Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

(2006) The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times History: Reviews of New Books: Vol 34, No 4, pp 134-135

The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower.

This essay argues that transnationalism is an indispensible term, bringing into sharp relief all the ways that scholarly disciplines have relied upon, and reified, the nation. Although some have charged that the concept is intellectually “soft,” this article contends that it does crucial work in undoing academic complicity with the ideological work of constructing the nation. Transnationalism is, we argue, a radical intervention with roots in anti-imperialist writers back to Fanon and Wallerstein, forward to the sharpest critics of neoliberalism. Drawing on work principally from Latin American and the United States, this article suggests that transnationalism need not be a concept that obviates our ability to think borders, walls, and militaries, but is precisely the conceptual apparatus that allows us to locate objects like the border wall in relation to transnational currents of globalization and its discontents. 
	In 1986, Joan Scott summarized a decade of feminist scholarship by arguing that gender refers to far more than sexed bodies (or even worse, female ones), but to entire symbolic systems and forms of social organization. In this piece, we suggest that the same is true of the nation—that it has organized knowledge, disciplines (Mexican History, American Literature), and forms of social organization (the entire bureaucratic apparatus associated with the Guatemalan economy). While the nation is anything but a transhistorical, natural, or autonomous entity, it has been politically usefully and academically expedient to proceed as if it were. “Gender” was the name Scott gave to the conceptual acid that could reveal the constructedness and utility of sex; “transnationalism” is the sign under which a critique of the nation has been underway.

/pdf/transnationalism-a-category-of-analysis-3ip8068har.pdf

Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Sentimental Education: Creating a Global Imaginary of Integration 2. Reader's Digest, Saturday review, and the Middlebrow Aesthetic of Commitment 3. How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism 4. Family Ties as Political Obligation: Oscar Hammerstein II, South Pacific, and the Discourse of Adoption 5. Musicals and Modernization: The King and I 6. Asians in America: Flower Drum Song and Hawaii Conclusion Notes Index

Cold War orientalism : Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961

Cold War orientalism

South Korea in the 1950s was home to a burgeoning film culture, one of the many “Golden Age cinemas” that flourished in Asia during the postwar years. Cold War Cosmopolitanism offers a transnational cultural history of South Korean film style in this period, focusing on the works of Han Hyung-mo, director of the era’s most glamorous and popular women’s pictures, including the blockbuster Madame Freedom (1956). Christina Klein provides a unique approach to the study of film style, illuminating how Han’s films took shape within a “free world” network of aesthetic and material ties created by the legacies of Japanese colonialism, the construction of US military bases, the waging of the cultural Cold War, the forging of regional political alliances, and the import of popular cultures from around the world. Klein combines nuanced readings of Han’s films with careful attention to key issues of modernity—such as feminism, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism—in the first monograph devoted to this major Korean director. “Christina Klein shines a brilliant klieg light on the still largely unknown South Korean classic films of the 1950s by placing them in a global context of Cold War culture and politics. This is an original and engaging study with broad scholarly and popular appeal.” CARTER J. ECKERT, author of Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea “Cold War Cosmopolitanism makes a unique contribution to multiple fields. Using Han Hyung-mo’s career and female characters as a springboard, Klein charts the historical and theoretical trajectories of the formation of Cold War cosmopolitanism in 1950s Korea under US hegemony.” HYE SEUNG CHUNG, author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema “This book belongs on the bookshelf of everyone interested in the Cold War culture of Asia.” POSHEK FU, author of Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas CHRISTINA KLEIN is Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Boston College.

/pdf/cold-war-cosmopolitanism-1b3wmnwfrk.pdf

Cold War Cosmopolitanism

This article proposes that Ang Lee's Chinese-language martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, be seen as a work of diasporic cinema. The essay explores how the film's material production and its aesthetic form have been shaped by Lee's ties to his Chinese homeland, to other members of the Chinese diaspora, and to the Hollywood films of his American hostland.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : A Diasporic Reading

This article explores how Korean director Bong Joon-ho appropriates and reworks Hollywood genre conventions in his films Memories of Murder and The Host , and uses them as tools to explore Korea’s experience of dictatorship and its vexed relationship with the United States.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40068554.pdf

Christina Klein

Papers

Cold War orientalism : Asia in the middlebrow imagination, 1945-1961

Cold War orientalism

Cold War Cosmopolitanism

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon : A Diasporic Reading

Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho