Cold War Ideology Research Articles

Post-World War II perspectives on Choi Seung-hee: ideological blind spots in Asia-based and Anglophone scholarship

ABSTRACT During and before World War II, Japanese colonial rule cast a profound impact on the cultural and artistic landscapes of its colonies. Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969), a prominent cultural figure from the pre-war period, skillfully navigated the delicate balance between her roles as a representative of Korean national dancer and an emblematic figure within the Japanese empire. Her dual identity elicited diverse public reactions, ranging from slander to praise. In South Korea, post-Korean War, ideological divisions led to the marginalization of artists like Choi who moved north, ambiguously referred to as “Choi X.” In North Korea, autocratic rule infused her evaluations with strong nationalism. In China and the Soviet Union, Cultural Cold War ideologies impacted her assessments. Japan’s perspective reflected its post-colonial introspection and issues. In contrast to the ideologically saturated research in Asian contexts, contemporary Anglophone scholarship on Choi, transcending nationalist confines, nonetheless exhibits distinct limitations. This study primarily scrutinizes the diverse perspectives reflected in Choi research, drawing upon news reports, visual materials, academic studies, and personal observations in China, South Korea, and Japan. The aim is to chart the trajectory and representative viewpoints of Choi research in post-World War II Koreas, China/Soviet Union, Japan, and the Anglophone scholarship. Through literature review and critical analysis, this research underscores how nationalist, socialist, Aesthetic Orientalist, Sinocentric and (Pan) Asian political/non-political ideologies have shaped perspectives on Choi amidst the Cultural Cold War and decolonization. Moreover, it reveals how transnational ideological constructs and dominant research paradigms have shaped and reshaped Choi’s image.

REALITY AND REPRESENTATION: THE NONFICTION WRITING IN JOHN UPDIKE'S "MOROCCO

“Morocco” is one of John Updike’s short stories concerning family travel s. With the attempt to blur the gap between fiction and nonfiction, Updike experiments in “Morocco” with a new form of represented reality, which reveals a middle ground between the discourse and the depicted world. Through the portrayal of real historical events by juxtaposing the overt family travel narrative and the covert Cold War narrative, the short story mixes realistic travel writing into a fictional representation of Cold War writing. The Cold War writing, especially when represented through a backdrop of baseless fears, forms the covert narrative dynamics and integrates the narrative rupture in the whole overt family travel story where the unreliable narrative techniques in the tale, such as denarration, and disnarration, break upthe narrative progression and present various possibilities from the fissured narration. It turns out that the various overt narrative possibilities are restricted by the covert Cold War narrative, thus, the variety of overt narratives in “Morocco” is always constrained by the Cold War ideology. While the travel narrative is at variance with this particular reality, the underlying Cold War ideology, nevertheless, serves as the universal representation.

Planning a Family: Birth Control, Sterilization, and the Welfare of Society in Cold War Brazil

This article explores the history of family planning during the Brazilian military dictatorship by focusing on the activity of The Society of Family Welfare (Sociedade do Bem-Estar Familiar no Brasil, BEMFAM), founded in 1965 and affiliated with the International Planned Parenthood Federation. BEMFAM’s campaigns were met with criticism from various fronts. The Catholic Church condemned the use of contraception methods. The military, which had ruled the country since taking power in 1964, opposed BEMFAM’s efforts to curtail population growth and its international partnerships. Leftist organizations attacked BEMFAM as well, denouncing its initiatives as a form of criminal Western imperialism. The denunciations ultimately led to a parliamentary inquiry into the activities of BEMFAM. Analyzing the dictatorship’s intelligence reports, state records, and BEMFAM’s publications, the article elucidates how population control models, Cold War ideologies, and gendered politics shaped health and reproduction in military Brazil.

McCarthyism and American Cold War Ideology in Irish-American Autobiographical Writing

This article explores the various ways in which the protagonist of Frank McCourt’s autobiographical account ’Tis, A Memoir confronts the McCarthyite proceedings and their unsettling consequences at times of utmost conservatism in America. It addresses his negotiation of an ultimately alienated ethnic identity, arguing that the protagonist’s fractured self not only reflects the slippery ground upon which McCarthyite practices are founded, but is also brought about by it. Beyond this analysis, however, the article is set to problematize the very status of McCourt’s autobiographical writing by assessing the memoir’s narrative codes in association with its content and purported readership. Specifically, the proposal evaluates the fictional strategies on which it is constructed, as well as the inconsistencies inherent in the narrative depiction of the character’s partial assimilation into an eventual Irish-American national identity. The proposal ultimately assays McCourt’s memoir as a product and reworking of the ideological tenets characteristic of McCarthyism and the early Cold War period.

Controversial Issues in the Law of the Sea and Existing Resolution Strategies

The establishment of a maritime community of shared future requires a commitment to legal governance of the oceans. However, the lack of codified maritime law and customary international legal norms presents significant challenges to this endeavor. In order to overcome these challenges, countries must adhere to legal frameworks in governing the oceans and foster global cooperation to establish a maritime legal environment that is based on the principles of equity, fairness, and sustainability. Furthermore, the uneven distribution of maritime rights and duties within the global marine community due to limitations in the scientific, technological, and The financial capacity of smaller States is a major obstacle to achieving the goal of establishing the rule of law in the oceans. This paper highlights the challenges involved in constructing a maritime community of shared future, and proposes various strategies to address these difficulties. These tactics encompass utilizing bilateral and regional pacts, enhancing the legal standing of customary global standards, reinforcing the United Nations structure, and collaborating with nations promoting the principle of equal sovereignty. By adopting these strategies and working together towards a common goal, The ideal establishment of the rule of law for the oceans and seas can be achieved, promoting a maritime community of shared future. Despite the potential benefits of establishing a global maritime legal framework, certain maritime hegemonic powers may pose obstacles to this objective, given their reluctance to embrace international maritime legal standards due to political considerations and the influence of Eurocentrism and Cold War ideologies. It is imperative that such powers be engaged in constructive dialogue, to overcome these obstacles and promote a shared vision for a sustainable, equitable, and cooperative global maritime community.

The Commodification of Cold War Ideologies: the Reception of Casals in Japan and the Sinophone World in the Post-Cold War Era

Abstract This article examines the reception of Pablo Casals, the Spanish cellist and humanitarian, in Japan, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong in the post-Cold War era from the perspective of consumer capitalism. It argues that although the Cold War ended in 1991, instead of being criticised, the Cold War ideologies, including communism, anti-communism, socialism, and humanitarianism, were intertwined with and consolidated by capitalism in the post-Cold War era. This article reveals how the legacies of Casals were interpreted differently in these places within the context of domestic and regional politics and discusses how the Cold War ideologies were commodified in the post-Cold War era. By conducting a multilateral dialogue between Japan and the Sinophone world, this article attempts to gain a clearer understanding of the geopolitical history of East Asia in the post-Cold War era from a musical perspective.

Japanese Parliamentary Diplomacy on the Eve of the Cold War: Focusing on the Taiwan Channel

This study explores the diplomacy of the conservative ruling party lawmakers in Japan toward Asia on the eve of the Cold War. It shows— based on interviews and latest archival material released in Japan and Taiwan—that a structure for ending the Cold War existed in East Asia on the eve of the Cold War, which is different from the Second Cold War framework centered on the West. This research may also play a significant role in the study of the long-term governments of conservative parties and their foreign policies during the Cold War. Before the Cold War was over, the governments of Nakasone Yasuhiro and Takeshita Noboru in Japan had access to both China and Taiwan, and there were already movements within the conservative ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its factions toward a de-Cold War structure and ideology. Pro-Taiwan and pro-Korea factions in the party, which had overlapped since the formulation of the Cold War ideology, diverged. In this context, despite the timely utilization of personal relations between Taiwan and Japan since the prewar Japanese colonial period, an effective systematization of channels between the two governments that could be sustained over the long-term was not achieved.

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

<i>The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures</i> by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

AbstractLocated mere feet from the busy Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Bunker is a former military bunker from 1970s authoritarian South Korea that now showcases changing art exhibits. Debuting in November 2019, Paju (by artist Kim Seung Rea) features a series of paintings and statues capturing life in the town of Paju in the Geyeonggi Province near the border of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. As a critique of militarization, Paju not only offers a glimpse into the life that blossoms amidst the guard towers, bulwarks, and barbed wire, it challenges the power dynamic implicit in the space of the bunker. Cold War ideologies overlap in SeMA Bunker, for while the bunker was purportedly designed to keep the former president, Park Chung‐hee, safe during potential North Korean attack, the town of Paju was to act as human and infrastructural sacrifice to keep the rest of the country secure. Therefore, to bring Paju into the bunker via the exhibit is to inverse that power relationship and thus work to demilitarize the space, the town, and ultimately the patrons.

Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

Decoding the Sino-North Korean Borderlands

(Un)Doing Critical Theory in Pretoria, 1981–1987

Critical Theory came to occupy pride of place in the curriculum of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pretoria between 1981 and 1987, at the height of political repression by the apartheid state. This article seeks to unravel this apparently paradoxical phenomenon, examining the assimilations of Critical Theory to other contextually specific discursive formations, including Cold War ideology, neo-Calvinist salvation history, Christian nationalism, occidentalist ideas of “Europe,” and cultural pessimism in the late apartheid era.

Expanding Available Futures: Ideological Contestation in Angola’s Emerging Higher Education Sector

This article explores the place of ideology and what I call analytic allegiances in the nascent higher education domain in Angola. Based on ethnographic research, it considers the post-War emergence of the sector and its implications for global higher education. Focusing primarily on two institutions, one state, one private, it probes how contesting cold war ideologies continue to manifest through the pedagogic, curricula, and campus-based decisions of higher education leaders in the country. It develops Jonathan Jansen’s notion of “political symbolism” to give attention to individual faculty member’s personal scholarly trajectories that result in analytic allegiances within domains of friendship and influence. It argues that exposure to political and social systems and symbols at formative times of individual faculty’s biographies radically inform the ways in which the emergent sector is being approached and molded today. It demonstrates how the existence of pluralistic knowledge traditions maintained through analytic allegiance and political symbolism have equipped Angola well for the transformative processes required in contemporary higher education.

Банкротство стратегии «Глобальная Британия» и перспективы китайско-британских двусторонних отношений

The "Global Britain" diplomatic strategy is the core concept that guides the development of the UK's diplomacy released by the British government in 2017. This concept attempts to build a global partnership as an important strategy for British diplomacy after Brexit. However, the post-Brexit Britain vigorously provoked European geopolitical contradictions particularly in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and identified China and Russia as the destroyers of the Western- international order. Britain completely reverts to the Cold War ideology by unlimitedly highlighting its special relationship with USA since British traditional diplomatic model fundamentally deviates from the basic concept of the "Global Britain" strategy. In the international context of the increasingly fierce competition between China and the United States, China-UK relations are correspondingly at a historically low level. However, China-UK bilateral cooperation still has huge potential for a promising future due to the complementary benefits for both sides in the fields of economy, trade and cultural exchange

Anticommunism, Sinocentrism, and elite Chinese identity: the 1957 Declaration of the First Convention of Chinese Schools in the Philippines

ABSTRACT In April 1957, Chinese educators from across the Philippines gathered in Manila for the First Convention of Chinese Schools in the country. This article comprises a translation of and commentary on the declaration that was published to commemorate the occasion. I use it to illustrate the little-known extent to which elite-authored Chinese identity in the Philippines was deeply infused with a particular strain of Cold War ideology that emphasized unyielding support for the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan and Sinocentrism. Texts such as these call attention to the Philippines as a largely neglected site for historicizing and differentiating among Southeast Asia’s Chinese communities after 1945. Read carefully and contextually, they offer a very different perspective on identity formation within these societies from that found in mainstream, typically Malaya-focused narratives of cultural hybridization, localization, and depoliticization.

Review: Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War

Review: <i>Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War</i>

The Crime of Leprosy: The Red Threat and U.S. Hansen’s Disease Policy in Cold War Korea

ABSTRACT This article examines how and why Hansen’s disease (leprosy) patients in South Korea emerged as a Cold War ideological battleground. Against the backdrop of U.S. wars of intervention in Asia, I argue that Cold War narratives of contagion used medical terms to conflate “infectious” ideologies and Hansen’s disease. Through reading Litany of Hope (1962), a film produced by the United States Information Service and loosely based on the life of Korean poet and former Hansen’s disease patient Han Ha-un, I analyze how U.S. Cold War ideology characterized Hansen’s disease patients in South Korea as recuperable internal enemies in need of humanitarian medical intervention.

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

Laboring for the State: Women, Family, and Work in Revolutionary Cuba, 1959–1971. By Rachel Hynson (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 314 pp. $39.99

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies

Reviewed by: The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ed. by David Murphy Yohann C. Ripert The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ED. DAVID MURPHY Liverpool UP, 2016. xii + 224 pp. ISBN 9781781383162 cloth. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies is a collection of ten essays that investigate art performances and postcolonial practices at a major cultural event promoted by Léopold Sedar Senghor, as well as the event's influence in large-scale spectacles of culture and the role of archives and archival-making from 1966 to 2016. Edited and introduced by David Murphy, the book is the only publication dedicated to a festival that some have cited as the "apotheosis" of Negritude (vii). Its most important contribution to the fields of African and postcolonial studies, however, is to combine multifaceted readings that go beyond Negritude and question the ways in which both Cold War ideology and Pan-African ideals haunted the First World Festival of Negro Arts, including how painters, choreographers, writers, and intellectuals have used the encounter to strengthen the ties between the African "homeland" and black peoples in the diaspora—especially in the United States. Though the book does not expand on the history of preceding cultural events (such as the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists and its second iteration in 1959, as well as the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression) to a 1966 festival (FESMAN) that aimed to create a platform for bolstering transnational blackness, David Murphy's thorough introduction theorizes the festival as "an attempt to produce a global community through a shared blackness" (5). Engaging with the most recent literature on aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial period, Murphy focuses on the political climate framing the festival's organization and stages its performance within a double bind that black intellectuals, artists, and statesmen faced after independence: between the reality of nationalism and the imagination of a postcolonial globality. To that end, Murphy questions both the "involvement of the important US delegation" in Senegal and the larger "role of culture in a post-imperial world" (9). In the volume's first part, "Contexts," each chapter engages with the double bind by offering a remarkable archival work on different aspects of the festival: staging of a "tradition" in art exhibitions (Vincent), creation of an "authentic" African ballet (Kringelbach), performance of the past in carefully programmed theatrical plays (Quinn and Bush), and coverage in popular media (Jaji). Perhaps [End Page 202] the strongest connection between these five chapters is their critical approach to the influence of and challenge to Senghor's aesthetic positions at the festival. Hélène Kringelbach not only analyzes how "the past was being reimagined in neo-traditional performance through the selection and standardization of a limited number of preforming practices" (74), she also retrieves from the archives a letter between Senghor's longtime ally Alioune Diop and Gray Cowan (Columbia University professor and future President of the African Studies Association) for academic expertise on "traditional African dances"—a request that seems to reveal an ideological contradiction between Senghor's strong sense of traditionalism and a lack of knowledge about those supposedly innate traditions. Similarly, Brian Quinn's close reading of Senghor's and Malraux's opening speeches revisits the "reworking of the relationship between culture and the State" (84) and then proceeds to analyze the behind-the-scenes of the festival's staging of Amadou Cissé Dia's Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior to uncover a troubling instrumentalization of culture that "heads of states such as those in the audience at FESMAN" (95) can use for the mobilization of a nationalist sentiment. In the second part of the book, "Legacies," the focus turns to the festival's afterlives: from the 1969 Algiers festival conceived as a direct response to the Dakar event (Anderson) and the 1977 Lagos Festival explicitly hailed as its direct successor (Apter), to the making of the PANAFEST archive that examines the relation between those three festivals and the Zaire 1974 music festival (Vincent and Malaquais) and a more theoretical consideration of "festivalism" in Africa...

Child’s play: Addressing the young Cold War audience inCaptain Video and His Video Rangers(1949–1955)

This article argues the early science fiction television programme, Captain Video and His Video Rangers (DuMont, 1949–1955), addressed its young target audience directly as Cold War citizens, while encouraging them to undertake imaginative play in a form of early television fandom. The moral panic about the programme’s perceived high levels of violence led to the negative portrayal of its young viewers in popular culture. Yet Captain Video’s modes of direct address reveal a concerted effort to constitute the early children’s television audience around a playful intertextuality, bringing together consumerism, Cold War ideology and imaginative multi-genre engagement through child’s play.

The Uncanny Return of Settler-Colonial Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Home

Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home is concerned primarily with the efforts undertaken by its protagonist, the black Korean War veteran Frank Money, to accommodate himself to civilian life. However, Home differs from other Korean War novels in that after Frank returns to the United States, he neither aligns his wartime experiences with the superpower rivalry nor conducts a critical meta-engagement with Cold War ideology. When Frank comes back to the United States in 1955 from a tour of duty as a combat infantryman in Chosin, Korea, he instead undergoes the unheimlich experience of becoming a fugitive within a carceral state. Morrison confronts readers with a comparably uncanny experience when she deletes from the narrative any trace of the Cold War ideology whose structures of feeling, epistemologies, and military architecture the Korean War was putatively fought to establish and that the so-called war on terror had eerily revived. When she disallowed Cold War ideology control over representations of Home’s characters, actions, and events, Morrison recast the Korean War as the Cold War’s uncanny Other that exposed readers to an ongoing settler-colonial war being waged within 1950s US domestic society.