| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, April 1, 2022 | 1:30PM - 3:00PM | Online Event, Online Event |
BOOK TALK
A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2022).
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.
Christine Hong is Associate Professor of Literature, chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and co-director of the new Center for Racial Justice at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author of A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific (Stanford University Press, 2019). Along with Deann Borshay Liem, she co-directed the Legacies of the Korean War oral history project. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational institute, and she is the co-editor of the journal of Critical Ethnic Studies.
Co-presented by the Centre for the Study of Korea, the Centre for the Study of the United States, and the David Chu Program in Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Toronto and is co-sponsored by Heung | 흥 Coalition
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