Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America by Benjamin M. Han

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America by Benjamin M. Han Victor Wu (bio) Beyond the Black and White TV: Asian and Latin American Spectacle in Cold War America, by Benjamin M. Han. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 216 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-9788-0383-1. Benjamin M. Han’s debut book, Beyond the Black and White TV, reexamines the oft-overlooked roles of Asian and Latin American ethnic entertainers in American television against the backdrop of the cultural Cold War. Because the Asia-Pacific and Latin America were two critical geopolitical spaces for the expansion of US hegemony, Han argues that the transnational circulation of Asian and Latin American performers on US commercial television functioned as Cold War cultural diplomacy that promoted American internationalism and waged ideological battles against the encroaching threat of communism in those regions. Han draws upon Marxist philosopher Guy Debord’s concept of spectacle as a “false representation of reality through the mass dissemination of images” (7) to postulate that the “ethnic spectacle” mediated by Cold War– era television fabricated a narrative of the United States as being a bastion of racial equality and democracy. Han asserts that this narrative was birthed in direct response to Soviet criticism of its anti-Black racism, which was growing increasingly visible due to the civil rights movement and was damaging the nation’s image on a global scale. Beyond the Black and White TV specifically examines the variety show as a site of transnational cultural interventionism that was informed by a “triangulation among Cold War geopolitics, globalism, and U.S. racial logics” (19). Because the variety show “functioned as both education and entertainment” (4), it was uniquely suited for America’s rebranding efforts. Variety shows often featured white hosts, who served as cultural interlocuters that interviewed ethnic entertainers about their backgrounds and sang American popular songs alongside them. This emphasis on international understanding, along with the surge of Asian and Latin American performers beginning in the early 1950s, allowed the variety show to project a false image of America as an antiracist nation. While variety show broadcasts initially only targeted domestic audiences and American military personnel abroad, Han shows how these broadcasts served as an “early itineration of global television” (19) that in the late 1950s provided [End Page 345] the blueprint for the dissemination of American Cold War narratives through transnational networks. The book is split into four modular chapters detailing four geographically separate yet unexpectedly analogous spaces where television played a significant role in America’s political agenda during the Cold War: Las Vegas, Korea, Cuba, and Hawaii. Han uses a wide range of historical materials such as television archives and oral histories to trace the development of television as well as the careers of ethnic performers such as the Kim Sisters, the De Castro Sisters, Alfred Apaka, and Don Ho. He examines not just the contexts of their careers but also the contents of their performances, interrogating the ways in which they contested and reinforced investment in whiteness. Chapter 1 looks at Las Vegas as a culturally and militarily significant locus during the Cold War. One of the earliest televised broadcasts of Las Vegas was of the atomic bomb testing on Yucca Flat in 1951, which served as Las Vegas’s introduction to the American public imaginary as a city crucial to national security. This was a far cry from Sin City’s previous negative association with crime, and entertainment personalities saw television as an opportunity to clean up the city’s image and promote American internationalism. Han posits that the later influx of Asian and Latin American entertainers in the 1950s to the Las Vegas nightlife and television scene was part of an attempt to portray the city as an integrated, family-friendly destination. And by the late 1970s, entertainment personalities were using television to capitalize on ethnic spectacle in order to “shed previous depictions of Las Vegas” (37). Consequently, the American government used these televisual images to show off Las Vegas as a racially integrated city that “was representative of American ideals and values” (33). Han explores how...