American Literary History

In the last two decades, New Cold War studies scholarship has made a belligerent appeal to do away with the mistaken characterization conveyed by the term “cold.” This 45-year period was marked by extraordinary violence everywhere in the world due to the intersecting decolonization and anticolonial struggles. Plus, proxy wars, weapons flooding, coups, assassinations, counterrevolutionary violence, torture, and regime changes were staples of Cold War strategies. Referring to this history as a “cold” war only obscures the reality of the scorched earth policy that the superpowers brought into being during their long standoff. Such contradictions animate Christine Hong’s new study. Referring to the Pax Americana after the end of World War II, Hong asks, “How and why did most Americans perceive a time of unrestrained war violence to be a period of uneasy peace?” (3). These were the years when the US solidified its power in the world through a necropolitical military empire whose counterrevolutionary violence led to several million dead worldwide. Yet at home, the project of democracy and its attendant forms of liberal multiculturalism and the blurring of color lines became ideologically embedded.

A Violent Peace explores these years marked by “U.S. military tactics and strategies against ’unruly’ populations at home and ‘enemies’ abroad” (9). Bringing together hitherto disparate struggles such as “black freedom, Asian liberation, and Pacific Islander decolonization” (8), Hong unearths the multipronged structures of US militarism that sought to create a police state at the domestic and international level. With a focus on transwar radical texts that resisted US fascism drunk on war, A Violent Peace makes a strong case for the ways in which this militarization, securitization, and regimes of racial terror were represented in the art and literature. Hong does so by drawing from a vast archive of Black writing, transpacific visual and textual material from Japan, Korea and the Philippines, Native American writing, along with such genres as graphic novels, poetry, human rights documents, and photography.

Hong refers to this post-1945 cultural production as the literature or art of democratization and teases out these contradictory and resistant representations through “racially abject figures” like the “Jim Crow soldier, camp inmate, cannon fodder, war trash, radiation test subject” (20). In seven masterful chapters, Hong paints with broad theoretical strokes but often through a meditation on individual authors whose works exemplify the bigger arguments. The first chapter tackles the end of segregation when the US war in Korea became a racialized site and Black soldiers were recruited as proof [End Page 1256] of democracy’s inclusive multicultural potential. We dive into this era through the works of Ralph Ellison who only responded to these currents belatedly, almost three decades later. The hot war only got hotter, and, as Hong posits, in Asia and the Pacific “the planes that transported the atomic bombs would also be ideologically cast as carriers of democracy, and ground zero would be construed as the basis for reconstruction” (55).

In turning to Japan, Hong builds upon the notion of a “black Pacific,” by making visible the figure of the Black pilot in Nobel prize-winning author Ōe Kenzaburo’s compelling and complex 1958 novella Shiiku (“Prize Stock”). Shiiku has received a lot of attention for its surreal narration of the Black man who is held captive in a village, but Hong furthers the threads of solidarity binding the pilot and the Asian aerial targets who are both subjects of this theater of bringing freedom and revolution to the region through a brutal US war machine. More importantly, her analysis explains how Ōe also narrates a “mutual subhumanity” (65) and counters Japanese imperial prowess through the rural setting that remains a peripheral space and does not participate in the militaristic center. Occupied Japan returns in the next chapter with a close reading of Miné Okubo’s incredibly rich visual texts of Japanese internment, not so much...