Description:
A Violent Peace offers a radical account of the United States' transformation into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in domestic strategies to quell racial protests the same counterintelligence logic structuring America's devastating wars in Asia.
Examining U.S. militarism's centrality to the Cold War cultural imagination, Christine Hong assembles a transpacific archive--placing war writings, visual renderings of the American concentration camp, Japanese accounts of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War-era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments alongside government documents. By making visible the way the U.S. war machine waged informal wars abroad and at home, this archive reveals how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity--imagining collective futures beyond the stranglehold of U.S. militarism.
Review Quotes: "A Violent Peace is a tour de force, a brilliant rebuttal to the myth of America as defender of human rights abroad and racial justice at home. Christine Hong demonstrates how radical black and Asian intellectuals' penetrating critiques represent the real democratizing project. Beautifully written and persuasively argued, this book is a seismic shift in Cold War cultural history and our geopolitical imagination."--Robin D. G. Kelley, University of California, Los Angeles