan think tanks have had on our foreign and domestic policies in the past half century. Yet little has been done to study the emergence of such nonprofit think tanks and their possible cooperation with academic foundations, such as Rockefeller, Ford, Guggenheim, and ACLS. In contrast with Langer and Gleason’s governmental work as professional historians and intelligence officers, Norman Holmes Pearson’s World War II work in the OSS and his continuing work for the CIA after the war while serving as a distinguished professor of American studies at Yale University have been well documented in Robin W. Winks’s Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (1996).7 Winks shows how Pearson’s teaching and scholarship at Yale not only provided a respectable cover for his efforts to recruit international students at Yale to the CIA, but that it worked oddly in tandem with his advocacy of such avant-garde modernists as H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Having met H. D. in London during the war, Pearson took a personal interest in her and a professional interest in her poetry and experiments in other media. For example, he helped H. D.’s daughter escape a dreary job as a wartime typist at Bletchley Park to become his personal secretary at the OSS headquarters.8 Anxious to collect her small press publications for US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 175

the Yale Library, he arranged an exhibition of the books in the Beinecke Rare Book Room and visit to New Haven by H. D. following the war. Winks concludes that Pearson’s interest in H. D. was primarily an indication of his belletristic interest in literary and artistic figures: “Pearson was a collector of people, as some collect experiences.”9 Today a leading example of a modernist who criticized patriarchal values, advocated lesbian feminist rights in both her life and poetry, and otherwise employed a radical poetics to challenge the regimentation and dehumanization of modern life, H. D. appealed to Pearson as an avant-garde formalist whose work lacked any political content. Even though Pearson is often celebrated as the greatest Hawthorne scholar of his generation, thanks to his modern edition of The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1937), Pearson produced relatively little memorable scholarship on American or British Romanticism, his two specialties.10 Despite two Guggenheim Fellowships, a long list of international awards (most given for his work for the OSS), Pearson likely cultivated his friendship with H. D. for its professional possibilities.11 Gleason left the academy for State Department intelligence service, and Langer left government service to return to Harvard, ostensibly finishing his academic career as a scholar of diplomatic European history. Pearson returned from wartime work for the OSS to his professorship at Yale, but continued covertly to work for the OSS’s successor, the CIA, while teaching and doing research in American literature. These three examples all suggest how traditional instruction and scholarship in higher education coexisted with espionage, state-sponsored propaganda, and US foreign policy during World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Langer and Gleason have faded from history without having raised serious investigations into their work for the scholarly-state complex, whereas Pearson is often cited as a major example of how academics in both the United States and Great Britain have used the protection of the university to cover their deeply political activities. From the Cambridge Five to Pearson, our suspicions of covert activities on our campuses have been fueled by highly publicized scandals. Yet in the last part of this chapter I want to consider how conspiratorial ideas of the relationship of the academy with the state can cause us to neglect other modes of cooperation, even in some cases collaboration, whose consequences may be just as insidious. At the risk of underscoring an obvi176  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

ous point of my argument, I want to point out that much of my argument revolves around the familiar conservative criticism of “political correctness” and “politicized” education in the modern American university. The historical facts seem to suggest much more convincingly that conservative interests used the resources and relative protections of the so-called “liberal university” politically, to do specific spying, intelligence, and foreign policy work in the modern era. But what about liberal and progressive intellectuals working for the state or at least for organizations with some direct influence upon the foreign policies of the US State Department? In this context, I offer as a case study my one-time colleague at the University of Maryland, Carl Bode’s (1912–93) service as US cultural attaché (and Fulbright director) to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1959 and his travel to Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany in 1967.12 Eponymously remembered in the American Studies Association’s Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement, Carl Bode is forever linked by name with his cofounder of the ASA, Norman Holmes Pearson. In a footnote to “The Politics of International American Studies,” in Exporting America: Essays on American Studies, Richard Horwitz actually confuses Bode with Pearson, citing Alfred Dudden’s claim in his acceptance speech for the Bode-Pearson Prize that Dudden “and Carl Bode . . . would often pass the time trading ‘war stories’ from days in OSS, as when they electronically bugged diplomats in Madrid.”13 Horwitz has confused Bode with Pearson, whose surveillance activities in Madrid during World War II are documented in considerable detail in Robin Winks’s Cloak and Gown.14 Born in Milwaukee, Bode completed his BA at the University of Chicago in 1933 after which he taught at the Milwaukee Vocational School for four years, attending graduate school in English at Northwestern University, earning his MA in 1938 and PhD in 1941. Bode served in the US Army during World War II, joining in 1943 and working primarily as a psychological counselor to recently demobilized troops. In 1947, he accepted a position in English at the University of Maryland, where he taught for nearly forty years, retiring in 1986. Well-known to my generation of American Studies scholars for his “convention uniform” of a frontier-style fringed leather jacket over a dress shirt and tie, Bode was also known for his advocacy of popular culture, especially his work on H. L. Mencken, his specialization in American Transcendentalism, and his oft-reprinted anthologies of the Transcendentalists. US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 177

A poet himself and irregular contributor to the Baltimore Sun, Washington Star, and Washington Post, he became a member of the Cosmos Club in Washington in 1955, where he advocated for women’s membership in the 1970s, a campaign that eventually succeeded in the 1980s. His birth in Milwaukee, with its history of quasi-socialist urban politics, and his work in the political campaigns of Carlton Sickles, the Democrat who lost his Maryland gubernatorial run to George P. Mahony in 1966, and Joseph D. Tydings, Democratic senator from Maryland (1964–70), who lost his senatorial seat in the 1970 reelection campaign, gave Bode the reputation of a progressive democrat. Bode’s progressive credentials should not discourage us for looking for connections between his duties as cultural attaché in the United Kingdom and the cultural front opened by the CIA, USIA, and Department of State in the Cold War era. Carl Bode’s scholarly legacy is built upon his amazing American Studies program-building work in the 1950s and 1960s. The founder and longtime director of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Bode helped establish American Studies in the United Kingdom by initiating programs at Manchester and Nottingham Universities. During his tenure as cultural attaché in the United Kingdom, Bode hosted such American literary figures as Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, and he sponsored other routine cultural events that we would expect from someone occupying his office. Tempting as it is for us to imagine this work as part of an independent, academic effort to counter US state-sponsored intelligence gathering in Europe in that period, there is considerable evidence supporting the idea that the CIA in particular wooed leftist and progressive intellectuals in this period in support of various anti-Communist agendas. Hugh Wilford’s The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, 1945–1960: Calling the Tune? (2003) makes a convincing case for the formal programs initiated by the CIA to lure British Labour politicians and intellectuals within and outside the academy to the anti-Communist cause.15 In his subsequent book, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008), Wilford makes a similar case for the cultural front the CIA opened up in US universities and artistic circles during the Cold War.16 It seems to me inconceivable that Bode could have been appointed cultural attaché to the United Kingdom in such a critical period—and then for two consecutive terms—as well as secured funding so easily for new programs in American Studies at British universities, unless he had at least some ties to the CIA-sponsored “cultural front” of the era. 178  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

Bode’s close relations with Senator Tydings show up in Bode’s 1967 confidential report to the Ford Foundation and the ACLS about the situation of American literary scholarship, academic scholars in the field, and literature in general in Yugoslavia (Ford Foundation) and East Berlin (ACLS). Of several specific recommendations regarding visits to the United States by these writers, Bode writes: “I promised to relay to the Maryland senator with whom I have worked in the past, Joseph Tydings, and to the proper government agencies.” The forty-four-page report, “From Belgrade to East Berlin,” reports on a trip to Tito’s Yugoslavia and Ulbrecht’s German Democratic Republic from April to May 1967, funded by the Ford Foundation, ACLS, and PEN, as well as organized by PEN societies in the United Kingdom and in Yugoslavia. Marked “Confidential” on the first page, the report suggests yet another way in which the state-scholarly complex worked outside the usual circuits of the CIA cultural front opened during the Cold War.17 In 1966, Bode had met three East German literary scholars who had been invited to the United States by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara: Eberhard Brünig, professor of Amerikanistik at Karl-Marx University, Leipzig; Albrecht Neubert, head of the Translator’s Institute at Karl-Marx University, Leipzig; Erich Leitel, professor of English at Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena. Brünig (1925–) was an Americanist who would go on to publish monographs on Ernest Hemingway (1985) and Eugene O’Neill (1990). Neubert would become one of the best recognized German specialists in Sprachwissenschaft and theories of translation, although he had begun his career with a doctoral dissertation on “bourgeois” feminine writers in the English tradition from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf.18 Leitel completed his doctoral dissertation—“The Reception of American Literature in Germany 1914–1944” (Die Aufnahme der amerikanischen Literatur in Deutschland 1914–1944) at Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, in 1958, and continued at that university as a professor of Sprachwissenschaft in Anglistik und Amerikanistik. In Daisy Wessel’s Bild und Gegenbild: Die USA in der Belletristik der SBZ und der DDR (bis 1987) (Image and Counter-Image: The USA in the Belles Lettres of the Soviet Union and East Germany [up to 1987]), Brünig and Leitel are mentioned as two of the leading “Americanists” in East Germany in the 1980s.19 The center’s invitation of these three East German professors to the United States appears to be an effort of an independent think tank to initiate cultural US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 179

exchange outside the usual State Department–sponsored activities. Bode refers at one point in his report to “the Washington underground” that made possible the visit of these three scholars, but he does not elaborate on the phrase or the members of such an underground.20 The word “underground” could mean an anti- or nongovernmental group, but it could also refer to a secret connectedness of ostensibly “nongovernmental” organizations and individuals. Bode characterizes the center’s founder and former president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, as “a long-time neutralist,” although Hutchins is popularly recalled for his vigorous defense of “liberal education” and his progressive academic politics.21 But Bode also notes that the center’s board “includes Senator Fulbright” (43). Largely funded in this period by the Ford Foundation, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions certainly seemed at the time to be independent of any State Department or US intelligence operations, even with governmental figures like Senator Fulbright serving on its board of directors. It appears that the center’s invitation of the three East German scholars was something of a cover to enable them to obtain permission for the trip from the East German government, which had forbidden GDR scholars to travel to the United States with any direct sponsorship from the Ford Foundation, “since it was considered anti-Communist” (43). Without knowing exactly the original motivation for the US invitation of these three GDR scholars, we can still draw the conclusion that the Center’s close ties with the Ford Foundation, Hutchins’s reputation as a “neutralist,” and Senator Fulbright’s presence on the governing board connected an erstwhile independent and liberal “think tank” with the broader “cultural front” of the US state I am attempting to describe in Bode’s international work. Bode’s own invitation to visit and lecture in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany followed his sponsorship of an event featuring the three GDR scholars in the University of Maryland’s Summer Session, June 19–21, 1966: a “Forum sponsored by the Summer Sessions and the English Department, Carl Bode, Forum Chairman (June 19–21 [1966]).” 22 Only a poster for this event survives in the Carl Bode Papers in Special Collections at the University of Maryland Library, but it is a rather odd event to hold during the Summer Sessions at the university. Perhaps the scholars were on break from their work at the center in Santa Barbara, perhaps on a tourist visit to Washington, DC, but it is far more likely that they were visiting Washington and then 180  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

the University of Maryland in some semiofficial capacity. Their residency at the center in Santa Barbara provided them with cover for the GDR’s ban on travel funded by the Ford Foundation. Could their “forum” at the University of Maryland have provided a similar cover for their visits with State Department or other governmental officials in Washington, DC? The latter is a mere speculation, but a rather legitimate one, given the details just sketched. Bode’s account of his travels and lectures in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany are unremarkable for anyone who has read the Fulbright and USIA brochures and orientation materials for this period. He lectured on “the tradition of dissent in American literature, as found in authors as various as Thoreau and Saul Bellow,”23 but characterized himself as “not progressive” and a person who “favored Vietnam.”24 Everywhere he goes, Bode notes approvingly that he and his wife, Charlotte, were not criticized for the Vietnam War, in most cases not even asked. He notes that, when in the GDR, he returned the favor by “not asking to visit Auschwitz,” apparently recognizing both Vietnam and the Holocaust as respective scandals for the two governments, an oddity given the origin of the GDR in the Soviet occupation of and colonization of East Germany after World War II, ostensibly in direct response to the atrocities of the Nazis in the Holocaust as well as on the Russian front. And tempting as it is to consider his three East German guests in the summer of 1966 to have been recruited by the CIA or another US government agency, perhaps with Bode’s help, there is no concrete evidence to support such a claim. These scholars returned to their home institutions and had distinguished careers within an academic system notorious for its own employment of its senior faculty as informants for the STASI (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) and other intelligence agencies of the GDR. American literature and American studies—“Amerikanistik”—was by no means as central a discipline in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the GDR as it was in West Germany and other European nations, but it had a place (usually in a department of “Anglistik und Amerikanistik”) in the higher education curricula of the GDR. As far as research was concerned, East German universities stressed dissident traditions in American literature and culture. Thus Brünig’s 1985 book was entitled Ernest Hemingway und Anti-Fascismus, and his monograph on Eugene O’Neill dealt centrally with the playwright’s criticism of US capitalism. Leitel would publish a frequently cited essay on “Der militärisch-inUS Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 181

dustrielle Komplex in den USA und die Behauptung von einer angeblichen sowjetischen Gefahr” (The military-industrial complex in the United States and the Meaning of a Similar Soviet Danger), included in a collection with a typical East German academic title for its time: Gegen Imperialismus und Bürgerliche Ideologie (Against Imperialism and Bourgeois Ideology).25 Intrigued by Bode’s transnational political and cultural activities in the Cold War era, I had the good fortune to find that one of Bode’s daughters, Carolyn Bode, lives in Santa Monica and was willing to talk with me about her memories of her father, especially during his tenure as cultural attaché in the United Kingdom. Carolyn Bode is a wonderful, politically committed feminist, who was educated at Bryn Mawr, and pursued a PhD in archaeology at the University of Michigan until it became clear to her that her department and graduate program were deeply sexist. As she recalled in our first interview (March 19, 2014), one of her faculty advisers told her that most of the women in the PhD program would “get married and have children,” so the graduate faculty favored male candidates.26 Carolyn spent her working career in a variety of administrative assistant positions, ending up in Santa Monica working for One Voice, a nonprofit that assists families living at the poverty level. In numerous emails and two interviews with her in Santa Monica, I got to know a person of great intelligence and compassion, as well as a daughter with profound love for her father and mother. Our conversations did little to dispel Carl Bode’s reputation as a liberal progressive in both his public and private lives. To be sure, I had come across correspondence by Bode during the Vietnam War that indicated he did not support antiwar protest, confirming his comments in his travel journal. But Carolyn told me many stories about how his upbringing in socialist Milwaukee, his early years as an orphan, and his later advocacy of the civil rights and women’s rights’ movements told a consistent and coherent story of a liberal progressive. In one poignant anecdote, Carolyn told me how her father had accompanied her sister, Barbara, during the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” on August 28, 1963, the famous march during which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Carl Bode had asked to accompany Barbara out of concern for her safety in this large demonstration, although he had warned her he did not share her progressive views on civil rights, but when they were caught up in the communal action of the march, Carl took the supporting sign his daughter was carrying and 182  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

proudly displayed it for the rest of the day, returning home to post it on his front lawn in his neighborhood in College Park, Maryland. Carolyn generously shared with me photographs of her father and mother, especially those taken in London, and anecdotes testifying to his anticipation of today’s transnational American Studies. She remembered the trip her father and mother had made in 1967 to Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany, although she was unaware of her father’s confidential report to Ford and ACLS. She noted that if it had not been for her mother, who loved to travel, Carl Bode might never have strayed too far from his home base at the University of Maryland, even though, after World War II, Maryland earned the government contract for the satellite campuses around the world that provided US military personnel with educational opportunities while they were stationed abroad. Carl Bode, it turns out, did not like to travel. Carolyn does not recall and probably never knew the precise details of her father’s appointment as cultural attaché to the United Kingdom in 1957, but she does recall that the post was offered to him at the last minute, after another person had declined it. Bode’s selection for the post is unusual; he had been a professor of English at the University of Maryland for only ten years in 1957 and was still an associate professor. His close associations with congressional political figures, like the US senator from Maryland, Joseph D. Tydings (1964–70), for whose campaigns Bode worked, began in the mid-1960s. Bode had virtually no extra-academic reputation in 1957, so even a last-minute, desperate need for a cultural attaché to such a top post does not explain his selection. During my second interview with Carolyn, this time at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica on July 23, 2014, we talked about her father’s friends and associates in England during his service as cultural attaché. Two names appeared frequently in his correspondence from 1957 to 1959: Brad Connors and Bill Clarke. We both left that meeting intending to find out more about them. All Carolyn could remember from her adolescent experiences (born in 1945, she was twelve to fourteen years old during her residence and schooling in London) was that Brad Connors was her father’s “boss.” Counselor for public affairs in the US embassy in London beginning on July 29, 1955, W. Bradley Connors was a relatively recent diplomatic arrival there when Carl Bode arrived as cultural attaché in 1957, but Connors had been associated with USIA since its founding by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 183

Posted first to Shanghai and later to Berlin, center of Cold War espionage and propaganda, Connors was transferred to London in 1955 as one of the top USIA public affairs’ officers and a frequent advisor to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.27 USIA was founded to: 1) explain and advocate US policies in terms that are credible and meaningful in foreign cultures; 2) provide information about the official policies of the United States, and about the peoples, values, and institutions that influence those policies; 3) bring the benefits of international engagement to American citizens and institutions by helping them build strong long-term relationships with their counterparts overseas; 4) and advise the president and US policy-makers on the ways in which foreign attitudes will have a direct bearing on the effectiveness of US policies. Although this bureaucratic rhetoric clearly is a cover for the propaganda and espionage activities sponsored by USIA between 1953 and October 1, 1999, when its information (but not broadcasting) and exchange functions were folded into the Department of State under the newly created position of Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy, the overt mission of USIA was clearly to export and promote US culture abroad for propagandistic purposes.28 Brad Connors shows up in the diplomatic histories as a frequent advisor to Dulles and for Joe McCarthy’s HUAC investigation (February to March 1953) of Connors for his administration of the “Voice of America” and the inclusion of Howard Fast’s novels in USIA libraries around the world. Connors’s colleague in London and friend of Carl Bode’s was Bill Clarke, in charge of the Media Division of USIA in London during Bode’s term as cultural attaché. Clarke reported directly to Connors, and it appears that Bode did as well during Connors’s tenure as “Public Affairs Attaché” (beginning in July 4, 1954) in the embassy. In tracking down the diplomatic records, it is easy to get lost in the maze of changing titles and postings, but one thing becomes clear as one reads about Brad Connors and Bill Clarke: they were high-ranking propagandists, who supervised or at least had access to Cold War espionage. They also appear to be culturally liberal, as McCarthy’s HUAC investigation of Connors suggests, even if they were politically conservative. Their profiles in this regard seem remarkably close to that of Norman Holmes Pearson. Carl Bode published several textbooks on American literature and culture for the USIA, including A Course in American Literature for the Advanced Study 184  j o h n c a r l o s r o w e

of English: Highlights of American Literature, Book IV (1980) and American Perspective: The United States in the Modern Age (1990).29 Neither of these volumes is exceptional for its propagandistic treatment of US culture. Both volumes treat at length issues of civil rights and race, although both women’s rights (Katherine Anne Porter is the only woman writer represented in the first volume) and indigenous rights are noticeably missing from both volumes. But when contrasted with the narrow and informationally false propaganda produced by the Soviet regime during the Cold War, there is nothing in either volume to cause alarm or to suggest that cultural propaganda or espionage were involved in Bode’s long, somewhat puzzling relationship to the USIA and the US state. Yet Bode’s confidential reports to the Ford Foundation and ACLS of his travels behind the Iron Curtain, his years as cultural attaché in London (1957–59) during the spy scandals that would rock MI5, the CIA, and the KGB, and his continuing work for the USIA during and after retiring from the University of Maryland suggest that his contributions to the scholarly-state complex differ from those of the spy in “deep cover” and the government representative committed to national security. Bode’s liberal cultural values, especially his devotion to Thoreau and Mencken, and his privately conservative foreign policy positions suggest yet another way that the academy was politicized long before “tenured radicals” used their positions for greater social justice and open political activism. In the most innocent terms, Bode is just one of many American academics who traveled abroad to “represent” and thus promote American cultural and political values. Anyone who has served as a Fulbright professor knows that the Fulbright Commission’s public policy is that those selected for its fellowships must be appropriate representatives of America. Transnational American studies of the past twenty-five years has been characterized by the effort to reject this sort of one-sided “American exceptionalism” and embrace instead a much more dialogical conception of American scholars and teachers engaging and learning from their students and colleagues abroad. In every sense, Bode must have been able to defend how his domestic values as a liberal Democrat, good father, and professor of American literature at a public university could be reconciled with the work he did for the US government in its diplomatic service, for the USIA, and whatever other confidential aspects of that state-sponsored work he may have done. US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 185

Undoubtedly, his sense of patriotism reconciled all possible conflicts of interest and contradictions of publicly expressed and privately held views. Of course, it was the same sort of patriotism that motivated William Langer and S. Everett Gleason in their US State Department careers, Norman Holmes Pearson in helping the Allies win World War II and then the Cold War. We may be tempted to justify their actions in the names not only of patriotism and public service, but also by confirming that the academy has always been deeply involved in the macropolitics of the state in which it is located. Yet even without commenting on the different political positions represented by these Cold War scholar–state agents and the tenured radicals so often criticized, we might also note that the greatest difference between the two groups of intellectuals involves “confidentiality.” For Langer, Gleason, Pearson, and even Bode, a certain degree of secrecy was required to accomplish their work. For the truly “tenured radical” or scholar activist, full disclosure of one’s political agenda, indeed one’s patriotic purposes, must be the moral law.

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Chapter ten The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War Beckett, Greene, Kavan, Ballard Adam Piette

Although many people think of Cold War superpower politics as pitting just two monoliths against each other (the United States and the USSR), in fact there was a third major player, the British Commonwealth, which, after World War II, encompassed colonial and imperial possessions still nominally under British control. The persisting sense of superpower politics as limited to two players underscores the ways in which the vanishing and bankrupt British Empire was underestimated on the postwar world stage—and yet the fictions of decolonization and neocolonialism cannot be understood without attention to the Commonwealth. This chapter thus attends to the special relationship that structured British responses to the emergence of the other two nuclear superpowers in order to explore what it would mean to think in terms of three, not two, superpowers. Such attention encourages one to understand Irish and British writers as engaged in neocolonial fictions insofar as they manifested nuclear-inflected, neocolonial, and globalizing superpower logic that might at first blush seem unique to the United States.

In short, I aim to demonstrate that the “British hypothesis,” the idea that it was British policies and postimperial imaginary that “invited” the United States to take on global superpower responsibilities (as with Churchill’s Fulton speech), which shaped the ideological mentality of the global Cold War.1 The Irish and British writers explored in this chapter are very forcefully entranced by both the shaping power of remnant British imperialism on the neocolonial Cold War world, and on the world-building fictions and nuclear fantasies that shaping power helped generate. In an important essay on Samuel Beckett’s internationalism, Peter Boxall focuses on Beckett’s novel L’Innomable [The Unnamable] (1953), tracking the protagonist’s journey around the globe, also scripted as winding around the ways on his home island. This confusion of the national and global bears witness to “a certain weakening of the boundary between nation states, as if the global and the national have come to inhabit each other.”2 What Beckett was intuiting was a contradiction fostered by the effect of Cold War superpower on perceptions of the world. As Boxall remarks, “It is the strengthening of the US and the USSR in the aftermath of World War II that marks the final demise of the European colonial powers, and that prepares the ground for the development of global markets, and a global culture.”3 What had strengthened the superpowers was possession of the bomb. Composed between March 1949 and September 1950, L’Innomable’s timeframe is identical with the inauguration of an unprecedented global nuclear environment.4 Following the American nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok in 1946 and 1948, and the creation of NATO with the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, the news struck of the USSR’s first nuclear test, at their Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, announced by President Truman on September 23, 1949.5 This was six months into Beckett’s project, globalizing the superpower relationship as nuclear destruction. The Bomb had already stimulated a new kind of world thinking triggered by the fact and idea of world war. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, in a memo to Truman in September 1945, had written: “In a world atmosphere already extremely sensitive to power, the introduction of this weapon has profoundly affected political considerations in all sections of the globe.”6 Truman, announcing the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, uses “world” twelve times, stating that the United States had spent 340 billion dollars winning World War II for “world freedom and world peace,” setting up the United States as guardian 188  a d a m p i e t t e

of the “free peoples of the world.” If the United States were to falter, “we may endanger the peace of the world.”7 The confusion of national (United States) and global (the world) is what the Truman Doctrine projected and was clearly the product of the new global responsibility of the first nuclear security state and superpower. The curious mix of national and global geopolitical states (of mind) noted by Boxall in L’Innomable is also traceable in the French attitude to the American atom bomb and its destructive shielding/targeting of the world. Frédéric Joliot-Curie told journalists on January 6, 1949, that the French government would be building a second atomic pile in their pursuit of nuclear energy, and a French bomb. The Communist High Commissioner for Nuclear Energy said “it would be unthinkable for a French Communist to communicate to a foreign power results which belong to the collectivity,” at the same time as asserting that “what we are realizing in the domain of nuclear energy is entirely French, and its development . . . is uniquely a French concern.” 8 The ambiguity in “collectivity” (is it the globe or the French as a collective that is meant?) speaks to the easy slippage from national to global—and it is the Bomb’s planet-destructive power that structures the slippage, for this most national of weapons was always a weapon of mass global destruction. Something of this paradoxical confusion of nationally self-referential and globally destructive targeting colors the Unnamable’s scripting of his place in his textual world. He dreams of “soaring above my condition,” yet acknowledges that he does not yet know how to move “either locally, in relation to myself, or bodily, in relation to the rest of the shit.”9 The dream of soaring is contrasted aporetically to the immobilized position between locally self-referential subject and globally “shit”-determined object. The double and incompatible pressure from within and without leads to a subjectivity of stalled dialectic. He is at once incapable of acknowledging any outside world (“What doesn’t come to me from me has come to the wrong address”) and cannot even think without the prompt of external stimulus (“the pressure of some critical circumstance, such as a violent pain felt for the first time”). That stalled state is itself double: it reads as empty Cartesian doodling, solipsistic argufying disguised as displays of contradictory premises; it also reads as symptom of some cultural determinant beyond the subject’s power to rationalize. This becomes dangerously clear as the Unnamable develops his argument with recourse to affect and vision. He distinguishes his way of The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 189

thinking from more philosophical models of understanding: others might like to debate a “nice point of semantics,” or indulge in the “time-abolishing joys” of speculation; he thinks, but it is thinking defined as “vertiginous panic” beyond terror, compared to “hornets smoked out of their nest.” Thinking here is more like an instinctive flight reaction, escaping asphyxiating threat. One of the models of the “repertory” of thought-experiments he is subject to is described: “These lights gleaming low afar, then rearing up in a blaze and sweeping down upon me, blinding, to devour me, are merely one example. . . . And in my head, which I am beginning to locate to my satisfaction, above and a little to the right, the sparks spirt and dash themselves out against the walls. And sometimes I say to myself I am in a head, it’s terror makes me say it, and the longing to be in safety, surrounded on all sides by massive bone” (353). On the one hand, this is an assault from without, a nuclear blast blinding before destroying its targeted victim, and also its corollary, an inner envisioning of the assault, as though following the blazing lights from retina to occiput. Beckett is deliberately confusing the poles: the external global forces read as violently self-referential (they sweep down “upon me,” “devour me”), or as internal zone, arena for projections of the violent world. The head of Cartesian solipsism becomes both a target, locatable to the self as bull’s eye for incoming missiles, and a bomb shelter, where the nuclear blast can be safely defused as mere ephemeral sparks to the mind’s eye. That double sense of the head as both target and shelter, as object in the world and as subject where the world is screened, turns on Kantian divisions, but squeezes the observer down to something generated by the textual bomb blast of the event, the blinded eye registering the blaze—or, as here, the tympanum of the ear between mind and the destructive noise coming from the world: “Perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympanum, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world” (386); “I, on the one hand, and this noise on the other” (392). What the noise is, what the blaze of devouring lights might be is uncertain; yet the unnamed event is hinted at in code, as half-rhyme: “It’s not clear, dear dear, you say it’s not clear” (391);10 “be this slow boundless whirlwind and every particle of dust . . . someone hears . . . the case is clear” (405);11 “how could that be made clear to me, here, in the dark” (412).12 “Nuclear” is on the tip of the tongue as ghost rhyme, driven on the language whirlwind. 190  a d a m p i e t t e

The obsession with whirls of dust (“word to word, a labouring whirl, you are in it somewhere” (406), “this horrible noise,” the devouring lights: fitfully a nuclear disaster flickers into view at the edges of the textual reasonings. And it is the prospect of being the last survivor, of having outlasted the species that seems to govern many of the time-abolishing fictions. The spiral journey around the earth; the fiction of the self as a “big talking ball” (307); the nostalgia for a time when the creative imagination could create a “little world” (409): what is hinted at is the voice as the voice of the species, a planetary vocalizing of the end of days. This is the postnuclear earth that’s speaking. That voice is at the same time absolutely bounded and localized (“each one in his little elsewhere” [407]), and Peter Boxall is right to suppose it is the superimposition of the global and localized that short-circuits the world-making, leaving a nothingness as situation. I would argue that it is a nuclear predicament that has voided the world-determined and nationally situated subject: subject to unknowable superpower destruction, isolated by the solipsism of nuclear-apocalyptic affect, codified by the imagined “boundless whirlwind” that devours from without and from within. Physically, it devours from without as blast, from within as radiation; metaphysically, the double devouring is about the confusion of inner and outer that is mapped onto the confusion of local and global. Cold War contradictions bedevil and entrance the disintegrating subject: targeted by globalized nuclear weapons and by deep-set self-destructive drives, locally ingrown, globally overblown, the Cold War ego reduces to a membrane between superpower and superego, and can only witness, as planetary fiction, the blasting and irradiating of whatever remains in the decreating and nuclearized textual inner/outer world. The Unnamable’s “boundless whirlwind” stages the idea of globalized and apocalyptic nuclear destruction that the Bomb had unleashed. Ernest Bevin, in a speech to the House of Commons on November 21, 1945, had called for a world government with world law enforced by a world judiciary because of the threat posed by nuclear weapons. As the American Journal of International Law put it, “the constraining reason for so momentous a decision is undoubtedly the profound alteration in international relations brought about by the atomic bomb.”13 “The atomic bomb,” argued Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo, in a 1947 article analyzing the psychological impact of the bomb, “means either a world government or world suicide.”14 The starkness and panic of these statements give some The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 191

measure of the predicament: imagining the end of the world, within and without the targeted body, leads to a desperate fiction-making—save the planet with government, or kill off your despairing subjectivity. Nuclear governmentality, as knock-on effect of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had given the world to the United States in 1945: true superpower lay in this irradiating, blasting fiction of world domination. Superpower was a term coined by William T. R. Fox during the war in 1944. His monograph The Super-Powers had a triumvirate as its focus: the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union.15 Fox overestimated, as many did, the reality of the Commonwealth as a sustainable postimperial cluster of states. Fox argued that Britain needed American support to bolster its hold over former colonies and dominions, and that the United States needed Britain to counter Soviet aspirations. This triple superpower logic was espoused by Churchill in his 1946 Fulton speech,16 launching the Cold War with the Iron Curtain rhetoric, and urging the United States to assume global Cold War responsibilities through alliance with the Commonwealth.17 The “special relationship,” Churchill’s term for the US-UK bond, was founded, then, on Fox’s misapprehension: three, not two superpowers. The mistake had specific consequences, though: simply because it encouraged Churchill to launch the Cold War as a special relationship project (contain the Soviets through alliance of the British and US superpowers), it fostered a particular fiction of Cold War globalization when decolonization in colonial territories occurred.18 That fiction, erroneously, supposed that the struggle for hearts and minds in the shift from imperial to neocolonial independence in former colonies would be structured according to Fox’s three superpowers. It is a triple fiction that Graham Greene dramatized in The Quiet American (1955), his novel about the influence of the American and British alliance on Indochina during the terrorist phase of Vietnamese decolonization. The novel, set in Indochina in the feverish years of Cold War escalation triggered by China going Communist in 1949, is treacherously narrated by Fowler, who sees himself as a representative of the old English ways of running Empire, an attitude dressed up in postimperial blasé cynicism disguised beneath a show of libertarian journalistic clear-sightedness. The middle-aged Fowler has nothing but lordly contempt for the young Cold War idealist, Pyle, an American dabbler in CIA black arts of secret state manipulation, and a disciple of York Harding, ideologue of a “Third Force” approach to decoloniz192  a d a m p i e t t e

ing states: neither Communism nor colonialism will do, but a Machiavellian combination of neocolonial views. They share an obsession with Phuong, whose sister is trying to marry her off, first to Fowler, then to Pyle; and in the heated nationalist self-consciousness of the triangle, Fowler sees writ large the struggle between bankrupt British imperial claims and the new superpower’s jejune exercise of unfamiliar world power for and over Southeast Asia during the withdrawal of French colonial influence from the region. Fowler’s perspective, couched in the accents of world-weary postimperial experience, betrays more ignoble currents of feeling: envy of the younger, more vigorous, and newly powerful agent, a suppressed murderous hatred borne of aged impotence. The casual misogyny and stereotyping of postcolonial subjects as prostituted, ignorant sex objects makes this a difficult novel to like, but the views about Phuong are very much to Greene’s point about the narrowly focused prejudices running secret state power politics in the region. What the novel does is to contextualize the vicious patriarchal rivalry within a new global consciousness about superpower that is nuclear-inflected—if only at the level of the textual unconscious. The novel aligns US superpower, staged as Pyle’s negotiations with terrorists in order to trigger intervention, with literally explosive targeting of civilian victims: the paramilitary organization Pyle connects with in order to bring about Third Force change, the terrorist army of the rogue General The, detonates a car bomb which decimates innocent bystanders. That bomb is linked, at the level of keyword motif, to the term “world.” Pyle, according to Fowler, “had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing for the world” (4); he is determined “to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world” (10). Pyle’s global Third Force superpower is linked to the car bomb, which is thematically tied to the airborne destruction of innocents when Fowler accompanies a French air strike on a sampan along a river; the pilot Trouin speaks about napalm: “ ‘You see the forest catching fire. . . . The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water.’ . . . He said with anger against a whole world that didn’t understand, ‘I’m not fighting a colonial war. . . . We’re fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt’ ” (143). Greene’s irony catches Fowler up in the accusations he levels against US “innocent” superpower: if Pyle’s flirting with terrorism uses fear of the bomb as instrument of global governmentality, then it is British imperial proxy “napalming” control of The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 193

the “whole world” which gave the United States the forcefield and powers of ideological persuasion in the first place. Greene’s aperçu is that the special relationship, with regard to the decolonizing regions of the world, was forging an Anglo-American alliance of Cold War Third Force rhetoric and neocolonial liberalism that disguised a raw struggle to seduce an unpredictable global population. The rhetoric of seduction (as both Pyle’s parroting of Harding’s Third Force propaganda and Fowler’s own espousal of liberal values) is backed up by paranuclear terrorizing of the same global population with napalm / car bomb targeting of every citizen. Greene’s hunch was acute: the very year his novel was published the United States and United Kingdom joined forces with friendly Southeast Asian countries to form the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), and historians have been showing how strained the backroom negotiations were between the old empire and new superpower. They turned on how far the Americans would be willing to deploy nuclear weapons to push back any Chinese incursion into the region. The British Joint Intelligence Committee in November 1955 went so far as to identify fifty likely targets in southern China and Indochina upon which the United States would drop nuclear bombs.19 British officials worried about the potential fallout of any leak that revealed to Asia SEATO willingness to use the Bomb in the region (including British nuclear weapons to protect Malaya and Singapore). For example, the Commonwealth Secretary informed the cabinet in 1956 that “Asia had not forgotten that the only atom bombs dropped have been on Asians. There is a danger that the effect [of news that the alliance would endorse the use of nuclear weapons] may be . . . to raise the question of white superiority.”20 “White” is another keyword in The Quiet American: it articulates the perceived racism of the old and new colonial powers—“ ‘They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want’ ”(86)—and aligns that with both the seduction of Southeast Asia, SEATO-style (Phuong is always figured wearing white silk trousers or gleaming white ballgown) and the mystique of the bombing campaign (the drums containing the explosives are seen filled with a strange “white dust” [135]). Greene registers a networking of superpower governmentality at the street level in the form of secret state sponsorship deals, Janus-faced negotiations of white colonialism, a backroom localizing of global politics as nuclear security and terror through 194  a d a m p i e t t e

technologies mimicking the gestures of the security state. What begins as a superpower pantomime acted out by Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong ends as a posthumous document only readable as bankrupt confession detailing the enmeshing of fictions of “nuclear” world government within networks of local and explosive decolonizing forces beyond all white control systems. The Quiet American tracks, then, how superpower ideology and coercive / persuasive practices underwent bafflingly complex transformations through interventional contacts with decolonizing forces around the world. The fluid nuclear imaginary in particular, as merging psychosexual and security state fictionalizing drives, is both symptomatic marker of and secret motor behind the global Cold Psywar. Ann Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice explores that imaginary (a frozen nuclear fluidity) in ways that recall both the Unnamable’s scening of Cold War subjectivity as paranoid target and schizoid shelter, and Greene’s cold-eyed tracking of decolonizing politics as shaped by nuclear-glocal terror, but pushes beyond both to explore the Cold War’s world logic of apocalypse-psychosis as internalized by the security-state citizen, suicidal, sacrificial, sadomasochistic, by way of governmentalized fantasies about the end of the world. The novel features a sexual-political triangle: the narrator as complicit and prurient voyeur; a brittle, persecuted victim, a girl with ice-white hair; and a persecutor Nazi figure, the “warden,” who variously torments her, infantilizes her, rapes, tortures, and ritually kills her. The girl dies many times in the strange, unsettling story, and the sacrifice is staged geopolitically in a world returning to a lethal ice age triggered by a nuclear catastrophe brought on by the proliferation of nuclear weapons. What the narrator cannot decide is whether the visions of the encroaching ice, or the suffering and victimization of the ice-girl, are anything more than projections of sadistic desire or Armageddon dreams fostered by nuclear culture. That they are both is made too clear by the excessive envisioning of the Cold War as disastrously freezing apocalypse. The novel foregrounds the geopolitics of the Cold War so excessively because its theme is the internalization of the transnational madness of globalized, globe-destroying fictions generated by the competing security state superpowers and their “client” nations around the world. Ice weaves a crazed fiction of apocalyptic war-cult persecution mania, and opts for a dreamy fluidity and repetition of the same vicious plot because, as James Purdon has argued, it was written “at a time when ‘make-believe’ had become The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 195

standard defense policy.”21 And that sense of world politics as make-believe is traceable not only to information about superpower war gaming, or to the visions of violence nested within the psyches of the nuclearized world citizen by Cold War technoculture; it is attributable, also, to the perceived pervasiveness of Cold War conflict at every political level conceivable, at a planetary scale. That perception was most keenly felt in the 1960s counterculture, especially the New Left, whose readings of the Cold War’s international grip on the make-believe of structural political binaries at all levels was both acute and self-dismayingly awestruck. Perry Anderson’s 1965 reading of the Cold War is instructive: The Cold War has at least four structural components, which any account must synthesize: a struggle between capitalist and socialist economic systems, a contest between imperialist and indigenous national systems, a conflict between parliamentary and authoritarian political systems and a confrontation between technologically equivalent and reciprocally suicidal military systems. International class struggle, defence of democracy, revolt against colonialism, arms race: each slogan indicates one “moment” in the Cold War, and denies the other. The reality is their infinite imbrication and interpenetration.22 Ann Kavan’s clairvoyance was to have staged that imbrication but to have insisted, still, that, in the 1960s, it was most of all the “contest between imperialist and indigenous national systems” that was most shaping the Cold War’s mode of interpenetration as world make-believe. The “revolt against colonialism” was understood by many as fueled by and fueling the superpower arms race. As Mike Davis was to argue in 1982, the arms race was “a complex, regulative instance of the global class struggle” (53).23 In Ice, the arms race has a freezing and disabling effect on the countries that come under its regulative (make-believe) command and control, and enacts a bullying neocolonial land-grab. In one of the strange anonymous war-torn countries the narrator is traveling through, the driver who accompanies him informs him: “ ‘Just because we are a small impoverished country, they’re treating us badly all along the line. . . . We sacrifice a piece of our land for the general good, but get nothing in return. They won’t even send ground troops to help protect the position.’ He spoke bitterly. I could feel his grudge against the big powers” (88). 196  a d a m p i e t t e

The driver has become cynical, though he remembers the good old days when parties of workers would sing on the way: “You remember the old formula—‘all men of goodwill to unite in the task of world recovery and against the forces of destruction.’ . . . Now everything’s different”(89). The “old formula” reads like a parody blending Soviet propaganda with NATO or United Nations rhetoric, and works because the Cold War had become by the 1960s a war for hearts and minds within decolonizing conflict zones around the world. As regards UK colonies alone, between 1960 and 1966, the years up to Ice’s publication, independence was won in Nigeria, Somalia and Cyprus (1960), Cameroon, Tanzania, Sierra Leone (1961), Uganda, Trinidad and Tobago (1962), Malaysia and Kenya (1963), Belize, Malawi, Zambia (1964), Gambia, Zimbabwe, the Maldives (1965), and Barbados and Lesotho (1966). And the newspapers were full of the incredible stories of violence, civil war, rebellion, and political murder, with intimations of Soviet and US corrupt manipulation, the United Nations an unruly arbiter and platform for interventions of all kinds. Typical was the story of the struggle for independence from Belgian colonial rule in the Congo: the independence leader Patrice Lumumba had called in the United Nations to help crush a rebel force led by Moise Tshombe in mineral-rich Katanga, and accused them of being a US puppet force aiming to help Tschombe plunder the region when they refused, turning to the Soviets for aid. He was murdered in January 1961 by mercenaries in service to Tshombe after having been handed to them by the Americans’ anti-Communist puppet Joseph Mobutu with the blessing of the CIA. The country was split between forces variously armed and “advised” by both the Soviets and the Americans, including Che Guevara assisting the rebels with a Cuban team and learning from their counterinsurgency tactics. The United Nations used troops to force Tshombe out of Katanga, and its secretary general, Dag Hammerskjöld, died in an air crash in 1961 when negotiating with Tshombe.24 The spectacle of raw Cold War power play in these warring regions is the target of Kavan’s dreamy satire, and may very well have been influenced by Conor Cruise O’Brien, who had acted as Hammerskjöld’s envoy in Katanga, and was sickened by US secret manipulation of Hammerskjöld’s UNOC peace project to engineer Lumumba’s murder. After resigning from the United Nations, he wrote a play about it, Murderous Angels, which staged Hammerskjöld and Lumumba as dupes of international politics, laid out clearly for us through the views of a mouthThe Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 197

piece of Belgian colonialism, Baron D’Auge, president of the commercial association and expounder of the global realpolitik that is really running the show. For O’Brien, both Hammerskjöld and Lumumba are wedded to murderous actions by their fanatical advocacy of the abstractions of Peace and Freedom, which makes them the easy playthings of the Baron D’Auges of this world: “The spectacle is of the working of the political fate of human beings: the veiled logic which requires from political men actions which are the function of what they represent. . . . The movement . . . toward the mutual destruction of Dag Hammarskjöld and of Patrice Lumumba, is the movement of Murderous Angels. The angels are the great and noble abstractions represented by the protagonists: Peace in the case of HammarskjöId, Freedom in the case of Lumumba.”25 Carole Jones has shown how Hammarskjöld and his assistant Andrew Cordier grounded their idea of peace on fear of nuclear escalation in the Congo, and fear of Soviet Communism. Cordier felt the Soviets had only one goal with the United Nations: “I know that their fundamental aim is one of the destruction of Western civilization.”26 For O’Brien, Hammarskjöld’s desire for world peace was conditioned by the ultimate violence of global nuclear destruction: “[His] calculations about world peace had necessarily to be mainly about the positions of those who could make world war.”27 Kavan’s indigenous driver voices a directly comparable blend of “world recovery” and “the forces of destruction,” a Hammarskjöld UN rhetoric of anti-Communist peace-making propaganda, which masks the sacrifice of land and people to the “general good.” The “old formula” is the vehicle of the murderous abstractions of the Cold War, world peace shaped by world destruction, the fate of nations impoverished by colonial corruption held in the balance by the mysterious designs of the big powers. The narrator’s nemesis, the warden, is at times figured as a rebel leader of a small impoverished nation, a Tshombe or Mobutu who draws Hammarskjöld or O’Brien under his influence: “Listen. This is a small, poor, backward country, without resources. In an emergency we would be lost without the help of the big powers. . . . I want you to convince your government that we can be useful, if only because of our geographical position” (43). But he becomes infinitely more powerful than the narrator, tricks him into agreeing to broadcast his propaganda, trades on his obsession with the ice-girl, emerges as “a new, powerful, unknown influence on the war issue” (81), a war profiteer and megalomaniac secret-state manipulator. 198  a d a m p i e t t e

Kavan scripts an allegorical transformation of rebel leader into crypto-fascist intelligence operative, blending a decolonizing ideologue like Lumumba with the cynical evil genius of the military-industrial complex, a Baron D’Auge figure, murderous angel of CIA/Soviet “veiled logic.” Kavan registered the real logic of this transformation not in terms of simple realpolitik conversion of revolution into corporate neocolonial violence, but because of the murderous abstractions so massively boosted by the global Cold War. The geopolitics of Ice is structured around fantasies of apocalyptic violence generated by the obsession with the global fostered by the threat of nuclear holocaust. This is thematized in the novel by the only incursion into real science fiction in the book: the narrator encounters an alien in a jungle when he escapes from the depression of the suicidal nuclear escalation. The big powers have “stocks of nuclear weapons many times in excess of the overkill stage,” and they are joined by “lesser countries” who also possess “thermo-nuclear devices,” and the resulting tensions created by the ‘world situation’ brings nearer the “final catastrophe” (122). But the retreat to the natural environment only reveals the vulnerability of the planet: “The defenceless earth could only lie in wait for its destruction, either by avalanches of ice, or by chain-explosions which would go on and on” (122–23). It is then that the alien appears, and he tells the narrator that his people have witnessed earth’s future, the human race’s “collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction” and invites him to join him in his other world: “He was offering me the freedom of his privileged world, a world my inmost self longed to know. I felt the excitement of the unimaginable experience. From the doomed, dying world man had ruined, I seemed to catch sight of this other one . . . that wonderful world; but saw how far it was beyond my powers when I thought of the girl, the warden, the spreading ice, the fighting and killing. I was part of all that, irrevocably involved with events and persons upon this planet . . . in our world under sentence of death” (124). The narrator’s fantasy of escape is a pacification of the global apocalyptic destructiveness of thermonuclear weapons; and the word “world” acts as both a sedative (“that wonderful world”) and a terminal universal (“our world under sentence of death”). The death drive has been spawned by the planetdestructive thermonuclear threat: but also, quite simply, by the worldiness of the idea of a third world war. The narrator’s vision of the end of the world, with the spreading ice and the chain-explosions, is conditioned by the global The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 199

Cold War as it stretches across the decolonizing world, in the expanding range of the technologies of destruction, and in the infinite imbrication and interpenetration of international class struggle, defense of democracy, and arms race, within the planet-wide revolt against colonialism. Victoria Nelson has argued that the ice-girl in Ice is clearly an allegory for the defenseless earth: “The world and the woman are the same entity; the body of the planet is her body; man’s sadistic misuse of both has resulted in their deaths.”28 Just as pertinent, the ice-girl signifies the ways Cold War globality as nuclear-terminal future is internalized within the world citizen dreaming the network of competing international security states. The novel gives us a psychoanalytic portrait of the colonized Cold War citizen as targeted and “frozen” in sexualized mindgames across pseudo-European territories signifying “world” under nuclear death sentence. Just as the warden contains the features of both the revolutionary leader and the fascist counterinsurgency officer, so the Cold War’s nuclear holocaust is both feared as a catastrophe and crime against nature, and yearned for by sadistic death drives. The warden, victim, and observer together form a triple portrait of the security state citizen of the nuclearized world: as world-universal subject dreaming of the power of Cold War destruction and war cult; as passive object, miming the defenseless earth and victims of neocolonial warfare; and as spectator, charting the sadomasochistic dreamwork generated by the global security state. That trifold structure to global security-state consciousness points toward a psychoanalytic geopolitics of the subject inaugurated by post-Hiroshima nuclear globality. And there was no greater apostle of the postsurrealist base of that consciousness than J. G. Ballard in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he was road-testing his theory of inner space. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) is a radical experimental novel, fragmented into isolated and coded paragraphs that read like condensed treatments for film or fiction projects, tracking split consciousnesses across surreal and psychotic landscapes. One of its strands develops a thesis about American Cold War biopower: how it is activated as military paraneural network through proxy agencies, media, technology, and psychohistory, establishing a paranoid, entombing, targeting, and globalizing rhetoric and compulsion within the security state citizen imagination. The novel stages a triangle that has some parallels with the Fowler-Pyle-Phuong and warden-narrator-ice-girl trios 200  a d a m p i e t t e

in The Quiet American and Ice. A traumatized doctor, Traven (or variations on that name), is obsessed by apocalyptic violence, car crashes, Hollywood celebrity, surrealist landscapes, the minutiae of uncanny technologies, and, most of all, spectacular forms of death. He is being observed as he puts himself through bizarre technosexual experiments and reenactments by Dr. Nathan, the theorist of the psychosis under surveillance. Traven has various Liebestod couplings and fantasies with a composite female (Catherine Austin, Karen Novotny, Margaret Travis) who acts out the role of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, or is staged as victim, doll-mannequin, or art object in the experiments in ways that recall the sadistic scapegoating of the ice-girl. Traven-Nathan-Margaret feature as trilateral composites of psychoanalytic topics (the three acting out Oedipal power games, their ego-defenses, ratiocination, and unconscious fantasies) and as projections of biopower (the three staging scenes enacting governmentality and the hold that global consumer, command, and control systems have over desirous agency). Ballard’s theory was that the surrealist turn before World War II, which had read the visible world as subject to invisible psychoanalytic drives, had been superseded by a turn toward inner space as the external world had become entirely governed by fabulating transnational agencies so powerful as to fictionalize the psychological and somatic, down to the nervous system of the human body. As he remarked in 1966, in “Notes from Nowhere”: “Neurology is a branch of fiction: the scenarios of nerve and blood-vessel are the written mythologies of brain and body.”29 What had triggered the inner-spatial turn were the bombs falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that had radically warped spatiotemporal relations in the world, transposing psyche and world, turning them inside out in ways that Beckett had surmised in L’Innomable.30 What the project aimed to capture was the montage interrelations between the extremes of private psychosexual experience and the geopolitical. As he told the Transatlantic Review in 1971: “Each section explores a different level of experience—from the domestic, private relationships to the largest, global events.”31 The novel opens with a paragraph entitled “Apocalypse,” featuring the annual art exhibition of the mental patients at Dr. Nathan’s psychiatric hospital—Catherine Austin notes the “marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if those long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses.”32 They remind her of “the slides of exposed spinal levels The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 201

in Travis’s office,” hanging on the walls “like the codes of insoluble dreams” (1). The art brut of the insane registers the deep strange interiority of the population, their dreamwork and skeletal mental scaffolding, and finds there the apocalyptic codes signaling world cataclysm. For Ballard, the unconscious is possessed by global events, from the very first sentences of the novel, and it is significant that it is the woman of the triangle who makes the triple connection between art, dream, and global apocalypse. Ballard begins with the figure who plays out the fantasies as victim and sex object: he intimates that the text, though nominally written by Traven and critically theorized by Dr Nathan, has at its heart the global citizen as nuclear target. The global citizen is shown as subject to a new dimension of biopower: lives governed by superpower nuclear fictions that have been internalized as somatic structuring events within the body, as radioactive “spinal levels,” as paraneural militarized zones within the unconscious. Traven is haunted by two figures: a traumatized pilot, who believes he dropped the A-bomb on Japan, and a woman with radiation burns. This perpetrator-victim Hiroshima couple creates another triangle with Traven: both are figments generated by the nuclear relations between the past, World War II, and the Cold War’s nightmare, the future World War III: “The dead face of the bomber pilot hovered by the door, the projection of World War III’s unknown soldier” (5).33 That dead face issues from the deep somatic unconscious but has been generated by the public imagining of Enola Gay. Similarly, the young woman with radiation burns resembles an erotic fantasy construction, but has been made out of the masochistic target-consciousness of every citizen in nuclear culture. On the weapons range, which is one of the militarized landscapes Ballard translates from surrealist inner space, targeting is foregrounded as sexualized, somatic, psychotic: “Here the circular target areas became identified in Travis’s mind with the concealed breasts of the young woman with radiation burns” (7–8). The toxic knowledge of the nuclear events of 1945, boosted by the apocalyptic fictions spurred into being by the tests on the Pacific islands (as Ballard’s seminal story “The Terminal Beach,” with its dreamlike narrative of Traven on Eniwetok, had explored), had not only spread across the world like fallout clouds, but had created a new space-time globality, a double world of globe under terminal threat, and subliminal world projected from the deep nuclear sublime, figured here as the fused perfection of the H-bomb’s mushroom cloud and the embryo’s 202  a d a m p i e t t e

blastosphere. As Dr. Nathan surmises in his notes, “It seems that Travis’s extreme sensitivity to the volumes and geometry of the world around him, and their immediate translation into psychological terms, may reflect a belated attempt to return to a symmetrical world, one that will recapture the perfect symmetry of the blastosphere, and the acceptance of the ‘Mythology of the Amniotic Return.’ In his mind, World War III represents the final self-destruction and imbalance of an asymmetric world” (9). The pun on “blastosphere,” embryonic cellular space figured as the sphere created in the initial phase of the H-bomb’s blast, signals a crazy identification of the nuclear as structuring all nuclei, an eversion of the microscopic and inward deep somatic origin of the species as planet-destructive geopolitical power.34 The “symmetrical world” is being generated by this parallel between the spheres of cell and blast, and the terms of the comparison are governed by the geopolitical dreamwork of the technocultural unconscious. The exchange of somatic interiority and world cataclysm has a viral reproductivity, a chain-reaction fissionability that nuclear world-consciousness had engendered. The real superpower is the Bomb as dream targeting device somatized within each citizen of the nuclearized world. Beckett’s Unnamable calls into being the skull as target and refuge within a nuclear environment that makes each world citizen into a little world about to be destroyed. Greene tracks this targeting logic as it expanded across the world, as neocolonial nuclear blackmail scripted within the ideological struggle for decolonizing hearts and minds. Kavan reveals the sexual sadomasochistic fantasies structuring the world-making and world-destroying dialectic unleashed by nuclear recolonizing globalization. Ballard, finally, demonstrates the somatic/geopolitical fusions and inversions at play within the targeting globality of the Cold War’s militarized technoculture. All four writers diagnose a sacrificial dynamic underpinning the triangular relations of deep Cold War subjectivity: a watcher, an experimenter, and a victim act out the geopolitics psychoanalytically consumed and internalized by the global security state citizen when suffering the big fictions of nuclear superpower, the triangle an ideological remnant of the fiction of three superpowers that had kick-started and shaped the Cold War as global enterprise. And all four show how Cold War global consciousness projects more than anything the loss of affective relations, social, psychological, or species-collective, beyond the desire for the blastopherical symmetries of nuclear apocalypse. The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 203

Chapter eleven The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? Andrew Hoberek

Did the Cold War ever really end? Even before claims that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election on Donald Trump’s behalf, journalists were turning to this trope for stories about the on-again-off-again tensions between the United States and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. In a 2014 National Geographic piece called “Is the Cold War Back?,” for instance, Eve Conant weighed the case for describing Russian intervention in the United Kingdom as a “second cold war,” concluding with one historian’s opinion that “calling this a second Cold War is an exaggeration, even if elements of it are reminiscent of the real Cold War.”1 In an Atlantic piece a year later, however, David Frum—now of course a leading proponent of the Trump/Russia nexus—speculated that Russians’ failure to address its bellicose history, the way Germany did after World War II, meant that the conflict had not in fact ended, as evidenced in Russian policies “more repressive and more aggressive” than those of the USSR.2 In the summer of 2016, reporters were already speculating that Russian hackers might have been responsible for leaking embarrassing Democratic Party emails to sway the presidential elec-

tion.3 The framework for what can at times seem like reanimated Cold War rhetoric was thus in place long before Robert Mueller began his investigation of Russian electoral interference in May 2017. As Frum’s piece suggests, all of these uses of the term “Cold War” rely upon (even if they are skeptical of) an understanding of the conflict as a traditional battle between two major powers. In this sense, it is fairly easy to dismiss the notion that periodic disputes between the United States and Russia can profitably be understood through the lens of the struggle between the United States and the USSR that shaped late twentieth-century history worldwide. But the question “Did the Cold War ever really end?” might carry more weight if we consider how the Cold War reshaped the very nature of warfare. Conant cites another academic who is wary of describing Russian intervention in Ukraine as a new Cold War because, as he puts it, “This in fact is not a global military and ideological struggle. It is just a regional dispute, and the stakes are entirely different.” But from another angle, the distinction between global struggle and regional conflict was exactly the line that the Cold War effaced. With the threat of nuclear war forestalling direct warfare between the United States and the USSR, every conflict and potential conflict of the war was simultaneously global and regional, the struggle between the United States and the USSR overlapping with local ones in Korea, Hungary, East Germany, Guatemala, the Congo, Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. It is in this sense—with war becoming less a conflict between nations and more an ongoing phenomenon molecularly embedded within global society—that we can understand the Cold War as continuous with the War on Terror that has succeeded it. In 2010 the Afghan War surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest running conflict in US history, and this war and the other military engagements that have taken place since the 2001 terror attacks have all but effaced the questions of duration and congressional authorization that remained politically troubling in the case of Vietnam. War has metamorphosed from a punctual event into an existential state, albeit one that for Americans always takes place elsewhere. This transformation of warfare has everything to do, in turn, with the rise of the global economic order—characterized by enforced austerity, privatization, and deregulation—that we know as neoliberalism. As Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith note in the introduction to this volume, the Cold War was the staging ground for the shift from the formal colonialism practiced by The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 205

European powers to what Kwame Nkrumah christened “neo-colonialism”: a system “based upon the control of nominally independent States by giant financial interests” aided by powerful nations like the United States.4 The historian of Latin America Greg Grandin puts the matter more bluntly: “In many countries now under supposed free-market democratic reconstruction,” he writes, “the US-waged cold war was one sustained, massive assault on the very forces that were trying create a fairer society.”5 Latin America played a key role in the advent of neoliberalism under US auspices, as most famously evidenced by the CIA’s role in the 1973 coup that replaced Chile’s socialist leader Salvador Allende with military strongman Augusto Pinochet and his US-trained economic advisers. But the pattern was already visible to Nkrumah in Africa in 1965. For Nkrumah, it was the localization of conflict that enabled neocolonialism: “If Africa was united, no major power bloc would attempt to subdue it by limited war because from the very nature of limited war, what can be achieved by itself is limited. It is only where small States exist that it is possible, by landing a few thousand marines or by financing a mercenary force, to secure a decisive result.”6 It was for this reason that Nkrumah located resistance to neocolonialism not in the nation, as was common among his fellow postcolonial leaders, but in a larger pan-African union possessed of the sort of economic independence capable of challenging what he recognized was an incipiently global, American-led capitalism.7 The United States’ role as globalism’s enforcer was, moreover, like neoliberalism tied to the long decline of American economic power beginning in the 1960s. In his book A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s, Daniel J. Sargent notes that “the United States in 1971 ran its first trade deficit since 1893,” and that the decade that followed saw “the advent of a distinctive post-Cold War era.”8 This new world order, in Sargent’s persuasive account, emerged even as the formal conflict continued, and was characterized by the United States’ abdication of “the responsibility for managing the world economic order that it had exercised since the 1940s—not to foreign nation-states but to integrating markets.”9 This economic retrenchment, crucially, saw “no parallel retrenchment in [the United States’] military role”—indeed, even as the country extricated itself from the costly war in Vietnam, it “acquired new military burdens in the Middle East” in order to keep oil flowing to the West.10 Under Ronald Reagan, moreover, 206  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

the United States returned military defense spending to pre-Vietnam levels using borrowed money—a move that ushered in the long process of bringing austerity home to the United States.11 Writing in 2003, at the onset of the still ongoing Bush wars, Grandin insisted that “neoliberal restructuring” in fact creates the conditions responsible for unending conflict: the proceeds from resource wars over things like diamonds and minerals make “conflicts not only profitable but interminable”; financial deregulation smoothes the process whereby “blood money from wars, dictators and contraband [is] transformed into respectable capital”; and international competition lowers commodity prices, creating economic and political crises whose supposed solution—World Bank restructuring—only deepens them.12 It thus seems paradoxical, but is on some level deeply true, to say that what Sargent describes as the end of the Cold War during the 1970s in fact leads to its still ongoing presence, in the form of the global regime of molecular warfare it set in place. In what follows I take up several examples, from nonfiction and fiction alike, of literary responses to this new regime, before finally arguing for its most prescient depiction in an unexpected source: John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup. While we generally relegate Updike to a role as middlebrow domestic realist—domestic both in the international and the familial senses—The Coup in fact turns to Africa in the late 1970s to limn the emergence of neoliberalism out of an ideologically exhausted but for that reason all the more powerful Cold War framework. Of course, the imagination of war as a disorienting experience divorced from its social and political causes has arguably been central to American realist war fiction since at least Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. But if Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and others produce this vision of war by foregrounding the confusing and violent experiences of reluctant low-level soldiers, more recent American depictions of war focus on professional soldiers in a way that transforms criticism into approbation, and in the process reinforce an existential vision of warfare. A classic early twenty-first-century version of this vision occurs in a scene from Ridley Scott’s 2002 film adaptation of Mark Bowden’s 1999 nonfiction book Black Hawk Down, about the effort to rescue a group of US soldiers whose helicopter was shot down by Somali insurgents in Mogadishu in 1993. In this scene, the Delta Force operative Hoot, played by Eric Bana, tells the Ranger Eversmann, The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 207

played by Josh Hartnett, that “when I go home people’ll ask me, ‘Hey, Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?’ You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it. They won’t understand that it’s about the men next to you, and that’s it. That’s all it is.” The fact that these characters are both highly trained special-forces operatives suggests a key difference between Black Hawk Down and the twentieth-century tradition running roughly from Crane to O’Brien. Rather than unwilling draftees, these men are professionals, and their professionalism is grounded in their ability to ignore the social and political causes of war and instead focus purely on its prosecution. This professional ethos saturates Bowden’s book, where it is mobilized as a reaction to the fact that certain parts of the world are lawless and inexplicable, and thus inherently given over to war. Early in the book, for instance, Bowden writes, It didn’t matter that none of the men in these helicopters knew enough to write a high school paper about Somalia. They took the army’s line without hesitation. Warlords had so ravaged the nation battling among themselves that their people were starving to death. . . . Little the Rangers had seen since arriving at the end of August had altered that perception. Mogadishu was like the postapocalyptic world of Mel Gibson’s Mad Max movies, a world ruled by roving gangs of armed thugs. They were here to rout the worst of the warlords and restore sanity and civilization.13 Needless to say, the book that follows delivers on every promise in this paragraph except the final sentence’s invocation of a restored “sanity and civilization”—the narrative proper (there is an epilogue) ends with the departure of the US troops who participated in the Battle of Mogadishu, after Bill Clinton announced the withdrawal of US forces from Somalia by 1994.14 To the extent that its soldiers carry on their heroic professional efforts in the absence of any hope of fulfillment, Bowden’s narrative reinforces the vision of war as an existential state. But if we understand the versions of Black Hawk Down and other works about special-forces operatives like Clint Eastwood’s 2014 American Sniper as offering a pro-military version of this vision, we can also see it in a set of works presumably aimed at an audience with very different political sympathies: 208  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

the narratives about African child soldiers that have enjoyed an American vogue in the same period. Aaron Bady has argued that these narratives, which depart from traditional African war novels published by African publishing houses for local audiences, “are symptomatic of an arrested historicization in part because they become trapped in a rhetorical effort to restore the childhood innocence of their narrator and, as a result, produce a metaphor of African childhood that is politically limiting as a characterization of the historical agency of the continent’s peoples.” This developmental narrative downplays the factors behind wars and instead foregrounds “a view of the individual that is significantly abstracted from culture and society.”15 Both Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2006) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night (2007), for instance, narrate the experiences of child soldiers in unnamed countries. And even works more specifically grounded in particular conflicts can seem abstract when read by American audiences lacking the casual historical knowledge they might bring to Crane’s depiction of the Civil War or O’Brien’s depiction of Vietnam. A wide range of contemporary works, I am suggesting, normalize a state of constant, ongoing warfare by making it seem like simply the nature of existence in certain parts of the world—the Middle East, of course, but also, as my examples suggest, Africa, especially those parts of Africa in which Islam plays a significant and contentious role. We have arrived, we might say, at the situation that Vietnam veteran and science fiction writer Joe Haldeman preemptively allegorized in his magnificent 1974 novel The Forever War, about a group of elite soldiers who are fighting a millenia-long war with an alien race and, thanks to the time-slowing effects of faster-than-light travel, find earth immeasurably changed each time they return from combat. The novel clearly offers a displaced narrative of the disorientation experienced by Haldeman and his fellow veterans upon their return from combat, a transition it casts in terms of an ontological split between a rapidly changing homefront and a perpetual, grinding state of warfare elsewhere. In this way it depicts the normalization of warfare as an ongoing state of affairs that is inexplicable not only to those at home but to those who are fighting it—who carry on for the sheer sake of carrying on. With The Forever War we begin to approach the history of this ahistorical, existentialized understanding of warfare. Bowden offers us another clue with his description, early in Black Hawk Down, of the Mogadishu neighborhood The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 209

containing a warlord’s stronghold as “Pure Indian Country.”16 In invoking this phrase used by US soldiers in Vietnam, Bowden inserts into his work a central Cold War trope that itself linked Vietnam to the earliest European wars on the North American continent.17 As Haldeman’s background suggests, Vietnam plays a central organizing role here, insofar as US intervention there was initially a site of Kennedy-era optimism about the United States’ role in helping to modernize the decolonizing world, but quickly became a site of failure and imperialist incomprehension. In the late fifties, modernization theorists at Harvard, University of Chicago, and MIT proposed US support of Third World development as the key to both winning the Cold War (insofar as it would counter the Communists’ different model of modernization) and reviving the moribund US middle class (insofar as its members could participate in the recapitulation of the middle-class revolution in nations around the globe). Popularized in works like Eugene Burdick and William Lederer’s novel The Ugly American (1958) and W. W. Rostow’s nonfiction book The Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), this idea was taken up by John F. Kennedy as the core of his foreign policy. Burdick and Lederer’s book—later printings of which stated on their covers that “President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is the answer to the problems raised in this book”—provides a blueprint for how things were supposed to go with its celebration of figures like the physically ungainly but friendly and capable engineer Homer Atkins. Atkins volunteers for service in the fictional Southeast Asian country Sarkhan and, unlike the “fashionably dressed . . . princes of bureaucracy” in the embassies, goes out into the countryside and works with the Sarkhanese to tackle everyday problems such as creating a bicycle powered water pump for use in the country’s hilly terrain. In the process he wins their support for the American way of life.18 Of course things didn’t go this way, and Kennedy’s most lasting foreign policy legacy was not the Peace Corps but the violence and abstraction associated with Vietnam.19 In Bowden’s use of the “Indian Country” trope, then, Vietnam functions as a kind of switching station between the civilizing mission of pre-American and American settlers and the failure to “restore sanity and civilization” that Black Hawk Down plays out. From this perspective, the proper answer to the question “Did the Cold War ever really end?” is no, in the sense that the War on Terror represents a continuation of the version of the Cold War that emerged, over the course of the 1970s, when optimism about the United States’ 210  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

modernizing mission among decolonizing nations gave way to frustration and a renewed belief in the inherent savagery of some parts of the globe. On one end the belief that the Vietnamese would welcome American assistance in becoming a modern nation; on the other the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Southeast Asia offered, for obvious reasons, the most prominent site for Americans to imagine this shift. But Africa—and particularly African nations in which the United States abandoned its modernizing mission and fell back upon simple power politics, prior to disentangling itself altogether—helps us to see the historical forces that drove it. As the historian Elizabeth Schmidt has argued, the withdrawal of US support from its Cold War client states on the continent, which had mostly taken the form of propping up strongmen like Somalia’s Siad Barre, led to social, political, and economic breakdown exacerbated by IMF structural adjustment policies: Although some elites benefitted from privatization measures by snatching up state-owned enterprises, others were forced to seek new sources of income and power. Like the rulers of these weakend states, some ousted elites partnered with foreign entities, engaging in illicit economic activities such as money laundering and drug, weapons, and minerals trafficking. Some became warlords whose power was rooted in their control over commercial networks and the populations that produced the wealth.20 As this passage makes clear, these post–Cold War power vacuums did not simply place the nations of Africa in the West’s loss column. Rather, they turned them into new sources of profit both for debtors whose rights IMF policies protected at the cost of further eroding state provisions for citizens, and for legal and illegal business ventures which benefited from the lack of regulation. “The new wars were generally financed . . . by looting natural resources, pillaging local populations, commandeering international humanitarian aid, gunrunning, money laundering, and drug smuggling,” Schmidt writes, and they continued not because of some inherent tendency toward violence but, simply, “because many groups profited.”21 Westerners, crucially, profited just as much as locals from state breakdown, as an example from anthropologist James Ferguson makes clear. Discussing the post–Cold War oil boom in Angola (which had hosted one of the key Cold War proxy battles of the late 1970s), Ferguson reiterates Nkrumah’s claims about neocolonial economic exploitation, noting that the key charThe Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 211

acteristic of this boom is that it is “socially thin,” depending upon capital production by “much smaller groups of highly skilled workers (sometimes foreign workers on short-term contracts)” and divorced from “wider social investments.”22 Crucially, oil is not the only profit source here. Whereas such “social investments,” and the maintenance of a state infrastructure, were once necessary to insure an environment for foreign investment, the “Angolan model” suggests how, in “places where capital investment is very heavily concentrated in mineral extraction, where domestic markets are of little value, and where stable national-level political order becomes difficult or expensive to achieve,” the provision of private security can easily (and profitably) substitute for “the legal, disciplinary, and security infrastructure that strong states provide.”23 The post-9/11 world has been a very profitable one for private security firms: Ferguson points out that in addition to such firms’ widely known role in providing security for Iraq’s Green Zone, “a South African firm called Erinys . . . commands a $14,000 strong private army charged with guarding Iraqi oil installations.”24 The forever war and the conditions we associate with it—“political disorder, endemic private violence, and the reliance on a patchwork of privately secured enclaves”—here translates into a steady profit stream for private companies and a steady source of employment for the US military.25 This—and not simply the presence of Islamic terror groups on the continent—helps explain the fact that, as Schmidt notes, “The new focus on counterterrorism also resulted in a surge of American military activity in Africa,” including the establishment of the first dedicated African military command.26 Crucially, another element of the Cold War that the contemporary order carries over is the disenchantment with war that arose in the early 1960s and became widespread following the dissolution of US strategy in Vietnam. This disenchantment might seem to us inherently critical. Indeed Bowden himself, in the new afterword he wrote for the tenth anniversary edition of his book, notes that he attempted to absent himself as author and foreground the experiences of the soldiers in his book in order to avoid the opinions about war expressed by such writers as Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Michael Herr, for whom “war is madness” and “soldiers can only be stooges, sadists, victims, or lunatics.”27 Yet, as I have already suggested, this is only half true, for Bowden adds to the confusing mise-en-scène of his 212  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

predecessors’ books not neutrality but the professional ethos that is very much about the narrowing of focus—a narrowing in fact formally mirrored in Bowden’s efforts to “remove [him]self as a filter for [the soldiers’] telling of” their story.28 From this perspective the disenchanted vision of war enhances the heroism of Bowden’s subjects by making it more difficult for them to, as he says in the narrative proper, “separate signals from the noise.”29 Bowden’s reworking of US war narratives thus does not reverse, but in fact intimately depends upon, a vision of war—and of the world in general— that was central to the late Cold War period. Here again Bowden offers us a clue to the origin of this vision, albeit in this case not in Black Hawk Down but in the afterword he wrote a decade later. The book itself begins with an epigraph from perhaps the first novel one might think of if one were trying to reinforce a view of warfare as natural and ahistorical, Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian: “It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting the ultimate practitioner.”30 In his afterword, Bowden echoes this view with a somewhat more suprising reference to an older contemporary of McCarthy. He writes, “John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of ‘antiwar,’ which he felt, and I’m paraphrasing him here, was like being ‘anti-food’ or ‘anti-sex,’ since war was such an essential element of human experience.”31 Bowden is perhaps referring here to Updike’s 1989 essay “On Not Being a Dove,” about his controversial mid-sixties support for the Vietnam War. In this essay Updike writes, “The Vietnam war—or any war—is ‘wrong,’ but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by lying down in front of ammunition trains, there is really no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates.”32 It is worth noting here that Updike’s essay is not so much a full-throated defense of US policy in Vietnam as an account of his difficult, and stubbornly fought, disenchantment with this policy. He begins by quoting his assertion, in the 1967 volume Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, that “I am for our intervention if it does some good—specifically, if it enables the people of South The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 213

Vietnam to seek their own political future.”33 He then quotes a letter to the editor to the New York Times (in response to their coverage of the volume) in which he acknowledges, “In the year that has passed, reasons accumulate to doubt that it is doing enough good,” but still notes that he differs from other contributors “in crediting the Johnson administration with good faith and some good sense.” From here he goes on to unpack the social awkwardness of his pro-intervention position and his anger with the peace movement. He notes that “I was a liberal. Democrats, not Republicans, got us into wars, to make the world a better place, a place more like America,” and asks, “If we approved of Roosevelt’s nudging us toward World War II, and of Truman’s bouncing us into Korea one impetuous Sunday, why were we turning up our noses at Vietnam?” That is to say, it is Updike’s very ambivalence about the ongoing failure of the United States’ plans for Vietnam that give rise to his stubborn insistence (“Something about it all made me very sore”) that war is necessary because “on both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for.” It’s also worth noting that Updike’s account of his relationship to the war subtly shifts in a scene that takes place not in the United States but in Africa. Noting that he was in Kenya in January 1973 when news of the Paris Peace Accords reached him, he writes, “I was sitting on a stage in Nairobi and a black professor sardonically asked me from the audience what I thought of the great American victory. I said, spontaneously and truthfully, that our getting out felt like a victory to me. The Americans in the audience applauded. We were all tired to death of it; even the protest had worn out its welcome, and was no longer fashionable. We could begin to breathe again.” In the remainder of this chapter I want to argue that in the novel written in the wake of his 1973–74 visit to Ghana and Nigeria as a Fulbright lecturer, The Coup (1978), Updike thematizes the sense of ideological exhaustion that he describes in “On Not Being a Dove.”34 The Coup’s achievement is, in this regard, itself ambivalent. On one hand, the novel works through such ideological exhaustion to suggest that it is capital, rather than politics, that is the driving force behind world events. On the other hand, it incorporates this exhaustion into a preexisting, distinctly American fictional framework in a manner that sets the stage for the pro-military version of cynicism about warfare that Bowden articulates on the eve of the War on Terror. 214  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

The Coup is narrated by Colonel Hakim Félix Ellelloû (Wise Happy Freedom in the various languages of Ellelloû’s polyglot career), erstwhile president of the fictional African nation of Kush. When we first meet him, Ellelloû is writing his memoirs from political exile in Kush’s former colonizer France. Beginning with his first-person account written in Europe, then switching into the third person, the novel describes Ellelloû’s encounters, in a country ravaged by drought, with American officials, Russian soldiers, and the functionaries of his own bureaucracy. It also includes a lengthy flashback to Ellelloû’s college days as an international student studying in Wisconsin in the 1950s. Ellelloû’s fatal encounter with an American official pressing him to accept food aid sets in motion a series of events that lead to the titular coup and Ellelloû’s exile to Europe. Except for Ellelloû’s brief sojourn in Wisconsin, The Coup departs from Updike’s by then established suburban/ small town American settings to tell the story of Ellelloû’s misadventures in colonial and especially postcolonial Kush. Perhaps surprisingly, reviewers expressed little shock at Updike’s turn to this subject matter, noting instead the continuity between Updike’s usual satirical voice and his African subject matter. Time’s reviewer R. Z. Sheppard, for instance, while arguing (in a doubly unfortunate formulation) that Updike “puts on black face and tap dances with breathtaking agility and grace through the contradictions of culture clash and leadership in a revolutionary African nation,” suggested that Ellelloû’s “sensibility is frequently indistinguishable from Updike’s gilded-gesso prose, a doge’s palace of words that are as unexpectedly suited to fill the dreaded emptiness of Kush as they did the drab streets of Olinger, the fictional setting of some of the author’s earlier stories.”35 And in a brief mention in, of all places, Foreign Affairs, the Africanist Jennifer Seymour Whitaker contended that “Updike’s American-educated Marxist dictator of a small Sahelian satrapy sounds remarkably like the author himself,” noting approvingly that Updike “seems to have kited his fancy freely while keeping his elbow firmly planted next to basic African source books.”36 We might understand such responses to the novel as reflections of its blend of first and third person—“Yet a soldier’s disciplined self-effacement, my Cartesian schooling, and the African’s traditional abjuration of ego all constrain this account to keep to the third person,” Ellelloû says early on—in ways that echo Updike’s own outsider position.37 If Updike’s knowledge of The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 215

Africa is based on research, so in part, he informs us on the sixth page, is Ellelloû’s: “(I am copying these facts from an old Statesman’s Year-Book, freely, here where I sit in sight of the sea, so some of them may be obsolete)” (6). In this regard The Coup, like Saul Bellow’s 1959 Henderson the Rain King, is not a realistic novel about Africa but a projection of a postwar American author’s typical preoccupations onto African characters. But whereas Bellow tells his story from the point of view of an American character who encounters an African version of the autodidactic mentors so common in Bellow’s novels, Updike directly inhabits the point of view of the African character. D. Quentin Miller’s John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain convincingly demonstrates that The Coup, like Updike’s oeuvre in general, is deeply imbricated in a Cold War framework. In the case of The Coup, this involves, as I have already suggested, concrete research: Miller points out that Updike’s “files on The Coup in the Houghton contain dozens of articles detailing military upheavals in African nations in the mid-1970s.”38 Yet despite this evidence Miller agrees with Malini Schueller’s argument, in her Edward Said-inspired reading of the novel, that Updike was not interested in the details of what happened in these nations.39 Rather, Miller argues, Updike’s interest is in “the superpowers” rather “than with the smaller, powerless, individual African nations.”40 Specifically, Miller reads The Coup as an allegory of the breakdown of the Cold War certainties of the 1950s (associated in the novel with Ellelloû’s college days in Wisconsin) amid the political upheavals of the 1970s. Within the world of the novel, Miller argues, “the Cold War has changed . . . and [Ellelloû’s] belief in the persistent reality of early Cold War oppositions renders him unable to cope with the problems posed by new Cold War configurations.”41 Miller writes, “The new Cold War does not provide the same type of structure for thinking about the world that the old Cold War did,” and Ellelloû, like Updike’s other characters from the 1970s, “retreat[s] into nostalgia, isolation, and paranoia. . . . scrambling for a cause, or a new structure with which to order the world.”42 The novel’s typically Updikean emphasis on personal psychology, that is, expresses a specific historical predicament created by the breakdown of Cold War certainties, and not incidentally enables us to see that predicament in Updike’s other, less obviously topical novels. Of course, with Nkrumah in mind, it seems to Updike’s credit that he chooses to think about the undermining of Cold War certainties precisely in 216  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

the context of “the smaller, powerless, individual African nations.” Another way of getting at what The Coup is doing is to suggest that the novel concerns itself not only with the decline of Cold War certainties in general, but with the modernization theory that drove Kennedy-era Cold War policy more specifically. What Schueller calls Ellelloû’s joint “insider and outsider” status is precisely what allows Updike to satirize the aspirations of modernization: “The deposed ruler who must consult the Statesman’s Year-Book in order to provide statistics about the population and geography of his native land,” Schueller contends, “is here the ruled subject who has so absorbed the colonizer’s values and powers of abstraction that he can write as a colonist.”43 As Schueller suggests in a more subtle formulation of the same dynamic, these “powers of abstraction” are in fact broadly shared in the era of decolonization: “As progenitor of a revolutionary society [Ellelloû] seeks to mould and change the fledgling country in accordance with his ideals of ethical and cultural purity.”44 Ellelloû’s belief in “Islamic-Marxist purity” (Updike 33) is not simply an effacement of local African history, but a reminder that during the Cold War Americans, Soviets, and proponents of Third World self-rule like Fidel Castro, Nkrumah, and Sukarno believed in (even as they fought over the terms of) the modernizing project. The Coup, crucially, lampoons not only Ellelloû’s “Islamic-Marxist purity” but also American naïveté, in the form of the junior diplomat who comes to deliver famine relief consisting of breakfast cereal and corn snacks. Ellelloû orders his assembled countrymen to burn the diplomat, whose name he later learns is Gibbs, on a pyre of his own junk food. But if this act clearly indicts the violence of Ellelloû and his fellow Kushites, the passage also seems skeptical about the gap between Gibbs’s rhetorical professions of his desire to help Kush and the “Kix Trix Chex Pops” (36; Updike’s emphasis) that are his means to this end. Gibbs embodies the blend of humanitarianism and strategy characteristic of Kennedy-era modernization policy, as exemplified in his comment to Ellelloû that a neighboring country “is taking tons of grain a day, and they have Chinese advisers over there. This thing cuts right through the political shit, and anyway don’t yell at me, I marched for civil rights all through college” (40). But as Gibbs’s contention that aid “cuts right through all the political shit” suggests, his own political agenda is on some level subordinate to the larger one of American-led capitalism. Gibbs’s final words, spoken as he clambers The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 217

around the pile of food aid that the Kushites will shortly ignite with their torches, reinforce this point even as they imply the difficulty of stating it outright: “We’ll bring in teams . . . green revolution . . . systems of portable trenching . . . a lily pond right where you’re standing . . . here we go . . . no, that’s cream of celery soup. . . .” (42). This fragmentary, ellipsis-filled speech plays out the failure of US development policy as the dissolution of a coherent plan into a series of disconnected catch-phrases merging, in the end, with consumer products. Focusing on a scene early in the novel in which Kush’s king tells Ellelloû, “The world is splitting in two . . . but not in the way we were promised, not between the Red and the free but between the fat and the lean” (Updike 16), Miller notes that the novel describes a globe whose divisions are increasingly structured by “economics, not ideology.”45 In a forthcoming essay on the ways in which data modeling can engage in productive conversation with more traditional interpretive methods, Dan Sinykin, Richard Jean So, and Jessica Young note that 1973, the year of neoliberalism’s successful implementation in Chile, also constitutes a watershed year for American fiction’s incorporation of economic language. They note, moreover, that Updike joins more expected figures such as Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen in being “among the literary writers who most often use economic language.”46 The Coup bears out the implicit assertion that Updike is among the earliest fiction writers to chronicle neoliberalism’s emergence. Moreover, Updike’s novel makes clear the relationship between neoliberalism and neocolonial management, even as it helps put in place the framework of disenchantment that will come to serve neoliberalism’s ends. Indeed, the main action of The Coup takes place, we learn early on, in 1973. This is not only the year of the coup that brought Pinochet to power and allowed him to implement the neoliberal economic reforms proposed by a group of University of Chicago-trained Chilean economists. It was also the year, closer to Updike’s imagined Kush, of Anwar Sadat’s shift, following his war with Israel, from the nationalization policies of his predecessor Gamal Abdel Nasser to the “infitah” or open-door policy of courting foreign investment. In an obscure but perceptive 1980 reading of The Coup that appeared in the Canadian Journal of African Studies, the political scientist Irving Leonard Markovitz relates Updike’s novel to Sadat’s move. If Updike locates provisional “help or hope” in “multinational corporations,” Marko218  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

vitz writes, it is perhaps because “Third World nations do indeed compete with each other to attract overseas investment funds. . . . Formerly radical regimes rush to put their domestic houses in order to placate international lending agencies like the IMF. They revise their investment codes to offer the most advantageous returns to foreign investors. Like Egypt, they raise the price of bread and throw people out of work” (543). It is not entirely clear that The Coup positions multinational corporations as a source of hope. But as Markovitz also suggests, Updike affirms neoliberalism much more effectively in the way that he assimilates his African subject matter to his existing preoccupations. Markovitz notes that the desire for private citizenship that leads Ellelloû to circulate in disguise is finally fulfilled in his move to France. There, living on a pension and writing his memoirs, he becomes an “alienated intellectual” like his creator.47 The novel’s African content, that is to say, allows Updike to update the narrative of middle-class disenchantment—characterized by the encounter with and ambivalent or partial escape from the system—that had been central to the form of postwar American writing, Updike’s included, since the late 1940s.48 Transposed to the developing world thirty years later in The Coup, this narrative does significant work, insofar as it transforms potential criticism of the way modernization was carried out into a dismissal of politics in general. While Updike “come[s] to Africa with compassion and concern,” Markovitz writes, he does not intend to stir us to action—writing for an American audience would hardly result in agit-prop exhortations. But Updike induces us to another extreme. His message is one of hopelessness, of a sense that nothing meaningful can be done, certainly not through ideological commitment or mass action. He expects that the least harmful activity a country could engage in would be a politics which is intermittent and of low visibility, with casual loyalty and a system run by the qualified, with as few “politicians” as possible, and a leading role for the “experts” in all areas including that of the managers of great corporations in “the economic sector.”49 This shift is precipitated, I have been arguing, by the discrediting of US government officials’ expertise in Vietnam. Yet as Markovitz’s reading of Updike suggests, what is crucial about it is that it does not discredit exThe Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 219

pertise in general. Rather, it removes expertise from the grand schemes of modernization policy and relocates it in the smaller and putatively amoral realm of the economist. It is not far from here to Bowden’s celebration of the amoral expertise of his soldiers, which we can now begin to see as, in its own way, distinctly neoliberal. It’s worth noting, in conclusion, that The Coup more concretely anticipates Black Hawk Down in the scene in which the Kushites finally ignite Gibbs’s pyre and Updike downshifts his satirical mode to allow the diplomat a bit of (silent) gravitas: “To his credit, the young American, when he saw the smoke and flames rising toward him, and all those slopes beneath him ringed by exultant Kushite patriots, did not cry out for mercy, or attempt to scramble and leap to a safety that was not there, but, rather, climbed to the pinnacle and, luridly illumined, awaited the martyrdom for which there must have been, in the training for foreign service provided by his insidious empire, some marginal expectation and religious preparation” (43). This scene’s appearance just a year before the Iranian hostage crisis announced the second great defeat of US modernization policy suggests the extent to which the deideologized expertise that neoliberalism promotes in fact depends upon a kind of deideologized violence as its opposite number. Global capital topples governments, and enraged mobs kill foreigners, but, crucially, no one believes anything. If this sounds familiar, it is perhaps because it constitutes the background situation of every Don DeLillo novel. Throughout his career DeLillo has been, of course, obsessed with the same blend of Cold War politics and Islam that preoccupies The Coup and Black Hawk Down. US literature, we might thus note, has played a key if underacknowledged role in simultaneously transforming and preserving Cold War ways of looking at the world for the present day.

220  a n d r e w h o b e r e k

Contributors

K a t e B a l d w i n is professor of English, communication and gender and sexuality studies at Tulane University. She is author of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red and The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side. S t e v e n B e l l e t t o is professor of English at Lafayette College. He is author of No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives, editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Beats, American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960, and coeditor of American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Reassessment (Iowa, 2012). He is also author of numerous articles on Cold War literature and culture that have appeared in such journals as ELH, American Literature, and American Quarterly. From 2011–16, he was an associate editor at Contemporary Literature and is now an editor there. He is currently writing a literary history of the Beat movement to be published by Cambridge University Press. M i c h e l e H a r d e s t y is associate professor of United States literatures and cultural studies at Hampshire College. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Writers Take Sides: Internationalism and US Literatures, 1959–86. Her essay “Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann Comes of Age in Afghanistan” was published in the journal boundary 2 in 2009, and her essay “If All the Writers of the World Get Together: Allen Ginsberg,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a Writers’ International in Sandinista Nicaragua” appears in Transnational Beat Generation, edited by Nancy Grace and Jenny Skerl. In addition, Hardesty’s work has appeared in Critical Quarterly and The Monthly Review. C h e r y l H i g a s h i d a is associate professor of English at the University of Colorado–Boulder. She is the author of Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, American Quarterly, and Afro Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. Her current research is on sound technology, social movements, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A n d r e w H o b e r e k is Catherine Paine Middlebrush professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post–World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work and Considering Watchmen: Poetics, Property, Politics. He is also the editor of The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy and the comics/graphic novels editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. His ongoing research projects include the relationship between US fiction and foreign policy since 1960, the genre turn in contemporary fiction, and the criticism of popular/corporate art forms like comics and hip-hop. J o s e p h K e i t h is associate professor of English at Binghamton University, SUNY. He specializes in twentieth-century literatures of the United States, comparative race and ethnic studies, Cold War studies, postcolonial theory, and Marxism and Marxist cultural studies. He authored Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship: 1945–1960. His essays have appeared in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postmodern Culture, and the Black Scholar. He is currently at work on a book entitled America’s Archipelago: Islands and the Aberrant Geography of US Empire. C r y s t a l P a r i k h is professor at New York University in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of English. She specializes in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and culture, with a focus on comparative race and ethnic studies, as well as ethical 222  Contributors

and political theory, and gender and sexuality, diaspora, and postcolonial studies. In addition to numerous articles, in 2009 Parikh published An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent US Literature and Culture, which won the Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary Studies, and Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color. She has also coedited, with Daniel Y. Kim, The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature. D o n a l d E . P e a s e is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, and professor of English and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. Pease is the author of Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context, The New American Exceptionalism, and Theodor Seuss Geisel, as well as editor or coeditor of Cultures of US Imperialism (with Amy Kaplan), National Identities and Postnational Narratives, New Americanists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon, Futures of American Studies, and Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. A d a m P i e t t e is professor in the School of English and the University of Sheffield. He is author of The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam and coeditor of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature. Piette is also general editor of the student creative writing magazine Route 57, and coeditor of the poetry journal Blackbox Manifold. J o h n C a r l o s R o w e is USC Associates professor of the humanities, and professor of English and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books on American literature and culture, including Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II, The New American Studies, and The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies. A d a m V . S p a n o s is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he is affiliated with the Department of English. He works on cultures of US imperialism and modern Arabic literature. His recent essays appear in The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and Critical Horizons: The Postcolonial Contemporary. Contributors 223

W i l l i a m V . S p a n o s was distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at SUNY-Binghamton. Author of numerous books including America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire, and American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The Specter of the Vietnam War, Spanos was founding editor of boundary 2. C e d r i c T o l l i v e r is associate professor of English at the University of Houston. His research interests are concerned with the cultures of modernity in the African diaspora, which link the African Americas and Africa. He is the author of Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers: African Diasporic Literary Culture and the Cultural Cold War.

224  Contributors

Notes

Introduction: Neocolonialism and Literature 1. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International, 1966 [1965]), ix. 2. Nkrumah’s book was one of the earliest attempts to define theoretically the concept of neocolonialism; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term had appeared in print for the first time only a little over a decade prior—in a 1953 article in the journal Pacific Affairs. This is not to suggest, of course, that neocolonialism had its origins in the early post-WWII period. Long before then, Western powers had begun honing their skills in the dark arts of informal empire, and this was especially true of the United States. Latin America, for instance, while theoretically freed from imperial control by the 1820s, had long served as a laboratory for US forms of intervention. Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had already officially adopted the Open Door Policy (1899), an attack on national trade barriers everywhere except at home. But while neocolonialism might be traced back to the early ninetenth century, it was in the early years after WWII that it became the preferred method of Western rule—a way to channel newly independent states in the capitalist periphery into different forms of exploitation (e.g., debt, IMF structural adjustment programs, World Bank–sponsored “development,” etc.). Thus neocolonialism supplanted the system of territorial colonialism employed by European powers pri-

or to WWII, and it did so for three reasons. First, it was undermined by liberation movements, now supported by the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. Second, the cost of World War II on European powers exhausted their ability to maintain the increasingly expensive colonial enterprise amid growing resistance. And finally, there was pressure from the United States, which viewed colonialism as an impediment to its own economic expansion and global ambitions. 3. George Lipsitz, American Studies in a Moment of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 4. 4. See Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 [1956]). 5. See Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 6. Gayatri Spivak, “Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge,” an interview conducted by Robert Young, Oxford Literary Review 13 (special issue on “Neocolonialism”) (1991), 221. 7. Boni Yao Gebe, “Ghana’s Foreign Policy at Independence and Implications for the 1966 Coup D’état,” Journal of Pan African Studies 2.3 (Mar. 2008): 160–86. 8. From Spivak, “Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge,” 221. See also Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 44–70. 9. Simon Gikandi, “Postcolonialism’s Ethical (Re)turn,” an interview conducted by David Jefferess, Postcolonial Text 2.1 (2006): n.p. 10. We also recognize that as an analytical framework, neocolonialism can also run the risk—at least in how it is periodically invoked—of becoming a dehistoricizing critical gesture. That is, it has at times been employed as an all-encompassing invective against US and Western foreign policy, which can collapse important differences between varying modes of neocolonial conditions and relations. The term does seem, for instance, to describe post-WWII conditions in countries such as India and Nkrumah’s Ghana more directly than it does the models of undemocractic development in East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore; see Jini Kim Watson, New Asian City: Three Dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 11. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Assedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (London and New 226  Notes to Pages 2–5

York: Routledge, 2001 [1964]); Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of Negro Women!” (June 1949), reprinted in Political Affairs 53 (Mar. 1974): 28–42; and “For the Unity of Women in the Cause of Peace!,” Political Affairs 30 (Feb. 1951): 151–68; Jack O’Dell, “Colonialism and the Negro American Experience,” Freedomways 6 (Fall 1966): 296–308; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing my Life from the Last Decade of its First Century (New York: International, 1991 [1968]); and Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), 148–205. 12. The pioneering work of history in this regard is Arne Odd Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), but see also Carol Fink, Cold War: An International History (Boulder: Westview, 2014). With respect to the “transnational turn” in Cold War and literary and cultural studies, see Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Andrew Hammond, ed., Cold War Literature: Writing the Global Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2005) and Hammond, ed. Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2012); Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Eric Keenaghan, Queering Cold War Poetry: Ethics of Vulnerability in Cuba and the United States (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009); Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Sorin Radu Cucu, The Underside of Politics: Global Fictions in the Fog of Cold War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); and Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 13. Donald E. Pease and Amy Kaplan, eds., Cultures of US Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000). Like the present volume, Cold War Constructions is interested in “specific site[s] of Cold War contestation” to explore “the connections between domestic political culture and U.S. Cold War foreign policy,” but, unlike Neocolonial Fictions, is a work of cultural history Notes to Pages 5–6 227

and only gives passing consideration to literature (jacket copy; 3). See also Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and US Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of us Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe, eds., Reframing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011). 14. On the relationship between the Cold War and postmodernism, see, for example, Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the AtomicAge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); Steven Belletto, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, eds. Postmodern/Postwar-and After: Rethinking American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016).

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228

Notes to Pages 6-17

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Notes to Pages 17–18 

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230  Notes to Pages 18–29

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CHAPTER HEART

OF

2: THE F RAG MEN TED B LAC K N E S S

For more information on members of the American delegation and the reports they produced for "official and quasi-official consumption," see Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) ,91-103. 2. For more on Bunche's early, although qualified radicalism, see Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 157-94. 3. Aime Cesaire puts these pressures front and center of his crafting of Bunche's role in the representation of the events surrounding the Congo crisis in his play A Season in the Congo. Aime Cesaire, A Season in the Congo, trans. Gayatri Spivak (London: Seagull, 2005). The play first mentions Bunche in the context of a conversation between Lumumba and the Secretary General Hammarskjold, in which the Secretary is explaining the organization's decision to not send troops into Katanga for fear of violent resistance from the local population. Upon hearing this explanation, Lumumba suggests that the leaders of the secession had made a fool of Bunche with their suggestion of possible resistance: "Katangese reisstance? Tzumbi et M'siri may well laugh .... Your Bunche has allowed himself to be abused like a child." After considering the possibility that Bunche's decision was the result of his naIvete, he reconsiders and suggests more sinister motives behind his actions: "Bunche made a mistake! Unless .... After all, Bunche is American" (75-76). The reference to his nationality suggests 1.

Notes to Pages 30-44

231













that Bunche reached his decision to not move against the secessionist Katanga province because it might conflict with United States’ interests in the province. In writing the scene this way, Césaire endorses the view held by Lumumba and others that the Katanga secessionists enjoyed the support of Western powers intent on installing leaders responsive to their interests in the mineral-rich province. 4. For a more thorough consideration of the events surrounding the assassination of Lumumba, see Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba (New York: Verso, 2001) and Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 5. In his article, Baldwin implies that it was when “Stevenson stated . . . that the United States was ‘against’ colonialism” that the African Americans in the gallery visibly expressed their outrage. See James Baldwin, “A Negro Assays the Negro Mood,” New York Times 12 Mar. 1961: SM25, 103–4. The distinction is important. By suggesting that it was disapproval of Hammarskjöld which was at issue, the Times’s report subtly implicates the Soviet Union. In the General Assembly’s 1960 session the preceding year, the Soviets had made repeated calls for his resignation over UN actions in the Congo. See Charles P. Henry, Ralph Bunche: Model Negro or American Other? (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 202. Baldwin’s account, obviously, highlights American duplicity in support of European colonial powers as the source of indignation: he mentions the recent US abstention when the General Assembly voted on Algeria in December 1960. 6. Despite the eminence of those involved, a recent work from a highly regarded university press dismisses these activists as mere “rabble-rousers” with “only dim beliefs about the transgressions and lies of the international politicians.” See Gerard and Kuklick, 2. 7. Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011; paperback 2013), 54. 8. For more on Mallory’s history in the black freedom struggle, including her fight against school segregation in New York City and her work with Robert Williams in Monroe, North Carolina, see Yie Foong, “Frame Up in Monroe: The Mae Mallory Story” (MA thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 2010). 9. The reference to Mecca appears to refer to a New York Times article which describes “a man in white Arab headdress,” identified as “Mus-

232  Notes to Pages 44–49

tafa Bashir,” leading demonstrators in a march toward Time Square. “Riot in Gallery Halts U.N. Debate,” New York Times 16 Feb. 1961, 1. 10. According to Henry, the two had begun a lifelong friendship in the fall of 1945 when they traveled to London together. Stevenson was Edward R. Stettinius’s deputy, whom Bunche was sent to advise at the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations. See Henry, 138–39. 11. The offices of the post-Yergan CAA were in the same Harlem building where Freedom, the newspaper where Hansberry began her career as a writer after coming to New York, had its headquarters. One imagines that she would have looked on in horror at how far to the right Yergan had traveled. For a discussion of CAA, see Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 12. As an example of this literal demonization, Borstelmann writes that Pierre Wigny, the Belgian foreign minister, considered Lumumba a “sorcerer” who “could entrance the Congolese parliament,” and the US ambassador to Belgium, William Burden, referred to an upcoming meeting with him as “a séance.” See Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 130. 13. For this list of participants, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and US Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 302. Chapter

3:

The Appeal of Cuba

1. FBI, “Roy Bradbury,” 29 Jan. 1968, Declassified 16 July 2012, The Vault, accessed 30 Sept. 2015. There is some evidence in these memos that the investigation was spurred because someone by the name of “Roy Bradbury” had traveled to Cuba, but the FBI continued to look into Bradbury’s activities despite ruling out this possibility. 2. FBI, John S. Temple, Los Angeles, “Raymond Douglas Bradbury,” 8 June 1959, Declassified 9 May 2003, The Vault, accessed 30 Sept. 2015. 3. FBI, Special Agent in Charge, Los Angeles, Memorandum to Director, “Ray Douglas Bradbury, aka,” 15 Aug. 1968, Declassified 16 July 2012, The Vault, accessed 30 Sept. 2015. 4. Ray Bradbury, “El Peatón,” Bohemia 5 Jan. 1968: 23, 113. 5. Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian,” The Reporter 7 Aug. 1951: 39–42. Notes to Pages 49–58 233

6. Cultural Congress of Havana: Meeting of Intellectuals from All the World on the Problems of Asia, Africa and Latin America (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1968), 4. 7. While outside the scope of this chapter, K. S. Karol emphasizes that the Congress downplayed Eastern bloc presence and that Castro’s final address condemned Soviet dogmatism. See K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Hill, 1970). 8. Irwin Silber, ed., Voices of National Liberation: the Revolutionary Ideology of the “Third World” as Expressed by Intellectuals and Artists at the Cultural Congress of Havana, January 1968 (Brooklyn: Central, 1970), 17. 9. Santiago Alvarez, “The Cinema & Revolution,” IKON Oct.–Nov. 1968: 20–22. 10. This chapter focuses on US delegates, and it should not stand in for an overview of the Congress itself; for such an overview, see Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt, To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution (Oakland, CA: PM, 2015); and Andrew Salkey, Havana Journal (New York: Penguin, 1971). 11. G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber, 1966), 15. 12. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 106–7. 13. See Lani Hanna et al., eds., El Diseño a Las Armas/Armed by Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), Interference Document 11 (New York: Interference Archive, 2015). 14. Quoted in Prashad, 108–9. 15. Gordon-Nesbitt, 222. 16. Cultural Congress of Havana, 70. 17. Deborah Cohn, “PEN and the Sword: US-Latin American Cultural Diplomacy and the 1966 PEN Club Congress,” in Hemispheric American Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 206–22. For another perspective, see Russell Cobb, “Cosmopolitans and Revolutionaries: Competing Visions of Transnationalism during the Boom in Latin America,” in Human Rights and Transnational Solidarity in Cold War Latin America, ed. Jessica Stites Moore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 101–19. 18. Cohn, 217. 19. Alejo Carpentier et al., “Carta Abierta a Pablo Neruda,” Casa de las Américas 6.38 (Sept.–Oct. 1966): 131–35. 234  Notes to Pages 58–61

20. E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Cultural Congress of Havana,” Times Literary Supplement 25 Jan. 1968: 79. 21. “Cultural penetration” and “brain drain” were phrases used frequently in CCH papers and related documents. 22. I will discuss these invitees later in the chapter; for other accounts of US-Cuba solidarities from this period and earlier, see Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (New York: Verso, 1993); Besenia Rodríguez, “ ‘De La Esclavitud Yanqui a La Libertad Cubana’: US Black Radicals, the Cuban Revolution, and the Formation of a Tricontinental Ideology,” Radical History Review 92 (2005): 62–87; Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a US Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); John A. Gronbeck-Tedesco, “The Left in Transition: The Cuban Revolution in US Third World Politics,” Journal of Latin American Studies 40.4 (2008): 651–73; Todd F. Tietchen, The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010); Frank Andre Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Sarah Seidman, “Tricontinental Routes of Solidarity: Stokely Carmichael in Cuba,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4.2 (2012): 1–25. 23. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), 158, 306–11, 347–49. 24. Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 88. 25. Fidel Castro, “Words to the Intellectuals,” Castro Speech Database, 30 June 1961. Web. 26. Ernesto Che Guevara, “Man and Socialism in Cuba,” Bertrand Silverman, ed., Man and Socialism in Cuba: The Great Debate (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 350. 27. Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 229. 28. “Diez años de la Revolución: el intelectual y la sociedad,” Casa de las Américas 10.56 (Sept.–Oct. 1969): 12. 29. Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: University of California Center for Afro-American Studies, 1988), 308–9. 30. Moore, 312. Notes to Pages 61–63 235

31. For Supreme Court cases on travel restrictions in this period, see Carl F. Salans and Richard A. Frank, “Passports and Area Restrictions,” Stanford Law Review 20.5 (1968): 839–57. 32. Salans and Frank, 857n72. 33. Ward Just and Richard Harwood, “Visa Denied to Lowell, 11 Others,” Washington Post 28 Jan. 1968: A17. 34. “Feiffer in Cuba: Cartoonist Tells of US Restrictions,” Los Angeles Times 10 Jan. 1968: 14. 35. Helen Yglesias, “Havana Cultural Congress,” The Nation 19 Feb. 1968: 243; David Dellinger, “Cuba: The Revolutionary Society,” Liberation Mar. 1968: 8. 36. Dellinger, 8. 37. “Denuncian delegados de EU las presiones del Departamento de Estado para impedir su asistencia al Congreso,” Granma 8 Jan. 1968, 6 [my translation]. 38. Margaret Randall, “Cultural Congress of Havana—Nine Years of Revolution and Other Realities,” IKON Nov. 1968: 35. 39. The Organization of American States (OAS) report on the CCH lists twenty-one congress delegates and thirteen credentialed reporters from the United States, with three individuals appearing on both lists. Missing are at least three names: Ronald Steel, reporting for the New York Review of Books, Helen Yglesias writing for The Nation, and Tom Hayden, who had press credentials from Liberation. Special Consultative Committee on Security, OAS, Cultural Congress of Havana (Washington, DC: Pan American Union, 1968), 45–48, 80–81. 40. Seidman, 10–14. 41. The absence of Baldwin and Mailer was noted by more than one mainstream press report. See Ruben Salazar, “400 Delegates Attend Cuba Culture Congress,” Los Angeles Times 8 Jan. 1968: 7. While Sontag was reportedly denied permission in 1968, her trip the following year became the basis for the essay “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (For Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” Ramparts Apr. 1969: 6–19. There were also well-known invitees from Europe who, while not barred from attendance, were not able to make it to the CCH: Peter Weiss, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bertrand Russell all sent messages of support. 42. In the aftermath of the Congress, Feiffer insisted that he was a press delegate only. Jules Feiffer, “The Uninvited,” Time 9 Feb. 1968: 16. 236  Notes to Pages 64–66

43. Yglesias, 245. 44. Franco, 86. 45. Yglesias, 245–46. 46. Silber, ed., 184. 47. Silber, ed., 187. 48. For Featherstone’s educational and cultural activism before and after the CCH, see Russell Rickford, We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). The other SNCC delegates were Jennifer Lawson, Willy Ricks, Chico Neblett, and Bob Fletcher. 49. Lionel Martin, “Featherstone: Para El Gobierno Americano Todo El Tercer Mundo Es Negro,” Cuba Feb. 1968: 42 [my translation]. As of this writing, I have not been able to locate reports by members of the SNCC delegation about this trip. Bob Fletcher’s website does mention the CCH in his biography, and includes photographs taken during the trip. See Robert Earl Fletcher Jr., “Hasta La Victoria Siempre: Cuba 1968.” Web. 50. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Turé), “Solidarity with Latin America,” Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2007 [1971]), 105. 51. Randall, 41; Martin, 42. 52. Martin, 42. 53. The Congress was organized around five themes, or commissions: 1. Culture and national independence; 2. The integral formation of man; 3. The responsibility of the intellectual with respect to the problems of the underdeveloped world; 4. Culture and the mass media; 5. Problems of artistic creation and of scientific and technical work. Gordon-Nesbitt, 223. 54. “Las comisiones: sesión matutina,” Granma 10 Jan. 1968: 5. 55. Cultural Congress of Havana, 33. 56. However, the “Appeal of the Havana” was initiated not by Commission III, but by UK delegate Ralph Milibrand. See Gordon-Nesbitt, 232. 57. A running thread in Salkey’s account is about rumors that oil had been discovered off the Cuban coast, which would relieve the island’s gas shortage. 58. A reference to arguments between Arnold Wesker and delegates from the United Arab Republic over Hussein Fahmy’s argument that, acNotes to Pages 66–70 237

cording to Gordon-Nesbitt, “position[ed] Israel as a powerful weapon in US attempts to thwart Arab self-determination and peace.” See To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture, 234. 59. Salkey, 203–4. 60. Salkey, 150. 61. Astrid Santana Fernández de Castro, “Imagen USA en el cubano 1968,” La Siempreviva 18 (2014): 20–29. 62. Edmundo Desnoes, ed. Now: El movimiento negro en Estados Unidos (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1967); Truman Capote, A sangre fría (La Habana: Instituto del Libro, 1968). 63. Santana Fernández de Castro, 26–29. Also, Kepa Artaraz has traced how the journal Pensamiento Crítico followed radical US movements. Kepa Artaraz, Cuba and Western Intellectuals Since 1959 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 75–81. 64. Noam Chomsky, “La Responsabilidad de Los Intelectuales,” trans. Jaime Sarusky, Unión 6.1 (1968): 139. 65. Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books 23 Feb. 1967, Web. 66. Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” 67. Noam Chomsky and George Steiner, “ ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books 23 Mar. 1967. 68. Chomsky and Steiner. 69. “M.I.T. Center Gets Aid from the CIA,” New York Times 18 Apr. 1966: 4. 70. However, Chomsky was one of the many antiwar activists who traveled to North Vietnam in this period. See Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia (Oakland, CA: AK, 2004). 71. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Responsabilidad de los intelectuales de los países subdesarollantes,” Casa de las Américas 8.47 (1968): 121–23. Santana Fernández de Castro also reads this essay as a response to Chomsky and her essay brought this line to my attention; I build on her analysis to consider the context of the CCH. 72. I am quoting the English translation that was published in IKON magazine. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “The Responsibility of the Intellectual,” IKON 6 (Oct.–Nov. 1968): 27 [emphasis in original]. 73. While Chomsky’s essay had made it to Cuba by way of Les Temps Modernes, an English translation of Retamar’s paper was partially blocked on its own circuit in the United States. The paper was included both in a special CCH number of Susan Sherman’s New York–based art and 238  Notes to Pages 70–74

politics magazine IKON in October–November 1968, and in a coproduced Cuba supplement of The Guardian and the SDS arts magazine Caw! Sherman, who had endured FBI surveillance upon her return from CCH, later found out that the CCH issue of IKON was never sent out by her distributor, and that the 500 copies she sent to Margaret Randall in Mexico City never arrived. See Susan Sherman, America’s Child. First edition, Curbstone Press, 2007. 74. Quoted in Meluzá, 7 [my translation]. 75. See Franco, as well as Jorge Fornet, El 71: Anatomía de una Crisis (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2013); Lillian Guerra, Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959–1971 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Lourdes Casal, ed., El Caso Padilla; Literatura y Revolución en Cuba; Documentos (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1971). 76. See Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (New York: William Morrow, 2010); and Sandra Levinson and Carol Brightman, eds., Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971). Chapter 4: American Spectacle and the Vietnam War Sublime 1. Portions of this chapter appeared in a different form as the introduction to William V. Spanos, Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 2. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 3. For a critique of such base-superstructure models as they pertain to cultural analysis, including ones founded on ontology, see William V. Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 133–38. 4. Harold Bloom had perceived the core issue of the sublime in writing about the uncanny, but he limited his insights to matters pertaining to the individual author’s psyche rather than the broader worldly context. See his A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); and Agon: Toward a Theory of Revision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For other reflections on the sublime and literature, see Notes to Pages 74–78 239









Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978); Mary Arensberg, ed., The American Sublime (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); and Rob Wilson, American Sublime: A Genealogy of a Poetic Genre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). Of these, only Wilson’s genealogy addressed the worldly uses to which American writers, particularly poets, put the “American Sublime,” but Wilson too remained unaware of the relationship between the American Sublime and the American exceptionalist ethos. 5. Among several recent volumes exploring the connections between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, two are especially helpful: see John Dumbrell and David Ryan, eds., Vietnam in Iraq: Tactics, Lessons, Legacies and Ghosts (London: Routledge, 2007); and Lloyd C. Gardner and Marilyn B. Young, Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (New York: New Press, 2007). 6. Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime), trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 [1756]); Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1790]), 128–59; Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, trans. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1764]); Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), especially issues 411–21; Anthony Ashley-Cooper, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit. The Moralists; A Philosophical Rhapsody. Volume 2 of Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (n.p.: John Darby, 1732 [1709]). 7. For the concept of the unpresentable, see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington; and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78–82. Of all the deconstructionists, only Lyotard recognized in some degree the worldly implications of the unpresentability of the sublime. 8. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, rev. and exp. ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 1993), 96. 9. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). Heidegger elaborates on these concepts in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962 [1927]), 227–35.

240  Notes to Pages 78–80

10. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” 100–101. 11. In Being and Time, Heidegger emphasizes that the “whence” of Dasein is “veiled” (174). We take him to mean by this a phenomenological consideration on how Dasein perceives her origin: the concealment of the origin is a prompt to questioning. Ontologically speaking, however, there is no origin, no “thrower.” 12. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” 101. 13. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 129–30. 14. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 130. 15. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 26–27. 16. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 17. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995 [1967]), 17. 18. Debord, 12. 19. Debord, 15. 20. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 95. See also Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1976), particularly the chapter entitled “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” 267–304. 21. Giorgio Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1996]), 82. 22. Agamben, 82, 85. 23. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 28. 24. Giorgio Agamben, “Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle,” Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 87. 25. Agamben, 84. 26. See William V. Spanos, “Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm,” Symplokē 16.1–2 (2008): 197 and passim. Notes to Pages 81–87 241

27. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 23. 28. Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990 (New York: Harper, 1991), 203. 29. Young, 243. 30. Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York: Penguin, 2015), x–xii. 31. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 44; see also Michael Bibby, ed., The Vietnam War and Postmodernity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 32. See William V. Spanos, America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 116–17. 33. Spanos, 258n53. 34. See, for example, Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War (New York: Ballantine, 1977), 102, quoted in Spanos, America’s Shadow, 250n18. 35. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999 [1982]), 115. 36. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam,” The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. 37. World War I, the Holocaust, and the French colonial wars in southeast Asia and Algeria each triggered movements of political and theoretical experimentation and brought the idea of the West into question: see William V. Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization, 53. 38. See William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Spanos, Shock and Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013). 39. Spanos, America’s Shadow, 170. Chapter

5:

From Kabul to Chicago

1. Jack Masey, Cold War Confrontations, US Exhibitions, and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden: Lars Muller, 2008). 2. See Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 242  Notes to Pages 88–102

3. See Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2016). 4. See Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 5. See, for example, Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Beatriz Colomina: Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); and Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 6. Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 191. 7. Orit Halpern, “Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving and Vision in Post-war American Design,” Journal of Visual Culture 11.3 (2012): 331. 8. “Art X = The Georgia Experiment,” Industrial Design Oct. 1954: 16. See also “A Designer with a Special Interest in Communication,” New York Times 3 Sept. 1959. 9. The multiscreen approach was a way to invite the viewer to make her own connections, and thus her own meaning, from the montage of images before her. A promotion of diverse patterns of meanings at once promised democratic difference of opinion—and even dissent— while belying an overarching insistence on uniformity or consensus in experience and interpretation. 10. See David Cort, “Darkness Under the Dome,” The Nation 1 Mar. 1956: 187–88. 11. Here I am indebted to Donald E. Pease’s work on American exceptionalism, and his claim that “the Cold War ushered in an era when many of the ideals of America were limited in order to protect the idea of the ideals of America”; see Pease, The New American Exceptionalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 12. Located inside the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan, the World Playhouse was Chicago’s first dedicated theater and art cinema, known especially for featuring foreign films. 13. Kathryne V. Lindberg, “Whose Canon? Gwendolyn Brooks: Founder at the Center of the ‘Margins,’ ” in Gendered Modernisms: American Notes to Pages 102–13 243

Women Poets and Their Readers, ed. Margaret Dickie and Thomas Travisano (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 289. Chapter

6:

The Unyielding Earth

1. Scholarship on Morrison’s work is justifiably extensive and varied, but with the exception of discussions of her 2012 novel Home (about a veteran of the Korean War), the question of a Cold War context is almost entirely absent from the critical reception of her corpus (see chapters 2 and 8). 2. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Introduction to Focus: ‘This Instant and This Triumph’: Women of Color Publishing,” American Book Review 29.4 (May–June 2008): 4–5. 3. For compelling discussions of how decolonization movements put forth diverse iterations of political community see John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan, “ ‘My Ambition Is Much Higher Than Independence’: US Power, the UN World, the Nation-State, and Their Critics,” in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Prasenjit Duara (London: Routledge, 2004), 131–51; Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007); Ronald Grigor Suny, “ ‘Don’t Paint Nationalism Red!’: National Revolution and Soviet Anti-Imperialism,” in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Prasenjit Duara (London: Routledge, 2004): 176–98; Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 4. Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 5. See Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; paperback 2007), for a sweeping historical account of the global Cold War. 6. For examples, see Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, 244  Notes to Pages 113–18

MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). The scholarship on the radical influences and transnational character of the black freedom and other nationalist movements in the United States is growing rapidly. For examples, see Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Joseph Keith, Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945–1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Alex Lubin, Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed, 1983); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a US Third World Left (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 7. For a helpful overview of the complex role of national difference and the right to self determination in the Russian empire during the period of the October Revolution, see Suny. 8. Jennifer Gillan, “Focusing on the Wrong Front: Historical Displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye,” African American Review 36.2 (2002): 284. 9. Gillan, 285. 10. See, for a few examples, J. Brooks Bousan, Quiet As It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Grace Kyungwon Hong, Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color, Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 31–63; Jane Kuenz, “The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity,” African American Review 27.3 (1993): 421–31; Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, “Re-membering the Body: Body Politics in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 12.2 (2002): 189–203; Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); and Valerie Smith, Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination (Chicester: Wiley, 2012). 11. Kelley, 8, 36, 49. Notes to Pages 118–21 245

12. Kelley, 49. 13. John N. Duvall further argues that the perspective of Soaphead, along with Claudia’s, in fact serve as an authorial mask by which Morrison fashions her own writerly authority. See Duvall, “Naming Invisible Authority: Toni Morrison’s Covert Letter to Ralph Ellison,” Studies in American Fiction 25.2 (Autumn 1997): 241–53. 14. Critics have debated about the representation of Soaphead Church as a “repressed” homosexual (especially in conjunction with his Caribbean and biracial heritage and whether Morrison has indulged in the homophobic stereotypes that especially militant black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement deployed against queer black men. Susan Neal Mayberry has argued, to the contrary, that Soaphead embodies one instance of the extensive damage inflicted by heteropatriarchal norms, which the novel in its entirety exposes; see Mayberry, Can’t I Love What I Criticize?: The Masculine and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 41–50. 15. For an insightful analysis of how a blues aesthetic informs and enables especially Claudia’s narration of communal trauma, see Cat Moses, “The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” African American Review 33.4 (1999): 623–37. 16. This is of course not to disavow the important types of crossing that black writers, artists, organizers, and party leaders did undertake, often at great personal risk and sacrifice, including black women such as Claudia Jones and Audre Lorde. 17. Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament.” Speech, Westminster, London, England, 8 June 1982. Web. 18. Especially important instances of this response included “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” “The Moynihan Report,” the “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders,” and “The Kerner Report.” 19. With the exception of a period between 1993 and 2000, the poverty rate for all Americans, which had reached historic lows in the early 1970s, has grown over several decades. In 2010, twenty-seven percent of African Americans and twenty-seven percent of Latinos lived under the poverty thresholds established by the US Census Bureau, as did nearly twenty percent of foreign-born residents of the nation. Furthermore, between 1980 and 2008, the number of incarcerated people in the United States grew from 500,000 to 2.3 million people (the highest rate of incarceration in the world), with fifty-eight 246  Notes to Pages 121–24

percent of those being African American and Latino prisoners. See http://www.npc.umich.edu/poverty/ and http://www.naacp.org/ pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet. 20. See, for example, Raymond F. Betts, Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2004); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, “Empire Preserv’d: How the Americans Put Anti-Communism before Anti-Imperialism,” in Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, ed. Prasenjit Duara (London: Routledge, 2004), 152–61; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 2008); and Suri, Power and Protest. 21. Kelly and Kaplan, 134–41. 22. For an account of the ideological mutations by which any number of those formerly on the left became vocal opponents of “identity politics,” see Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50.3 (1998): 471–522. 23. Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 91–97. 24. Melamed, 108, 97. 25. See Kimberly Springer, Living For the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 4-5; and Randy J. Ontiveros, In the Spirit of a New People: The Cultural Politics of the Chicano Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 175–94, for discussions of such attacks, as well as the complex “feminism-in-nationalism” that shaped the black nationalist and Chicano movements. 26. Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 322–24. 27. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “ ‘The Future of Our Worlds’: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 8.2 (2008): 101. 28. Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, x. See also Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 90–96, 154–73; and Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 110–37. 29. Melamed, 104. See also Hong, 107–9. Notes to Pages 124–26 247

30. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 41–63. See also Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 111–19. 31. See, for example, Arianne Burford, “Cartographies of a Violent Landscape: Viramontes’ and Moraga’s Remapping of Feminisms in Under the Feet of Jesus and Heroes and Other Saints,” Genders 47 (June 2008), web; Dennis López, “ ‘You Talk ’merican?’: Class, Value, and the Social Production of Difference in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus,” College Literature 41.4 (Fall 2014): 41–70; and Anne Shea, “ ‘Don’t Let Them Make You Feel You Did a Crime’: Immigration Law, Labor Rights, and Farmworker Testimony,” MELUS 28.1 (Spring 2003): 123–44. 32. Shea, 123–27. 33. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds., “Introduction,” in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 34. Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 33–34. 35. Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. 36. Talavera et al., “Deportation in the US-Mexico Borderlands: Anticipation, Experience, and Memory,” in The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, eds. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 171–84. See also De Genova and Peutz, “Introduction,” 14–15. 37. Mitchum Huehls, “Ostension, Simile, Catachresis: Misuing Helena Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus to Rethink the GlobalizationEnvironmentalism Relation,” Discourse 29.2/3 (Spring/Fall 2007): 353. 38. Huehls, 361. 39. For a thorough discussion of immigration restrictions and reform in the twentieth century, see Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 40. See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 178–79. 41. Campbell, 170–71. 248  Notes to Pages 127–34

42. Keith, 10, 13. 43. Pérez, 7. Chapter 7: “Home is Where the Hatred Is” 1. Diane Fisher, “Miss Hansberry & Bobby K.: Birthweight Low, Jobs Few, Death Comes Early,” Village Voice 6 June 1963: 8–9. 2. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 276–91. 3. Belletto and Keith, “Introduction: Neocolonialism and Literature,” 10. 4. Belletto and Keith, 10–11. 5. See Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 259–75. 6. Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); GerShun Avilez, “Housing the Black Body: Value, Domestic Space, and Segregation Narratives” African American Review 42:1 (Spring 2008): 135–47. 7. McKenzie, 3. Because early subdivisions tended to house affluent communities, racial exclusion attained cultural cachet that helped guarantee its pervasiveness among middle-class homeowners. 8. Quoted in McKenzie, 69. 9. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, vol. I (New York: Harper, 1962 [1945]), 271–72. 10. McKenzie, 63; Clement E. Vose, Caucasians Only: The Supreme Court, the NAACP, and the Restrictive Covenant Cases (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 225. The FHA’s primary purpose was to insure private lending institutions against loss on housing loans. In 1949 New York housing consultant Charles Abrams wrote that the FHA was “the most serious government offender against racial equality” (qtd. in Vose, 225). 11. McKenzie, 67. 12. Allen R. Kamp, “The History Behind Hansberry v. Lee.” University of California-Davis Law Review 20.3 (Spring 1987): 481–99, 484. 13. Cayton and Drake, 202. Notes to Pages 134–39 249

14. Richard Thompson Ford, “The Boundaries of Race: Political Geography in Legal Analysis,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: New Press, 1995), 449–65, 450. 15. Cayton and Drake, 211. 16. See Kamp, 483–90, 498; Smith, 284–87. 17. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47. 18. The NAACP’s petition was prepared by W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote: “It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi; not Stalin and Molotov but Milbo and Rankin” (qtd. in Borstelmann, 77). 19. Vose, 169; Borstelmann, 59, 76–77. 20. Indeed, concomitant with divorcing race rights from anticolonialism, anti-Communist policies like the Marshall Plan strengthened colonialism by giving European allies resources that they used to keep control over their colonies. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 12. On African American internationalism of the World War II era, see also Cayton and Drake, 762–67; Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); and James Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 21. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic, 1988), 14. 22. Catherine Jurca, “The Sanctimonious Suburbanite: Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” American Literary History 11:1 (Spring 1999): 82–106, 85. Jurca compellingly argues that Wilson recuperates the professional-managerial class’s unhappiness and sense of victimization as the means through which they succeed within the strictures of Cold War corporate America, by rebelling against it only to replicate its social order. I largely agree with this but contend that the novel shows the material basis for white middle-class social mobility to be entrepreneurial suburban development. 23. May, 14. 250  Notes to Pages 139–41

24. Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Boston: De Capo, 2002 [1955]), 240. 25. Tom is strikingly uncertain in the face of Betsy’s confident plans to capitalize on his grandmother’s estate. In response to Betsy’s grandiose plans to “put up a whole housing development,” Tom says, “I’m dizzy . . . To do that, you’d need capital. You’d have to know the real-estate business and the building business.” To which Betsy declares, “I can learn, and I will devote full time to it” (63). The novel later makes it clear that Betsy is less interested in a bigger place than in having a more fulfilling marriage (112), but this fulfillment is ultimately contingent on the Raths embarking on their housing development. 26. Emily S. Rosenberg, “ ‘Foreign Affairs’ after World War II: Connecting Sexual and International Politics,” Diplomatic History 18.1 (Winter 1994): 66. 27. Lending her authority as mother-wife, Betsy comes around to seeing the moral imperative of supporting her husband’s Italian mistress and their son: “He should have a good education and everything he needs. Do they have trouble getting enough food and medicine and clothes over there? . . . We shouldn’t just send money” (272). Indeed, the United States sent machinery, materials, and experts along with money to prop up Western Europe against the Communist threat. See James E. Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940–1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). 28. Wilson, 255. In The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Cold War geopolitical uncertainties evoked during Tom’s commute to work parallel his personal economic and existential uncertainties: “Tom opened his [paper] and read a long story about negotiations in Korea. A columnist debated the question of when Russia would have hydrogen bombs to drop on the United States. Tom folded his paper and stared out the window at the suburban stations gliding by. He wondered what it would be like to work for Ogden and Hopkins, and he wondered whether Betsy’s schemes could possibly turn out successfully. What happened if he got fired by Hopkins and Betsy’s real-estate deals turned into a fiasco?” (67). The novel indicates that American integrity in both domestic and international dealings (Tom’s support of his families in Italy and the United States) are mutually beneficial. Notes to Pages 141–42 251

29. The novel ends with Tom preparing to use his windfall from his real estate venture to set up the trust fund for his Italian family, thereby emphasizing that the future lies with the reconstruction of both American and Western European families through suburban development. 30. Wilson, 230–32. 31. Wilson, 133. 32. Wilson 245. 33. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit illustrates McKenzie’s point that even after the Court banned racial restrictive covenants, “homeowner associations and restrictive covenants shifted their emphasis to class discrimination. . . . Less affluent families, who might be able to afford a house only by pooling resources or renting out rooms, would be prohibited from buying. Lifestyle restrictions were justified with such familiar euphemisms as ‘preserving the character’—or ‘integrity’ or ‘stability’—of a neighborhood rather than by referring to race or class. Nonetheless, the principle is still the same: certain groups of people are considered a threat to property values and are excluded. The result is still increased homogeneity, and, given economic disparities between white and nonwhite Americans, this approach inevitably contributes to continuing racial segregation” (McKenzie 78). 34. Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (New York: Vintage, 1995), 20. 35. Hansberry, “The Scars of the Ghetto,” Monthly Review 41.3 (July/August 1989 [1965]): 52–55. 36. Smith, 285. 37. Harold Cruse, “Lorraine Hansberry,” in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership (New York: Quill, 1984), 267–84. 38. See, for example, Gordon, 124, and Carter, 8 and 21. 39. Hansberry, Raisin, 135. 40. Hansberry, Raisin, 45. 41. Original emphases, Hansberry, Raisin, 84. 42. Ossie Davis, “The Significance of Lorraine Hansberry,” Freedomways 5.3 (1965): 396–402, 400. 43. Gordon attributes four elements to the aesthetics of segregation: “evidence of systemic exploitation and its human costs; prophecy of 252  Notes to Pages 142–44

black rage; demonstration of black resistance to the dehumanizing effects of segregation; and the presence or awareness of the violence that maintain color lines and social inequality.” Michelle Y. Gordon, “ ‘Somewhat Like War’: The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun.” African American Review 42:1 (Spring 2008): 121–33, 126. 44. In addition to Gordon, see Steven Carter, Hansberry’s Drama (New York: Meridian, 1993), 34–43; Harry J. Elam, “Remembering Africa, Performing Cultural Memory: Lorraine Hansberry, SuzanLori Parks and Djanet Sears,” in Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama, ed. Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter (Brussels, Belgium: Peter Lang, 2008), 31–48; and Fanon Che Wilkins, “Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950–1965,” Radical History Review 95 (Spring 2006): 191–210. 45. Conversely, whereas scholarship on Hansberry’s pan-Africanism have not systematically shown how this informs Raisin’s presentation of housing and home, discussion of housing and home in the play have not fully acknowledged the ways that these issues play out through a Black internationalist framework. See Carter, 44–66; Judith E. Smith, Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 310–27; Avilez, 135–47; Kristin L. Matthews, “The Politics of ‘Home’ in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” Modern Drama 51:4 (Winter 2008): 556–78. 46. Hansberry, Raisin, 131 [my emphases]. 47. Hansberry, Raisin, 134. 48. Hansberry, Raisin, 142–43. The mise-en-scène at the beginning of Act 3 explicitly parallels Beneatha’s and Walter’s existential crisis, when “we see on a line from her brother’s bedroom the sameness of their attitudes” of “profound disappointment,” despite the fact that they sit in separate rooms (131). 49. Hansberry, Raisin, 118, 144, 135. 50. Hansberry, Raisin, 135. 51. Hansberry, Raisin, 136. Asagasi applies the word “home” to Nigeria five times at the beginning of Act 3. 52. Hansberry, “The Scars of the Ghetto,” 52. As Smith writes, “Asagai’s interaction with the Youngers . . . suggest[s] that cultural exchange Notes to Pages 144–46 253

could place the struggles of American blacks in a wider international context, expanding their political imagination” (314). 53. Wilkins, 192. On Hansberry’s political evolution and her involvement with the black Left, see also Smith, 290–304. 54. Meriwether, 165. 55. Describing Asagai, Hansberry wrote, “He has ascertained the nature of political despotism and seen in it not the occasion for cynicism – but an ever growing sense of how the new will never cease to replace the old. He thinks man and history are marvelous on account of his view. Finally, it is my own view” (qtd. in Carter, 60). Carter persuasively contends that Asagai is Hansberry’s spokesperson (35, 59). 56. Ford, 449. 57. Ford, 462. 58. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, rev. ed. (New York: New Press, 2012); and Andrea S. Boyles, Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 59. Norris, 135. 60. Hansberry, “The Scars of the Ghetto,” 55. Chapter 8: Returning from the Unending Korean War 1. See Vaughn Rasberry, Race and the Totalitarian Century: Geopolitics in the Black Literary Imagination. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press [1991], 1999). 2. Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2011). 3. See Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press [2000]); and Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 4. See Cumings, The Korean War: A History; and Joseph Darda, “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War,” American Literature 87.1 (2015): 79–105. 5. Cumings, The Korean War: A History; and Darda. 6. See Donald Pease, “Moby Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease

254  Notes to Pages 146–51

(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), [113–54]; and Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War. 7. See Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); and Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 8. Toni Morrison, Home (New York: Vintage, 2012), 4–5. 9. Morrison, 138–39. 10. Steven Belletto, “The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel,” American Literature 87.1 (2015): 51–77. 11. Elaine H. Kim, “Roots and Wings: An Overview of Korean American Literature, 1934–2003,” in Korean American Literature, ed. Young-Key Kim-Renaud, R. Richard Grinker, and Kirk W. Larsen. (Washington, DC: George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, 2004), 13. 12. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, Present and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995). 13. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 14. Theresa Hak Kyung, Dictee (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 81. 15. Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (New York: Vintage, 2009), 6. 16. See Sherie Mershon and Steven Schlossman, Foxholes and Color Lines: Desegregating the US Armed Forces (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Manuela Lopez Ramirez, “The Shell-Shocked Veteran in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Home,” ATLANTIS: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies 38.1 (June 2016): 129–47. 17. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 257. 18. Leerom Medovoi, “The Race War within: Biopolitics of the Long Cold War,” in American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War: A Critical Assessment, ed. Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 163–86. 19. Medovoi. 20. See Arif Dirlik, “Global South: Predicament and Promise,” Global South 1.1 (Winter 2007): 12–23; and Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Notes to Pages 151–56 255

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Fifty Years After,” in The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 207–8. 22. Colleen Lye, “When the Past Is Past,” Public Books 14 Feb. 2013. Web. 23. See Cumings, The Korean War: A History. 24. Cumings. 25. Cumings. 26. Cumings. 27. Darda. 28. Cumings, The Korean War: A History. 29. Kwon, 157. 30. Kwon, 149. 31. See Chen. 32. Kwon, 99. 33. Darda, “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War.” 34. See Michael Cullen Green, Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military after World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 35. Darda. 36. Darda, 83. 37. Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections Between African American and Asian-Americans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7. 38. Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” an interview conducted by Cristopher Bollen, Interview 1 May 2012. Web. 39. Mary Dudziak, “The Limits of Empathy in Toni Morrison’s Home,” OUPblog. Oxford University Press’s Academic Insights for the Thinking World, 28 May 2012. Web. 40. Kathy Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. 41. Cathy Caruth, “Recapturing the Past,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 155. 42. Martin Jay, “Experience Without a Subject: Walter Benjamin and the Novel,” in Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 47–61. 43. Dudziak, “The Limits of Empathy in Toni Morrison’s Home.” 44. Shoshanna Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (London: Routledge, 1991). 256  Notes to Pages 156–66

Chapter 9: US Cultural Attachés and the Cold War 1. José Clemente Orozco, The Epic of American Civilization (1932–1934), Fresco 15, “Gods of the Modern World.” See Jacquelynn Baas, “The Epic of American Civilization: The Mural at Dartmouth College (1932–1934),” in José Clemente Orozco in the United States, 1927–1934, ed. Renato González Mello and Diane Miliotes (New York: Hood Museum of Art in Association with W. W. Norton, 2002), 42–185. 2. William Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge of Isolation, 1937–1940 (New York: Harper, 1952) and The Undeclared War, 1940– 1941 (New York: Harper, 1953). 3. H. G. Nichols, review of Gleason and Langer, The Challenge of Isolation, International Affairs 28.4 (Oct. 1952): 541. 4. Deborah Davis, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire (New York: Sheridan Square, 1991), 129–30. 5. Gleason’s papers are held at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. 6. John Carlos Rowe, “Areas of Concern: Areas Studies and the New American Studies,” The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities, 2012), 84–101. 7. Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939–1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 247–321. 8. Winks, 311. 9. Winks, 310. 10. Norman Holmes Pearson, ed., The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (New York: Random House, 1937). First published as a Modern Library Giant on January 1, 1937, Pearson’s one-volume edition went through many subsequent editions and is familiar to many students and general readers between 1937 and 1970, but it can hardly be considered a major scholarly edition with the sort of apparatus and explanatory notes we today expect from such scholarly editing. 11. Pearson’s cultural politics in his relations with expatriate modernists, like H. D., is much more complicated, of course, since he was instrumental in helping Ezra Pound escape the treason charge facing Pound at the end of the war by encouraging Pound to enter a plea of insanity. 12. I was an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1971 to 1975, on leave from 1974 to 1975 as a Fulbright Professor at the University of the Saar, Germany. Notes to Pages 171–77 257

13. Richard Horwitz, ed., Exporting America: Essays on American Studies Abroad (London: Taylor, 1993), 116n40. 14. Winks, 247–21. 15. Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War, 1945–1960: Calling the Tune? (London: Routledge, 2003). 16. Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 17. Carl Bode, “From Belgrade to East Berlin: April–May 1967” (P38:A:26e) and “The View from East Germany” (P38:A:28a), unpublished MSS, Carl Bode Papers, Special Collections, University of Maryland Library. 18. Neubert has his own German Wikipedia page. 19. Daisy Wessel, Bild und Gegenbild: USA in der Belletristik der SBZ und der DDR (bis 1987) (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien, 1989), 60. 20. Bode, P38:A:28e, p. 3. 21. Bode, P38:A:28e, pp. 42–43. 22. I am quoting from the actual poster in the Carl Bode Papers, but the bracketed date is added from information Bode provides in P38:A:29e, p. 3. 23. Bode, P38:A:28e, pp. 42–43. 24. Bode, P38:A:28a, p. 3. 25. Erich Leitel, “Der militärisch-industrielle Komplex in den USA und die Behauptung von einer angeblichen sowjetischen Gefahr” in Gegen Imperialismus und Bürgerliche Ideologie (Jena: Friedrich-Schiller Universität Verlag, 1977), 44–73. 26. I conducted two formal interviews with Carolyn Bode, the first at Starbuck’s in Santa Monica on March 19, 2014, and the second at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica on July 23, 2014. 27. See David F. Krugler, The Voice of America and the Domestic Propaganda Battles, 1945–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). 28. See United States Information Agency’s Wikipedia page. 29. Carl Bode, A Course in American Literature for the Advanced Study of English: Highlights of American Literature, Book IV (International Communications Agency, Educational and Cultural Affairs, English Teaching Division, 1980); and Bode, ed., American Perspective: The United States in the Modern Age (Washington, DC: United States Information Agency, Division for the Study of the United States, 1990).

258  Notes to Pages 177–85

Chapter 10: The Security State Citizen and the Global Cold War 1. See Peter J. Taylor, Britain and the Cold War: 1945 as Geopolitical Transition (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 2. Peter Boxall, “From Joyce to Beckett: From National to Global,” in Beckett and Ethics, ed. Russell Smith (London: Continuum, 2008), 147–62; quotation on 156. 3. Boxall, 153. 4. Steven Connor, “Preface,” in Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (London: Faber, 2010), ix. 5. The two Bikini tests organized by the Manhattan Project for Operation Crossroads in July 1946 were the first since Nagasaki. These were followed by Operation Sandstone, the three Eniwetok tests in April and May 1948, and run by the Atomic Energy Commission. 6. Philip Cantelon and Robert Williams, eds., The American Atom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 75–76. 7. Truman Doctrine address to Congress, March 12, 1947, on Yale Law School’s Avalon Project website. 8. Le Monde online archives. 9. Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: John Calder, 1959), 353. 10. Parallel rhyme is there in the original French: “pour quoi faire, pour que tout soit clair” (Samuel Beckett, L’Innommable [Paris: Editions de minuit, 1953], 168)—reinforced by repetition of “ce n’est pas clair” just beforehand. 11. Equivalent rhyme in the original French; Beckett rhymes (repeated) “errer” with “poussière” (192), the \ɛ.ʁ\ repetition summoning the ghost of “nucléaire.” 12. Equivalent in French with heavy rhyming on “voir” and repeated “noir” leading to an “azur”-“sers” pairing (202). 13. Philip Marshall Brown, “World Law,” American Journal of International Law 40 (1946): 159–60; quotation on 159. 14. A. M. Meerloo, “Atomic Nerve War and the Urge for Catastrophe,” Mens & Maatschappij 22.6 (1947): 333–44; quotation on 339. 15. William T. R. Fox, The Super-Powers: The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union– Their Responsibility for Peace (New York: Harcourt, 1944).

Notes to Pages 188–92 259

16. Winston Churchill, “ ‘The Sinews of Peace’ or ‘Iron Curtain’ Speech,” 5 Mar. 1946, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. Churchill Centre website, 1 Jan. 2016. 17. As Churchill put it: “If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealth be added to that of the United States . . . in the air, on the sea, all over the globe . . . there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power.” 18. Significantly when he had no power: he was a deposed as prime minister with the Labour landslide of 1945. 19. Matthew Jones, “Up the Garden Path? Britain’s Nuclear History in the Far East, 1954–1962,” International History Review 25.2 (2003): 306–33; quotation on 311. 20. Earl of Home, “SEATO Nuclear Weapons,” 27 Feb. 1956, quoted in Jones, “Up the Garden Path?,” 312. 21. James Purdon, ‘ “Is This War?” British Fictions of Emergency in the Hot Cold War,” in War and Literature, ed. Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 41–58; quotation on 58. 22. Perry Anderson, “The Left in the Fifties,” New Left Review 29 (Jan.– Feb. 1965): 12. 23. Mike Davis, “Nuclear Imperialism and Extended Deterrence,” in Exterminism and Cold War, ed. New Left Review (London: Verso, 1982), 35–64; quotation on 53. 24. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–43. 25. Conor Cruise O’Brien, Murderous Angels: A Political Tragedy and Comedy in Black and White (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1968), xix–xx. See also Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick, Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 26. 1961 letter, quoted in Carole J. L. Collins, “The Cold War Comes to Africa: Cordier and the 1960 Congo Crisis,” Journal of International Affairs 47.1 (Summer 93): 243–69. 27. O’Brien, xx. 28. Victoria Nelson, “Symmes Hole, Or the South Polar Romance,” Raritan 17.2 (Fall 1997): 136–67. 29. New Worlds, Oct. 1966, transcribed at J. G. Ballard website. 30. “[T]he past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age.” J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London: Harper, 1967), 267. 260  Notes to Pages 192–201

31. Ballard interviewed by Brendan Hennessy, Transatlantic Review 39 (1971), at J. G. Ballard website. 32. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Harper, 2006 [1970]), 1. 33. Who themselves create a further triangle, the ghostly avatars Xero, Coma, Kline. 34. See Fabienne Collignon on this: she speaks of the shape created by the blast at “0.016 seconds and for a short while after” as “a luminous globule, a dome of a smooth, opaque essence,” a “techno-form” intimating “a dream-world/death-world,” “expressions of Freud’s pleasure principle, the wish to return to an inanimate state”—Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 204–5. Chapter 11: The Forever War, or, Did the Cold War Really End? 1. Eve Conant, “Is the Cold War Back?,” National Geographic 13 Sept. 2014. Web. 2. David Frum, “The Cold War Never Really Ended,” Atlantic July/Aug. 2015. 3. David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth, “As Democrats Gather, a Russian Subplot Raises Intrigue,” New York Times 24 July 2016. Web. 4. Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966 [1965]), 22. 5. Greg Grandin, “What’s a Neoliberal to Do?,” Nation 20 Feb. 2003. Web. 6. Nkrumah, xi. 7. Nkrumah, 47. 8. Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2, 9. 9. Sargent, 2. 10. Sargent, 302. 11. Sargent, 306. 12. Grandin. 13. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Signet, 2001 [1999]), 11. 14. Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 205. 15. zunguzungu (Aaron Bady), “African Child Soldiers,” zunguzungu, n.d., Web. See also Bady’s elaboration of this argument in his essay “The Notes to Pages 201–09 261

Last Child Soldier: Beasts of No Nation and the Child-Soldier Narrative,” Los Angeles Review of Books 11 Nov. 2015. Web. 16. Bowden, 6. 17. David Espey, “America and Vietnam: The Indian Subtext,” Journal of American Culture and Literature—Uprising: The Protests and the Arts, ed. David Landrey and Bilge Mutluay (Ankara: Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University, 1994); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998 [1992]), 441–623. 18. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Norton, 1999 [1958]), 206. 19. See also Amanda Kay McVety, “JFK and Modernization Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Andrew Hoberek (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 103–17; and Vaughn Rasberry, “JFK and the Global Anticolonial Movement,” Cambridge Companion to John F. Kennedy, 118–33. 20. Schmidt, 197. 21. Schmidt, 194. 22. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 36. 23. Ferguson, 208. 24. Ferguson, 210. 25. Ferguson, 208. 26. Schmidt, 215. During the Cold War, US military responsibility for the continent had been split among the European, Central, and Pacific Commands (218). 27. Bowden, “Afterword” (2010), Black Hawk Down (New York: Grove, 1999), 356. 28. Bowden, 354. 29. Bowden, 27. 30. Bowden, x. Bowden’s use of McCarthy here illustrates my point, since no one would accuse Blood Meridian of a sanguine view of the world, but McCarthy’s attitude seems poised uncomfortably between horror and the kind of admiration that Bowden will commit to wholesale. 31. Bowden, 355–56. 32. John Updike, “On Not Being a Dove,” Commentary 1 Mar. 1989. Web. 262  Notes to Pages 209–13

33. Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley, eds., Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (London: Peter Owen, 1967). 34. Kathleen Lathrop, “The Coup: John Updike’s Modernist Masterpiece,” Modern Fiction Studies 31.2 (Summer 1985): 250. 35. R. Z. Sheppard, “Books: White Mischief,” Time 18 Dec. 1978. Web. 36. Jennifer Seymour Whitaker, “Review of V. S. Naipul, A Bend in the River and John Updike, The Coup,” Foreign Affairs (Fall 1979), 206. 37. John Updike, The Coup (New York: Knopf, 1978), 7. 38. D. Quentin Miller, John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 154. 39. Malini Schueller, “Containing the Third World: John Updike’s The Coup,” Modern Fiction Studies 37.1 (Spring 1991): 113–28. 40. Miller, 154. 41. Miller, 155. 42. Miller, 161. 43. Schueller, 123. 44. Schueller, 123. 45. Miller, 156. 46. Dan Sinykin, Richard Jean So, and Jessica Young, “Statistical Modeling and Literary Criticism: The Case of Economic Language in US Fiction,” forthcoming. 47. Irving Leonard Markovitz, “John Updike’s Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 14.3 (1980): 545. 48. See Andrew Hoberek, The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 49. Markovitz, 539.

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index

Abani, Chris, 209 abjection: in The Bluest Eye, 119, 122; in Under the Feet of Jesus, 128 Abrams, Charles, 249n10 Addison, Joseph, 79 Afghan War, 205 Africa: and Cold War, 209, 211–12; in The Coup, 215–17. See also Congo African Americans: and African independence, 48, 197; and anticapitalism, 49; and anticolonialism, 47, 49, 137, 140–41, 145–46, 232n5; and civil rights, 38–39; and Cold War, 44–45, 52, 55–56, 140, 149; and Congo Crisis, 8, 38–40, 44–45, 55; cultural politics of, 47, 55; elite, politics of, 44–45, 49–52; and housing segregation, 139, 143–46; and Korean War, 10, 150–51, 161–64; Lumumba assassination protest, 46–50, 55–56; pathologization of, 124; and poverty, 124, 247n19 Agamben, Giorgio, 84, 86 Algerian War of Independence, 78

alienage, 132–34 All-African People’s Conference, 40–41 Allende, Salvador, 206 Alvarez, Santiago, 59 American Committee for Aid to Katanga Freedom Fighters, 8, 39, 50, 52 American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS), 175, 179 American exceptionalism, 87–88; and American Studies, 185; and anticolonialism, 7, 137; and anti-Communism, 3, 7, 137; and Cold War, 243n11; and colonialism, 3; groundlessness of, 77; and spectacle, 79; and the sublime, 239n4; and universalism, 90–91, 96–97; and Vietnam War, 9, 90; and violence, 9, 96–97; and War on Terror, 78 American literature: and realism, 207 American Sniper (film), 208 American Society of African Culture (AMSAC), 40–41 American Studies, 78–79, 94–95, 173, 178; and American exceptionalism,

185; and Cold War, 118–19; in Eastern Europe, 181–82; transnational turn in, 6, 183, 185 Anderson, Perry, 196 Angelou, Maya, 8, 39, 47, 56 Angola, 211–12 anti-Americanism, 11 anticolonialism, 196; and American exceptionalism, 7, 137; and African Americans, 47, 49, 137, 140–41, 145–46, 232n5; and anti-Communism, 146; and armed struggle, 60; and black cultural politics, 47; and civil rights movement, 250n20; and internationalism, 137, 140–41; and neocolonialism, 3–4; in A Raisin in the Sun, 144–46; and transnational struggle, 121 anti-Communism: and the academic left, 178; and American exceptionalism, 3, 7, 137; and anticolonialism, 146; and Cold War, 6–7; and Congo, 51–52; and neocolonialism, 3–4; and postmodernism, 7. See also Communism anti-imperialism, 69; of US intellectuals, 70–71 antiracism: Cold War containment of, 125; and colorblindness, 125; and liberal multiculturalism, 125; and transnational struggle, 121 Appy, Christian, 90 Árbenz, Jacobo, 4 area studies, 175 Arendt, Hannah, 86 art, revolutionary, 62, 67 Ashley-Cooper, Anthony, 79 Asian American literature, 18, 36

286  Index

assemblage, 39 Atrocity Exhibition, The (Ballard), 200–203 Badouin (King of Congo), 42–43 Bady, Aaron, 209 Baldwin, James, 39, 47–48, 56, 66, 232n5, 236n41 Baldwin, Kate, 9 Ballard, J. G., 11, 200–203 Bandung Asian-African Conference, 60 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 8, 39, 47–48, 161; on Ralph Bunche, 50 Barre, Siad, 211 Bashir, Mustafa, 232n9 Beasts of No Nation (Iweala), 209 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 201, 203; internationalism of, 188 Bell, Daniel, 72 Belletto, Steven, 8, 41, 137, 152–54, 205 Bellow, Saul, 216 Bentley, Eric, 64 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 88 biopower: and race, 155 Black Arts Movement: and homophobia, 246n14 Black Hawk Down (Bowden book), 207, 208, 209–10, 212–13, 220 Black Hawk Down (film), 11, 207–8 black internationalism, 10, 137, 146; and anticolonialism, 137, 140–41; and Cold War, 149; and A Raisin in the Sun, 145, 253n45. See also internationalism Black Lives Matter, 95 black nationalism, 48; and homophobia, 246n14 Black Panther Party, 75

black studies, 94–95 blackness: and Cold War, 56; and neocolonialism, 50 Blood Meridian (McCarthy), 213, 262n30 Bloom, Harold, 79, 81, 239n4 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 116–17, 119–23, 135, 246n13; abjection in, 119, 122; critical reception of, 119; dispossession in, 121; racial capital in, 121; respectability politics in, 120–22. See also Morrison, Toni Bode, Carl, 11, 172, 173, 177–86; cultural attaché work, 178, 182, 183–86; and USIA, 183–85 Bode, Carolyn, 182 Bond, Horace Mann, 40 Borstelmann, Thomas, 54, 55, 139, 233n12 Bowden, Mark, 207, 209–10, 212–14, 220, 262n30. See also Black Hawk Down (Bowden) Boxall, Peter, 188–89, 191 Bradbury, Ray, 57–58, 59, 71 Bridges of Toko-Ri, The (Michener), 19, 25 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 9, 104. See also Maud Martha (Brooks) Brown, Irving, 50 Brown, Michael, 149 Brünig, Eberhard, 179 Buckley, William F., 52 Bunche, Ralph, 39; Adlai Stevenson, relationship with, 233n10; and Congo Crisis, 42–46, 49–50 Burden, William, 233n12 Burdick, Eugene, 210 Burke, Edmund, 79, 81 Burnham, James, 52

Burnham, Louis, 49 Bush, George H. W., 95; race, pathologization of, 124 Cabral, Amilcar, 60 Cambodia, 211 Campbell, David, 134 canon wars, 125 capitalism: and colonialism, 6; and Communism, 142; and Congo Crisis, 54; and democracy, 101–2; and imperialism, 6; racial, 7 Carbonell, Walterio, 63 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Turé), 66, 68 Carpentier, Alejo, 61 Carter, Steven, 254n55 Caruth, Cathy, 164 Casa de las Américas (magazine), 9 Castro, Fidel: at CCH, 61, 234n7; on domestic intellectuals, 62; and Third World movement, 60 Cayton, Horace, 138–39 Cesaire, Aimé, 231n3 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 19, 29–30, 153, 154 Challenge of Isolation, 1937–1940, The (Langer and Gleason), 173, 175 Choi, Susan, 19, 35, 37, 153 Chomsky, Noam: on intellectuals, responsibility of, 59, 71–74, 238n73; on US imperialism, 72; on Vietnam War, 71–72, 238n70 Churchill, Winston, 11, 188, 192, 260n17 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency): Africa, involvement in, 40–41; and All-African People’s Conference, 40; and Allende, 206; creation of,

Index 287

159; funding of anti-Communist organizations, 61; and Guatemalan coup, 4; and Guevara assassination, 60–61; and Lumumba assassination, 197; and state-scholarly complex, 174, 176, 178 civil rights movement, 39–40; and anticolonialism, 250n20; and Cold War, 38–39, 45, 118, 142, 147; and Communism, 48; and pan-Africanism, 145; and transnationalism, 118, 244n6; and US imperialism, 39. See also African Americans Clarke, Bill, 183, 184 Clinton, Bill, 208 Clybourne Park (Norris), 138, 147–49 Cohn, Deborah, 61 COINTELPRO, 118 Cold War, 228n5; and Africa, 209, 211– 12; and African Americans, 44–45, 52, 55–56, 140, 149; afterlife of, 159; and American exceptionalism, 243n11; and anti-Communism, 6–7; biopolitics of, 156–57; and blackness, 56; and colonialism, 154–55, 162–63; as colorblind, 155; and Congo Crisis, 50–53; and containment, 229n5; and Cuba, 66–67; and decolonization, 159–60, 192; and democracy, 3; and dispossession, 124; and domesticity, 142; and empire, 11; and epistemology, 17; fictions of, 195–96; and freedom, 3; and Global South, 159–60; and globalization, 192, 195, 199–200, 205; as ideological construct, 6; and imperialism, 6, 154–55; and integration, 124–25, 229n5; and internationalism, 10,

288  Index

119, 137, 147; literary frame of, 19–22, 26–34, 37, 151, 216; and neocolonialism, 2–3, 37, 124, 206; and neoliberalism, 118; and race, 9–10, 56, 102–3, 139, 155–57; and racialized violence, 164; scholarly foundation of, 174; “second Cold War,” 124; and subjectivity, 191, 195, 200, 203; as unending, 204–5, 207, 210–11, 212; and US hegemony, 2; and US interventionism, 4–5, 9; and US universalism, 102–3; and Vietnam War, 90; and War on Terror, 205, 210–11. See also Korea; Korean War Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, 6, 227n13 Collignon, Fabienne, 261n34 colonialism: and American exceptionalism, 3; Belgian, 53; and capitalism, 6; and Cold War, 54–55, 162–63; Japanese, 157–58; and liberation struggles, 2; and US foreign policy, 158, 226n2. See also empire; imperialism; neocolonialism colonization, American, 76 colorblindness, 121, 125; and Cold War, 155. See also race Communications Primer, A (film), 107 communications theory, 9, 102–7; and Maud Martha, 111 Communism: and civil rights movement, 48; and containment, 229n5; in Hold Back the Night, 21; and Patrice Lumumba, 46, 54; and US capitalism, 142. See also anti-Communism Conant, Eve, 204, 205

Condon, Richard, 18–19 Congo: and anti-Communism, 51–52; Brussels Round Table, 41–42; civil war in, 8; decolonization of, 38, 42; independence of, 39–40, 41–43, 197; Katanga secession, 43–44, 45, 52, 197, 231n3; post-independence, 43; and United Nations, 39, 42–46, 49–50 Congo Crisis, 38–40, 50–53; and African Americans, 8, 38–40, 44–45, 55; and anti-Communism, 51–52; and capitalism, 54. See also Bunche, Ralph; Lumumba, Patrice Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 40, 51, 61–62, 65 Connors, Brad, 183–84 containment: and antiracism, 125; and Cold War, 229n5; of Communism, 229n5; and integration, 117, 124; and neocolonialism, 117 Cook, Mercer, 40 Cordier, Andrew, 46, 198 Council of African Affairs (CAA), 50, 233n11 Council on Foreign Relations, 175 Coup, The (Updike), 11, 214–20; Africa in, 215–17; Cold War frame of, 216; critical responses to, 215–16; ideological exhaustion in, 214, 219–20 Crane, Hart, 207, 208, 209 Crawford, Neta C., 42 Cruse, Harold, 143 Cry Korea Cry (Pak), 30 Cuba: and black liberation movement, 62; and Cold War frame, 66–67; cultural openness of, 66–67; quinquenio gris, 75; and Soviet dogmatism, 58,

234n7; and Third World movement, 60; travel restrictions to, 63–64; and US neocolonialism, 58 Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage (CAWAH), 47 cultural attachés, 172–73, 177–86 Cultural Congress of Havana (CCH), 57–70, 236n39; and anti-Communist left, 62; cultural boycott of US, 68–69; structure of, 237n53; surveillance of US delegates at, 69–70; US delegation to, 63–65, 69–70 cultural exhibitions, 107–8; and universalism, 102–3 cultural studies, 6 culture wars, 123 Cultures of United States Imperialism, 6, 227n13 Dane, Barbara, 65, 70 Davidson, Carl, 68 Davis, Deborah, 174–75 Davis, Mike, 196 Davis, Ossie, 144 DeBord, Guy, 83, 84–86 decolonization, 118; of British Empire, 187, 197; and Cold War, 159–60, 192; in the Congo, 38, 42; and desegregation, 146; and integration, 124–25; and Korea, 16; and neocolonialism, 5–6, 38; and United Nations, 40 DeGenova, Nicholas, 129 DeLillo, Don, 218, 220 Dellinger, David, 64–65, 70 deportation regimes, 129 desegregation, 148–49; and decolonization, 146; in Home, 161–62; of US military, 151, 161. See also segregation

Index 289

Desnoes, Edmundo, 59, 63, 71, 74 development: and exploitation, 4; housing, 137; and US foreign policy, 218; of white suburbs, 137 Díaz, Porfirio, 129 Dictee (Cha), 19, 29–30, 35, 154 differential consciousness, 127; in Under the Feet of Jesus, 132, 134–35 dispossession, 120; in The Bluest Eye, 121; and Cold War, 124; and Korean War, 156; of Mexicans, 133 Douglas, William O., 19–20, 27 Drake, St. Clair, 139 DuBois, Shirley Graham, 49 DuBois, W. E. B., 5, 10, 49, 104, 156, 250n18 Dudden, Alfred, 177 Dudziak, Mary, 166 Dulles, John Foster, 184 Duvall, John N., 246n13 Eames, Charles, 9, 102, 106, 107, 108 Eames, Ray, 9, 102, 107 Eastland, James O., 52 Eastwood, Clint, 208 Eisenhower, Dwight David, 43, 55, 174 empire: and Cold War, 11; and spectacle, 93–94, 95–96; and the sublime, 93–94; and transnationalism, 7. See also colonialism; imperialism; neocolonialism epistemology: and Cold War, 17 ethnic studies, 94–95 Fanon, Frantz, 5 Featherstone, Ralph, 67–68, 74 Feiffer, Jules, 64, 66, 70 Feldman, Keith, 118

290  Index

Felman, Shoshana, 166 feminism, US women of color, 10, 126 “feminism-in-nationalism,” 129–30, 247n25 Ferguson, James, 211, 212 Ferguson, Missouri, 149 FHA (Federal Housing Administration): and restrictive covenants, 138–39, 249n10 Ford, Richard Thompson, 148 Ford Foundation, 175, 179, 180 Foreign Student, The (Choi), 19, 30, 32, 33–35; language in, 33–35 Forever War, The (Haldeman), 11, 209–10 Forman, James, 162 Foucault, Michel, 31 Fox, William T. R., 192 Fox Girl (Keller), 31 Franco, Jean, 62, 66 Frank, Pat, 15–16, 20, 24, 29, 35–36, 153; and neocolonialism, 17. See also Hold Back the Night (Frank) Franzen, Jonathan, 218 French theory, 77–78 Freud, Sigmund, 79 Frum, David, 204–5 Fulbright, J. William, 180, 181, 185 Fuller, Buckminster, 102, 108 Furé, Rogelio Martínez, 63 gender, 77; in American Studies, 118; in The Bluest Eye, 120–21; and Jeshyn International Fair, 109; and race, 120–21, 128, 130; in Under the Feet of Jesus, 128, 130, 132; and women of color feminism, 126 genocide: cultural, 68; of Native Americans, 92; in Vietnam, 72

Ghana: independence of, 146; and neocolonialism, 226n10; US intervention in, 4 ghettoization, 137, 144; and restrictive covenants, 139 Gikandi, Simon, 5 Gillan, Jennifer, 120 Gitlin, Todd, 68 Gleason, Sarell Everett, 11, 172, 173–75, 186 Global South: and Cold War, 159–60; in Home, 157; and neocolonialism, 8–9 globalization, 188–89; and Cold War, 192, 195, 199–200, 205; violence, 220 Gobels, José Llanusa, 63 Golitsyn, Anatoly, 173 Gómez, Sara, 63 Gordon, Michelle, 144, 252n43 Gordon-Nesbitt, Rebecca, 61 Grandin, Greg, 206, 207 Greene, Graham, 11, 192, 203 Guatemala: US intervention in, 4 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 60–61, 62, 197; assassination of, 60–61 Guillén, Nicolás, 61 Guilt Payment (Pak), 19, 30 Gulf War, 95 Guy, Rosa, 47 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), 175–76, 257n11 Haldeman, Joe, 11, 209, 210 Halpern, Orit, 106 Hammarskjöld, Dag, 43, 47, 54, 197, 231n3, 232n5 Hansberry, Carl, 139, 143–44 Hansberry, Lorraine, 10, 136, 137, 233n11; and ghettoization, 144; internationalism of, 149; on Lumum-

ba assassination protest, 39, 47–50, 56; pan-Africanism of, 253n45. See also Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry) Hansberry v. Lee, 139, 143 Hardesty, Michele, 8 Harris, Cheryl, 136 Hartman, Saidiya, 106 Havana Cultural Congress, 9 Hayden, Tom, 236n39 Heidegger, Martin, 79–80, 86, 97, 241n11; on nothingness of being, 80–83; on objectification, 84, 85; on spectacle, 83–84 Heller, Joseph, 212–13 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow), 216 Herr, Michael, 212–13 Hicks, Calvin, 47 Higashida, Cheryl, 10, 47–48, 56, 118 Hoberek, Andrew, 11 Hobsbawm, Eric, 61 Hold Back the Night (Frank), 15, 20–21, 26, 27, 35; and Cold War, 22; Communism in, 21; as first-phase Korean War literature, 18, 27; reviews of, 20 Home (Morrison), 150–52, 154–55, 156–57, 160–67; antiblack violence in, 152, 161, 163–64, 166; Cold War frame of, 151; colonial imperial violence in, 160, 166–67; desegregation in, 161–62; flashbacks in, 164–65; Global South in, 157; Korean War in, 150–52, 154–56, 160–61, 164, 167 homeowner associations (HOAs), 138–39; and class discrimination, 252n33; in Clybourne Park, 147–48 Hong, Grace Kyungwon, 126 Horwitz, Richard, 177

Index 291

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 57, 163, 184 Huehls, Mitchum, 133 Hughes, Langston, 149 Hunter, The (Salter), 25 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 180 Ice (Kavan), 195–97, 198–201; geopolitics of, 199 identity politics, 94, 127; and women of color feminism, 126 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 211, 219 imperialism: British, 188, 193; and capitalism, 6; and Cold War, 6, 154–55; and neocolonialism, 2, 6; and racism, 155–56; and violence, 78. See also colonialism; empire; neocolonialism imperialism, US, 67–69, 72, 158; and civil rights movement, 39; decomposition of, 95; intellectual complicity with, 73–74; and Korean War, 158; and spectacle, 95–96. See also neocolonialism India, and neocolonialism, 226n10 Indignation (Roth), 19, 36–37, 153 Infante, Guillermo Cabrera, 75 Internal Security Act (1950), 133 International Confederation of Free Trade Union (ICFTU), 50–51 internationalism: and anticolonialism, 137, 140–41; of Beckett, 188; and Cold War, 119, 137; feminist, 118; US, 75; of Hansberry, 149; of Malcolm X, 67; of SNCC, 67. See also black internationalism Iran: US intervention in, 4 292  Index

isolationism, 174 Iweala, Uzodinma, 209 Jay, Martin, 165 Jeshyn International Fair (Kabul), 102–3, 106; Fuller dome at, 108–10, 112; verisimilitude at, 109 John, Erwin Roy, 65 Johnson, Lyndon, 28 Joliot-Curie, Frédéric, 189 Jones, Carole, 198 Jones, Claudia, 5, 246n16 Jones, Emily, 109 Jurca, Catherine, 141, 250n22 Kant, Immanuel, 79, 81 Kanza, Thomas, 41, 44, 45 Karol, K. S., 234n7 Kavan, Anna, 11, 195–96, 203 Keith, Joseph, 41, 134, 137, 205 Kennedy, John F., 210, 217 Kenyatta, Jomo, 51 Kierkegaard, Søren, 80–81 Kim, Daniel, 33, 37 Kim, Elaine, 24 Kim, Jodi, 16–17, 19, 153 Kim, Richard E., 18, 153 Kim Il Sung, 32 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 92–93 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 126 Klein, Christina, 229n5 Korea: as Cold War proxy, 16–17, 35, 36, 153; as Cold War symbol, 19–20, 27; decolonization of, 16; US intervention in, 16, 18, 147 Korean American literature, 24, 35. See also Korean War literature

Korean War, 10, 16; and African Americans, 10, 150–51, 161–64; afterlife of, 147, 154; as civil war, 21; in Clybourne Park, 147; and Cold War, 24–25, 28, 30, 36, 150, 157, 159; desegregation of US military, 151, 161; and dispossession, 156; as epistemological project, 17; erasure of, 25; as experimental war, 162; as forgotten war, 28, 30, 32, 158–59; in Home, 150–52, 154–56, 160–61, 164, 167; and Korean Americanness, 18, 24; martyrs as symbols in, 26–27; and military-industrial complex, 158; and neocolonialism, 19; as unending, 158; and US imperialism, 158 Korean War literature, 16–18, 152–54; Cold War frame in, 19–22, 26–34, 37, 151; Communism in, 21; first phase, 18–24, 25, 27, 35, 153; second phase, 18, 19, 24–37, 153; and US neocolonialism, 35, 37; and Vietnam War, 28–29 Kristol, Irving, 72 Kwon, Heonik, 159, 160, 164 Langer, William L., 173, 174–75, 176, 186 language: alienation of, 86; in The Foreign Student, 33–35; and spectacle, 86–87; in Under the Feet of Jesus, 130; and violence, 34–35 Lark and Termite (Phillips), 19, 36–37, 153–54 Latin America: and neoliberalism, 206; US interventionism in, 225n2 Laub, Dori, 166 Lay, James S., Jr, 174 Lederer, William, 210

Lee, Chang-rae, 19, 37, 153 Leitel, Erich, 179 lesbian and gay studies, 94–95 Levitt, William, 142 Lewis, Oscar, 64 liberalism: racial, 123 liberation: fiction of, 2 Lipsitz, George, 2 literary studies: transnational turn in, 6 literature: American, 207; Cold War, 19–22, 26–37, 151; and cultural politics, 172–73; by women of color, 125–27, 135. See also Korean War literature; and individual texts Long Way Round, The (Frank), 15 Longinus, 79, 81 Lorde, Audre, 10, 246n16 Lowell, Robert, 62, 64–65 Lumumba, Patrice, 8, 38, 40, 49–50, 53, 197–98; assassination of, 41, 46, 197; Bunche, relationship with, 44, 45–46; at Congo Independence ceremony, 42–43; and Communism, 46, 54; demonization of, 54, 233n12; Pan-Africanism of, 44–45; and UN Congo protests, 46–50, 55–56 Lyotard, Jean-François, 240n7 MacArthur, Douglas: in Korean War literature, 32, 36 Macdonald, Dwight, 62, 64–65 Mahony, George P., 178 Mailer, Norman, 66, 207, 236n41 Malcolm X, 10; internationalism of, 67 Mallory, Mae, 48, 232n8 Maltz, Alfred, 163 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Wilson), 141–43, 250n22, 251n25,

Index 293

251–52nn27–29; and Cold War internationalism, 10, 137, 147 Manchurian Candidate, The (Condon), 18–19, 22–24, 153 Manifest Destiny, 92 Markovitz, Irving Leonard, 218–19 Marshall Plan, 141–42 Martyred, The (Richard E. Kim), 18, 19, 26–28, 31 Masey, Jack, 109 mass media, 58–59 Maud Martha (Brooks), 9, 104–7, 111; race in, 106–7; universal humanness in, 105, 113; verisimilitude in, 104–5, 107, 112–13, 114; violence in, 114–15 May, Elaine Tyler, 140–41 Mayberry, Susan Neal, 246n14 Mboya, Tom, 51 McCarran, Pat, 133 McCarran-Walter Act (1952), 133 McCarthy, Cormac, 213, 262n30 McCarthy, Joseph, 23, 162–63, 184 McCarthyism, 23 McKenzie, Evan, 252n33 Mead, Leonard, 59 Medovoi, Leerom, 126, 155–56 Meerloo, Joost A., 191 Melamed, Jodi, 103, 125, 126 Melley, Timothy, 33 Melville, Herman, 93 Meriwether, James H., 55, 146 Mexican Revolution, 129 Michener, James, 19 military-industrial complex: and Korean War, 158 Miller, D. Quentin, 216, 218 Mitarachi, Jane Fiske, 108 Mobutu, Joseph, 197, 198

294  Index

modernization policy, 210, 217, 219–20 Moore, Carlos, 63 Morejón, Nancy, 63 Morrison, Toni, 10, 115, 124, 135, 150, 246n14; on re-memory, 164. See also Bluest Eye, The (Morrison); Home (Morrison) Morrison Case, The (Maltz), 163 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 4 Mouvement National Congolais (MNC), 40 Mueller, Robert, 205 multiculturalism: and antiracism, 125; and neoliberalism, 119, 123; and politics of representation, 125 Murderous Angels (O’Brien), 197–98 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 49, 140, 250n18 Nadel, Alan, 229n5 Nasser, Abdel, 218 National Liberation Front (NLF), 60, 67, 72, 97 National Security Council, 174 nationalism, 50, 120; black nationalism, 48, 246n14; and feminism, 129–30, 247n25; masculinist, 120; racialized, 120 Native Speaker (Chang-rae Lee), 19, 32–33, 35 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 188, 197 Nelson, George, 102, 106, 107 Nelson, Victoria, 200 neocolonialism, 4–5, 211–12; as analytic, 5, 12, 226n10; and anti-Communism, 3–4; and blackness, 50; and

British Empire, 187; and Cold War, 2–3, 37, 206; and colorblindness, 125; and containment, 117; and decolonization, 5–6, 38; defined, 225n2; economic underpinnings of, 1–2; emergence of, 2, 225n2; and exploitation, 4; fictions of, 4, 7, 187–88; and Ghana, 226n10; and the Global South, 8–9; and imperialism, 2, 6; and India, 226n10; and Korean War, 19, 35, 37; and literature, 6–7, 12; and localization of conflict, 206; and mass media, 58–59; and military force, 2; and neoliberalism, 218; and Pan-Africanism, 206; and postcolonialism, 5; and sovereignty, 1, 5. See also colonialism; empire; imperialism neocolonialism, US: and Cold War, 37; and containment, 117; and Cuba, 58 Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (Nkrumah), 1, 225n2 neoliberalism: and Africa, 219; and American fiction, 218; and austerity, 207; and Chile, 218; and Cold War, 118; and consumer citizenship, 134; and Latin America, 206; and multiculturalism, 119–23; and neocolonialism, 218; and postracialism, 148; and unending conflict, 207; and warfare, 205–6 Neruda, Pablo, 61, 69 Neubert, Albrecht, 179 New Left, 71, 74, 196 Night (Pollini), 18–19, 21–22, 26, 35, 153 Nkrumah, Kwame, 1–2, 5, 40–41, 60, 206, 216; on neocolonialism, 4–5, 211–12; Pan-Africanism of, 206

Non-Aligned Movement Conference (Belgrade), 60. See also Bandung Asian-African Conference nonalignment, 60 Norris, Bruce, 138, 147 nuclear weapons, 188; and globality, 188–89, 191, 195, 199–200; and subjectivity, 189–92, 200–202; testing of, 259n5 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 197–98 O’Brien, Tim, 207, 208, 209 Occupy protests, 95 O’Dell, Jack, 5 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 173–75, 176–77 On Guard for Freedom, 47 Open Door Policy, 225n2 Operation Mockingbird, 174–75 Organization of African, Asian, and Latin American Solidarity (OSPAAAL), 60 Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), 60, 66, 68 Orientalism: in The Manchurian Candidate, 23 Orozco, José Clemente, 171 Padilla, Heberto, 75 Pak, Ty, 19, 30 Pan-Africanism, 40–41; of Kwame Nkrumah, 206; and neocolonialism, 206; and US civil rights, 145 Parikh, Crystal, 9–10 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 175–76, 177, 184, 257nn10–11 Pease, Donald E., 10, 228n3; on American exceptionalism, 243n11 Pérez, Emma, 129, 134 Index 295

Peutz, Nathalie, 129 Philby, Kim, 173 Phillips, Jayne Anne, 19, 36, 154 Piette, Adam, 11 Piñera, Virgilio, 63 Pinochet, Augusto, 206, 218 Plummer, Brenda Gayle, 46, 55 political correctness, 177 Pollini, Francis, 18–19, 21–22, 24 postcolonial studies, 94–95 postcolonialism, 118; and neocolonialism, 5 postmodernism: and anti-Communism, 7 Prashad, Vijay, 60 Purdon, James, 195–96 Puritanism, 88–89; and providence, 91 Putin, Vladimir, 214 Pynchon, Thomas, 212–13 Quiet American, The (Greene), 192–95, 200–201; whiteness in, 194–95 race: and biopower, 155; and Cold War, 9–10, 56, 102–3, 139, 155–57, 164; and empathy, 106; and gender, 120–21, 130; and justice, 117; and nation, 10; and nationalism, 120; pathologization of, 124; and poverty, 246n19; and selfhood, 103; and violence, 114–15, 164 racial capital: and liberal multiculturalism, 125; in The Bluest Eye, 121; social fictions of, 121 racism: and colonial imperialism, 155–56 Rahv, Philip, 62, 64–65 Rai, Lajpat, 68 Raisin in the Sun, A (Hansberry), 10, 143–46, 147; anticolonialism in 296  Index

144–46; black internationalism of, 137; ghettoization in, 138; neocolonial critique of, 138; Pan-Africanism of, 138; segregation in, 143–45 Randall, Margaret, 66, 68 Randolph, A. Philip, 161 Reagan, Ronald, 96, 123–24, 206–7; racialized pathology under, 124; Westminster Speech, 124 Reagan Doctrine, 124 recognition: politics of, 126 respectability politics: in The Bluest Eye, 120–22 restrictive covenants, 138–39, 249n7, 249n10; and class discrimination, 252n33; court cases on, 139–40 Retamar, Roberto Fernández, 61, 68, 71; on responsibility of intellectuals, 59, 72–74, 238n73 Reynolds, Grant, 161 Rhee, Syngman, 30, 32, 34 Robeson, Paul, 10 Rockefeller Foundation, 173, 175 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 214 Rosenberg, Emily, 141–42 Rostow, W. W., 210 Roth, Philip, 19, 36, 154 Rowe, John Carlos, 11 Russell, Bertrand, 236n41 Russia: and unending Cold War, 204–5 Russian Revolution, 120–21 Sadat, Anwar, 218 Said, Edward, 216 Salazar, Antonio, 53 Salkey, Andrew, 68, 69–70 Santana Fernández de Castro, Astrid, 71, 238n71

Sargent, Daniel J., 206 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 5, 73, 236n41; Nausea, 82 Schiffrin, André, 64–65 Schmidt, Elizabeth, 211, 212 Schueller, Malini, 216, 217 Schuyler, George, 8, 39, 51–52 Schuyler, Philippa, 39, 52–55 Seale, Bobby, 162 Season in the Congo, A (Cesaire), 231n3 SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization), 194 segregation, 120; aesthetics of, 144, 253n43; housing, 136–37, 139, 143– 49; in A Raisin in the Sun, 143–45. See also desegregation Shannon, Clyde, 107, 109, 111 Shelley v. Kramer, 140 Sheppard, R. Z., 215 Sherman, Susan, 65, 66, 238n73 Sickles, Carlton, 178 Silber, Irwin, 65, 66–68 Sinykin, Dan, 218 Situationists, 86 slavery: afterlife of, 163 Smith, Judith E., 253n52 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 65; at CCH, 237n48; internationalism of, 67 So, Richard Jean, 218 Song for Night (Abani), 209 Sontag, Susan, 62, 64–65, 66, 236n41 sovereignty: and neocolonialism, 1, 5 Soviet Union: dissolution of, 120, 123–24; as nuclear power, 188 Spanos, Adam V., 9 Spanos, William V., 9

spectacle: American, 77; and American exceptionalism, 79; as apparatus of capture, 83; and Gulf War, 95; and history, 96; and language, 86–87; and neocolonialism, 95–96; society of, 87; and the sublime, 77–79, 83–87, 89; and truth, 96; and US empire, 93–94, 95–96; and Vietnam War, 89–95; and violence, 77 state-scholarly complex, 171–75, 179–80, 186; and CIA, 174, 176, 178 Steel, Ronald, 236n39 Steiner, George, 72 Stephanson, Anders, 16 Stevenson, Adlai E., 47, 50, 232n5; Ralph Bunche, relationship with, 233n10 Stimson, Henry, 188 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 68, 75 subjectivity: and Cold War, 191, 195, 200, 203; and nuclear weapons, 189–92, 200–202; in Under the Feet of Jesus, 130–31 sublime: and American exceptionalism, 240n4; and American providence, 77, 97; displacement of, 77; and the dreadful, 81–83; and liberation, 83; ontological, 85; and politics, 78; and spectacle, 77–79, 83–87, 89; and transcendence, 81; and truth, 96; and the uncanny, 239n4; and US empire, 93–94 suburbanization, 137 superpowers: coining of term, 192; ideology, 193–94; politics of, 11, 187–89 Surrendered, The (Chang-rae Lee), 19, 25–26

Index 297

Talalay, Kathryn, 53 Third World movement, 58, 60; and “peaceful coexistence,” 60 Till, Emmett, 162 Tolliver, Cedric, 8 Touré, Ahmed Sekou, 40–41 Trotsky, Leon, 119–20 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 153 Truman, Harry S., 140, 188–89, 214; desegregation of US military, 151, 161; in Korean War literature, 32, 36; military mobilization under, 157–58 Truman Doctrine, 159, 188–89 Trump, Donald, 95–96, 204 Tshombe, Moïse, 43, 46, 53, 54, 197 Turner, Fred, 102, 108 Twain, Mark, 93 Tydings, Joseph D., 178, 179, 183 Ugly American, The (Burdick and Lederer), 210 Undeclared War, The (Gleason and Langer), 174, 175 Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes), 117, 127–35; abjection in, 128; critical reception of, 129; differential consciousness in, 127, 134–35; ethic of care in, 133, 135; gender in, 128, 130, 132; labor in, 127–28, 132–33; language in, 130; subjectivity in, 130–31 Unión (magazine), 9 United Fruit Company, 4 United Kingdom: and Cold War, 187; and decolonization, 187, 197; “special relationship” with US, 192, 194 United Nations: and the Congo, 39, 42–50; and decolonization, 40; and

298  Index

interventionism, 197; and Lumumba assassination, 46–48 United States: economic power of, 206; political ontology of, 90–91; poverty rate of, 246n19; and spectacle, 87–89 United States, foreign policy: and colonialism, 158, 226n2; and interventionism, 4–5, 9, 16, 18, 140, 147, 210–11, 213–14, 225n2; and Vietnam War, 92, 210–11, 213–14. See also neocolonialism; neocolonialism, US United States Information Agency (USIA), 102, 104, 109, 181, 183–85; and cultural attachés, 172; mission of, 184; and state-scholarly complex, 178 universalism: and American exceptionalism, 90–91, 96–97; and Cold War, 102–3; and colorblindness, 125; and cultural exhibitions, 102–3; in Maud Martha, 105, 113 Unnamable, The (Beckett), 188–91, 201, 203 Updike, John, 11, 207, 213–14, 218 verisimilitude, 103–4; in Maud Martha, 104–5, 107, 112–13, 114 Vietnam: US intervention in, 210–11, 213–14 Vietnam War, 71–72, 205, 238n70; and American exceptionalism, 9, 90; and CCH, 67; and Cold War, 90; as exceptional, 92; and genocide, 72; and Korean American literature, 28–29; and spectacle, 89–95; and state violence, 92–93; and US foreign policy, 92

violence: and the academy, 171; and American exceptionalism, 9, 96–97; of American spectacle, 77; antiblack, 152, 161, 163–64, 166; colonial imperial, 154–55, 162–63; and globalization, 220; in Home, 152, 160–61, 163–64, 166–67; and imperialism, 78, 160, 166–67; and language, 34–35; in Maud Martha, 114–15; racialized, 114–15, 164; settler colonial, 156–57, 162, 164–65; and spectacle, 77; state-sponsored, 92–93, 171 Viramontes, Helena María, 10, 117, 127. See also Under the Feet of Jesus (Viramontes) Vonnegut, Kurt, 212–13 Walker, Alice, 126 war: in American literature, 207; as existential American state, 205; and neoliberalism, 205–6; normalization of, 209; and the West, 242n37. See also Korean War; Vietnam War War on Terror, 11, 154, 214; and American exceptionalism, 78; as continuation of Cold War, 205, 210–11; and spectacle, 95 Washington, Mary Helen, 105, 115 Watts, Daniel H., 47 Weiss, Peter, 73, 236n41 Whitaker, Jennifer Seymour, 215 white supremacy: and anti-Com-

munism, 140; and respectability politics, 121 whiteness: as property, 136–37; in The Quiet American, 194–95 Wigny, Pierre, 233n12 Wilford, Hugh, 41, 178 Wilkins, Fanon Che, 146 Williams, Robert F., 162, 232n8 Wilson, Rob, 240n4 Wilson, Sloan, 10, 137, 141. See also Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The (Wilson) Winks, Robin W., 175–76, 177 women of color, US, 120; and neocolonialism, 120 women of color feminism, 117–18, 126, 135; and identity politics, 126; global capital, critique of, 126 women’s studies, 94–95 Wright, Melissa, 131 Wright, Richard, 3 Wright, Sarah, 47 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, 75, 118 Yav, Joseph, 54 Yergan, Max, 8, 29, 50–52, 233n11 Yglesias, Helen, 64, 66–67, 236n39 Yglesias, José, 65 Young, Crawford, 45 Young, Jessica, 218 Young, Marilyn, 89–90 Young, Robert, 5

Index 299

The New American Canon

Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella by Gina Arnold

Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry by Jim Cocola

Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in US Fiction since the Great Depression by Jason Arthur

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou

The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Lindsey Michael Banco

Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature by Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War edited by Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith

Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett

After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University edited by Loren Glass

Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature by Sean Austin Grattan It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music by Timothy Gray American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small US Presses, and Progressive Social Change By Teresa V. Longo Pynchon’s California edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller

Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism by Ian McGuire Reading Capitalist Realism edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge Technomodern Poetics: The American Literary Avant-Garde at the Start of the Information Age by Todd F. Tietchen How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production by John K. Young