A Violent Peace

"Offering a critical account of the ways in which the US deployed its war power under liberal auspices throughout the Cold War, this book casts a geopolitical lens onto cultural productions preoccupied with black freedom, Asian liberation, and Pacific Islander decolonization against the backdrop of U.S. militarism in the Asia-Pacific region. The book examines the centrality of this militarism to the political and cultural imagination of racialized subjects in an era of serial U.S. "police actions" abroad and what writers such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois described as a police state at home, contending that U.S. informal warfare relied on racial counterintelligence campaigns that structured not only America's hot wars in Asia but also its approach to radical activism, racial protest, and urban riots on the domestic front. As the author demonstrates, even as U.S. war politics may have taken the guise of anti-racist, multicultural alliance-building and marshaled the rhetoric of mutual defense, they gave rise to dissident visions of human rights that converged in a critique of the unilateralism of U.S. militarism, one that did not point in the direction of today's interventionist human rights politics. The book is in critical conversation with a spate of recent publications that might be called "Afro-Asian," but unlike these last, which tend to emphasize cross-racial solidarity, it highlights racial collusion, collaboration, and alignment with the post-1945 U.S. war machine as a paradoxical effect of the securitized "anti-racism" of the so-called Pax Americana. For Asian writers, artists, and filmmakers, Ōe Kenzaburo, Nakazawa Keiji, Byun Young-Joo, and Carlos Bulosan, the imagination of postcolonial or post-imperial justice is troubled by the period's deferral of decolonization. Literature by Miné Okubo, Chang-rae Lee, and Robert Barclay variously takes immigration, repatriation, or relocation as its theme, yet looming over this conditional incorporation into the postwar U.S. body politic is the specter of America's militarism in Asia. If these works by Asian American and Pacific Islanders implicitly query whether material redress is satisfied through U.S. citizenship or economic assistance, the major African American writers examined in this study critique civil rights as too narrow a horizon for racial democracy. Positing Jim Crow as war without end, they seek a vernacular for racial justice that transcends national boundaries, and in the case of Ellison and Baldwin, politicize black freedom via homology with historic U.S. foes, the Axis and the Vietcong. If visions of redress imply an obligation to restructure, the works assembled here lay bare the under-theorized composite nature of U.S. militarism and use cultural critique to engage in radical democratic deliberation"--