Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961

I finally completed my skim of Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism. I bought the book two years ago and never read it for a class with my adviser on the state of the field (US foreign relations history). This won't be a long, drawn-out review like the others. Klein, a professor of English at Boston College, examines cultural artifacts (such as Reader's Digest, Saturday Review, The Ugly American, "The King and I," and others) to chart how producers of knowledge endeavored to destroy barriers that separated the US from Asia. Klein highlights how authors and playrights engaged in a liberal program to link the US to Asia to foster support for the Cold War through the creation of sentimental books, articles, tracts, plays, and films.

Klein's introduction lays out her improvement on Edward Said's concept of Orientalism. Similar to Melani McAlister, she argues that the American variant isn't as strict as the European form Said first chronicled. Her focus on the sentimental revealed how middlebrow Americans "must be seen...as working through a logic of affiliation as well as through one of difference" (16). Her treatment of this throughout the book is well done and contributes a much-needed level of nuance to the US' interactions with the developing world after 1945. I am left to wonder, however, if one can trace the genesis of a particularly American brand of Orientalism without first discussing whiteness and the concept of race and races prior to 1945. By doing so, it would shed light on the steps by which foreign others were categorized and placed in a hierarchy of races. The American notion of whiteness itself was fluid prior to the 1920s and never as simple as seeing non-white people as the Other. I also believe that concepts of Orientalism cannot be divorced from material culture or production in a longer view of American history.

I also wonder about her use of the term middlebrow. She never articulates who was the target for this cultural output. Of course, the immediate response is to say, "hey, dummy, it's middlebrow. Get it?" But American conceptions of class and what was middle-class went through significant shifts following the Second World War. I have some doubts about the widespread acceptance and viewing of the products she interprets by a steel worker in Pittsburgh or an oil worker in Kansas. Do you think they were dog earring their copies of William Lederer's and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American? While that audience could be considered low brow, that is somewhat at odds with American history and class relations at that time. I also have questions regarding the long-term effect of "The King and I" and how one could illustrate the permanence of the ideas expressed in the representations she analyzes.

As a final critique, there are points where I tire when reading about Oscar Hammerstein, James Michener, Norman Cousins, Thomas Dooley, etc. Certainly, it feeds her analysis and is relevant for her argument, but I found myself skimming those sections speedily and with no remorse for the oversight.