Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War (Literature Now)

Why were U.S. intelligence organizations so preoccupied with demystifying East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century' Sunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of 'Oriental inscrutability' across a wide range of texts. She examines how cold war regimes of suspicious thinking produced an ambiguity between 'Oriental' enemies and Asian allies, contributing to the conflict's status as both a 'real war' and a 'long peace.' Xiang puts interrogation reports, policy memos, and field notes into conversation with novels, poems, documentaries, and mixed media work by artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She engages her archive through a reading practice centered on tone, juxtaposing Asian diasporans who appear similar in profile yet who differ in tone. Tonal Intelligence considers how the meaning of race, war, and empire came under pressure during two interlinked periods of geopolitical transition: American 'nation-building' in East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century and Asian economic modernization during the late twentieth century. By reading both state records and aesthetic texts from these periods for their tone rather than their content, Xiang shows how bygone threats of Asian communism and emergent regimes of Asian capitalism have elicited distinct yet related anxieties about racial intelligibility. Featuring bold methods, unlikely archives, and acute close readings, Tonal Intelligence rethinks the marking and making of race during the long cold war.-- Provided by publisher "In postwar America, different expressions of the "Inscrutable Oriental" have produced and challenged ideas about how we perceive, process, and make claims about race during periods of dramatic change and historical unpredictability. In Neutral Tones, Sunny Xiang examines two different modes of Asian and Asian-American self-representation. The first, produced during the height of the Cold War were US-sponsored projects that furthered U.S. strategic and ideological goals in Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam. In addition to helping to reinforce Washington's goal of communist containment, they also reinforced liberal notions of racial assimilation and integration. Examining such case studies as Hirohito's transformation into a democratic human emperor, the testimonies of South Korean women, and the autobiography of a Korean POW, Xiang considers how these examples became sources of intelligence and certainty. While the earlier texts come from the records of the US foreign policy, the later come from literary and artistic works from the 1970s to the 2000s by figures such as Ha Jin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Viet Thanh Nguyen. These works, Xiang argues, critique and subvert earlier forms of self-expression and challenges and neutralizes standard markers and personas of race. In the place of compulsory forms of racial self-expression sponsored by mid-century US cold war liberalism, this new formulation of racial identity gave expression to an emergent economic regime that valorizes flexible persons - a regime increasingly associated with the rise of the Pacific Rim as an economic power"-- Provided by publisher Introduction: Hardly war, partly history -- The tone of intelligence : unconventional warfare and its archives -- The tone of the rumors : something in the air -- The tone of the times : a surpassing hurry -- The tone of documentation : the brainwashee's drone -- The tone of intimacy : among the fish -- Coda: The tone of commons : solidarities without a solid