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Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

2011; Oxford University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jar005

1945-2314

Andrea L. Foster,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Ends of Empire posits an intricate, ambitious thesis about the ways that examination of Asian American cultural products will reveal how they “stage the Cold War as a geopolitical, cultural and espistemological project of gendered racial formation and imperialism undergirding U.S. global hegemony” (p. 4). This critique provides an “unsettling hermeneutics” that destabilizes American exceptionalism, and much that Jodi Kim argues underpins U.S. ideology about its role and purpose in the world (p. 5). In support of this ambitious thesis, Kim provides in the first chapter a history of Cold War politics, focusing particularly on how what she argues is viewed as a bipolar U.S.-Soviet struggle came to be fought mainly in Asia. Subsequent chapters provide deep readings of cultural products, primarily those of Asian Americans, although the readings in the chapter on American visions of China are about Asian Americans. That chapter explores the original The Manchurian Candidate movie (1962), the “Butterfly” genre, and M. Butterfly. A chapter exploring the roles of Japan and Japanese Americans features Steven Okazaki's documentary Survivors (1982), David Mura's memoir Turning Japanese (1991), and Ruth L. Ozeki's My Year of Meats (1998). Kim turns next to the lasting effects of the Korean War through Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Heinz Insu Finkl's autobiographical novel Memories of My Ghost Brother (1997), and Deann Boshay Liem's documentary First Person Plural (2000). A final chapter explores the aftermath of the U.S. war in Vietnam by examining the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang (2002), Aimee Phan's short story collection We Should Never Meet (2004), and Trihn T. Minh-ha's film Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989).