USIA/USIS

In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, many of the overseas American Cultural Centers or binational centers sponsored or supported by the U.S. Information Service (USIS) organized annual Gettysburg Address speech contests.  The contests helped local students develop speaking and oratorical skills while they learned about the U.S. war over slavery and "government of the people, by the people, for the people."  "A speech or essay contest . . . may encourage hundreds of students to strive for the prize.  Win or lose, every contestant benefits from the effort."  Includes recollections from Bangladesh, Nigeria, Taiwan, and China.

Modern art in Taiwan which burgeoned during the Japanese colonial era and further
developed after World War II has been heavily influenced by Western art. In such a
historical context, Taiwanese modern art world on the one hand has been eager to gain
recognition from the West, particularly Europe and North America; while on the other
hand, has been apprehensive about being assimilated or fading into oblivion. The
development of Taiwanese modern art has been the result of power relations between
Western culture, local politics,​ and institutions. With reference to related archives, newspapers, magazines, diaries and oral
histories, this study uses the method of discourse analysis to examine the impact of Western art and culture on Taiwanese modern art through the perspective of cultural
politics.

Hastings Kamau is a teenage Kikuyu farmer forced by poverty to leave school and village to find work in Mombasa and Nairobi, Kenya's seaport and capital city. Hastings' two-year journey brings us behind the scenes to modern Kenya, where he, like his nation, tries to turn a troubled past into a brighter future.

Chapter in "Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945-1990," edited by Stephen H Whiteman, Sarena Abdullah, Yvonne Low, Phoebe Scott (Singapore and Sydney: National Gallery Singapore and Power Publications, 2018). Blind peer-reviewed publication.

https://shop.powerpublications.com.au/products/ambitious-alignments-new-histories-of-southeast-asian-art-1945-1990

As Dr. Martin Luther King and other Americans demonstrated for an end to segregation and discrimination, within the Kennedy administration, the Director of the U.S. Information Agency, Edward R. Murrow, added the argument that racial discrimination in America impaired support for the United States in the Cold War, especially as African colonies attained their independence.  President Kennedy absorbed Murrow's concept, which contributed to the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Amerika Birleşik Devletleri uzun zamandır yabancı ülkelerin halklarını kamu diplomasisi yoluyla etkilemeye çalışmaktadır. Bu çalışmada Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’nin kamu diplomasisi faaliyetlerini yürüten United States Information Agency’nin (USIA), misyonu, yapısı, faaliyetleri ve Soğuk Savaş sürecine etkisi incelenmiştir. İkinci Dünya Savaşı, eski diplomasinin uygulamalarının başarısızlığını ortaya koyarken ulusların ideolojik ve askeri bloklara bölünmüş b󰁩r dünya için yeni bir diplomasi yaratılmasını gerektirmişti. Çünkü II. Dünya Savaşı’nın dünyada açtığı yaralar ve dramatik deneyimler Amerika Birleşik Devletleri ile Sovyetler Birliği arasındaki iki kutuplu çatışmanın yerini askeri olmayan savaş araçlarına yönlendirmişti. Bu amaçla kurulan USIA, Amerikan ulusal çıkarlarını korumak ve Sovyetler Birliği’ne karşı “kalp ve zihin savaşını” kazanmak için açık/örtülü propaganda operasyonları, uluslararası yayıncılık, yurtdışındaki yerel medyayı etkileme, kişisel temasları ve kültürel alışverişleri teşvik etmek gibi birtakım faaliyetler yürütmüştür. Amerikan Hükümet organlarının yurtdışında sahip olduğu en geniş yerel görev ağına ve yetkisine sahip olan USIA, yürüttüğü faaliyetlerle hem komünizme hem de Sovyetlere karşı güçlü bir propaganda aracı olarak uzun yıllar Amerikan kamu diplomasisinin merkezinde yer almıştır.

The United States has long sought to influence the peoples of foreign countries through public diplomacy. In this study, the mission, structure, activities of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which carries out the public diplomacy activities of the United States, and its effect on the Cold War process were examined. While the Second World War revealed the failure of the practices of the old diplomacy, it required the creation of a new concept of diplomacy for a world divided into ideological and military blocs of nations. Because the wounds and traumatic experiences inflicted by the Second World War throughout the world, the bipolar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was replaced by non-military war instruments. Established for this purpose, USIA carried out a number of activities such as overt/ covert propaganda operations, international broadcasting, influencing local media abroad, promoting personal contacts and cultural exchanges in order to protect American national interests and win the "heart and mind war" against the Soviet Union. USIA, which has the widest local mission network and authority that the American government organs in abroad, has been at the center of American public diplomacy for many years as a powerful propaganda tool against both communism and the Soviets with these activities.

L’elaborato ricostruisce la vicenda della biblioteca dello United States Information Service di Palermo. Il centro sorse in città alla fine della Seconda guerra mondiale con lo scopo di informare gli italiani circa i modi di vivere, gli usi e i costumi, le istituzioni americane, e di suscitare consenso intorno alle scelte della politica estera statunitense. Il programma dell'USIS prevedeva l'apertura di biblioteche aperte al pubblico nelle maggiori città italiane. Nel 1945 il governo americano istituì a Palermo una delle prime American libraries in Italia.

Alla fine degli anni Settanta, a causa di forti tagli al bilancio del governo americano, la collezione bibliografica dell’USIS fu donata alla Biblioteca Centrale della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell’Università degli Studi di Palermo, affinché fosse mantenuta in vita la biblioteca americana. Nell’elaborato si analizza il patrimonio del fondo librario statunitense oggi conservato presso la Facoltà di Lettere e presso le altre biblioteche cittadine.

***

Paper tells the story of the library of the United States Information Service in Palermo. The center was founded in the town at the end of the Second World War. The aim of USIS was to inform Italians about the ways of life, habits and customs, American institutions, and encourage consensus around the choices of U.S. foreign policy. The program of USIS was intended to open public libraries in most important Italian towns.
In 1945 the U.S. government established in Palermo one of the first American libraries in Italy.
At the end of the Seventies because of deep cuts to the budget of the U.S. government, the books of USIS was donated to the University of Palermo, to keep the American Library alive. This paper analyzes the U.S. book collection.

Keywords: USIS (United States Information Service), library, advertising, DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification), After the Second World War

As Americans look back on nearly two decades of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, the experiences and analyses of a junior officer of the U.S. Information Agency during the war in Vietnam, Douglas Pike (1924-2002), deserve to be recovered.  His view of "three basic ways that ideas can be communicated" -- through mass media, informal channels like word or mouth or rumor, and through social organizations -- merit attention.  Pike examined the motivations of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers and cadres, their scant knowledge of Marxism and Communism, insights provided by defectors, the “darker character”
and “psychological dependence” of the Vietnamese, and the relationships between "political struggle" and "armed struggle" during the war.  Pike offered many takes that challenge the standard Stanley Karnow-Ken Burns narrative of the war.

After the Second World War, government-level public information agencies in the U.S., such as the U.S. Information Service (USIS), resided in allied nations, such as South Korea, to engage in long-term propaganda activities.  This study focuses on the negotiation of identity of South Korean filmmakers and audiences in making and consuming cultural films, devoting particular attention to the role of the American ‘foreign’ authorities. 
The idea of cultural film (Kulturfilm), which had been imported by the Japanese colonial rulers and was succeeded by the U.S. and ROK public information agencies, created a useful foundation for South Koreans’ perception of the Self in this context.  It was a vaguely defined category of films mainly distributed by governmental-level agencies for educational and propaganda purposes.  The category of cultural film included public information documentaries, occasional newsmagazine films, ethnographic films, and educational feature films.  Cultural films were not only a means of publicizing governmental policies, but also a window through which to learn about the world with an ethnographic element.  Under the name of cultural film, U.S. public information agencies imported American-made documentary films which depicted the American way of life and produced ‘localized films’ dealing with local issues by hiring Korean filmmakers. 
For Koreans who were situated in the postcolonial state formation, the new conditions fostered through the emergence of the Cold War system were crucial to their identity formation.  They were citizens of a newly built state, but their nation was divided between the Cold War Power blocs which defined South Koreans as citizens of the “Free World.”  Cultural films created an interesting foundation for South Koreans’ perception of the Self in this context.  As a window to learn the world, cultural films of U.S. public information agencies made a condition for the Self/Other opposition, as conventional ethnographic films usually did.
However, in the geopolitical and historical particularity of South Korea, those cultural films created a unique type of spectatorship that mediated the perceptions of the Self and the Other in an intricate web of different ethnographic gazes.  Imported documentaries showed the American life as an idealized model of civilization, but there is little probability that Koreans fully identified themselves with Americans in these films.  (Re)presentations of idealized American urban life were rather a means of entertainment to see the exotic Other.  At the same time, locally made cultural films depicted South Koreans who constructed their lives and rehabilitated from social and personal damages.  Despite the aim to facilitate self-recognition of Korean audiences as citizens of the “Free World,” such films also presented the complexity in identification since their self-recognition was organized by the foreign agencies like USIS-Korea.  Thus, it is highly probable that the reception of those films was a process of intense negotiation to define the Self and the Other.
This outcome was partly an inevitable consequence of the localization project of U.S. public information activities; however, use of local manpower was not the only cause of such an uneven screen.  The appearance of translated and modified ‘ideal citizens’ in P‘aldogangsan (1967), one of the representative films of NFPC also made under the profound impact of USIS, and an enthusiastic response from the Korean public to that film show how an original project on the cultural cold war could be transformed into a vernacular one in the more local context.
In the case of Korean filmmakers who were affiliated with U.S. public information agencies, the negotiation of identity appears more clearly.  They were hired by the U.S. governmental agencies and served as messengers of the “Free World” screen, but, at the same time, they recognized themselves as builders of the nation.  Further, they also regarded themselves as individual artists who did not merely deliver rhetoric of their hirers but also expressed their own artistic sensibility.  These contested self-identities led the filmmakers to adopt certain compromising positions.  As one can see in the distinction between the routes of the two symbolic documentarists, Robert Flaherty and John Grierson, government-sponsored documentary filmmaking would drive filmmakers to a crossroads between romanticism facilitating humanist impulse and enlightenment seeking social engineering.  Similar inner conflict of USIS- and UNKRA-affiliated filmmakers was joined together with the geopolitical conditions of South Korea and concluded with unique auteurism in film making.
The routes of these alumni of the American film training camps indicate several different choices in the intense negotiations on identity: leaving the camp and devoting oneself to auteurism in filmmaking; leaving the camp and keeping auteurist impulse in mind, but giving it up in commercial filmmaking with deep skepticism; and remaining in the camp with auteurism in cultural film making.  They also show double-sidedness of those Korean filmmakers who did receive benefits from U.S.-led agencies, as the successor and criticizer of the Western culture.  They constantly had to seek compromises between the Griersonian missions and artistic self-realization and between nation-building and “Free World” bloc building, in an all too “expert” system created by a hegemonic foreign agency.

The definition of the Korean national cinema in the course of modern and contemporary history of South Korea has provoked controversy. This article examines the negotiations in the identity formation of Korean filmmakers examining specific objects from years of reconstruction following the Korean War. It pays attention to the time when state-building and nation-building became combined enduring heterogeneity of this process. Kim Ki-yŏng's films depict such characters. His public information short films reflect the legacy of American war films. However, they also contain self-conscious moments when the director refuses to be identified as a mere successor of American documentary filmmakers. Kim's first commercial film, Boxes of Death (1955), an anti-communist thriller, shows great influence from Hollywood, but also with a strong auteurist impulse, theatrical tradition, and the Japanese colonial legacy. However, the most important aspect is the standing presence of America and the USIS-Korea in the identity of Kim Ki-yŏng and his film. American agencies intervened in the work of Korean filmmakers in the interest of “Free World” bloc-building, and those filmmakers used such agencies to obtain resources. The heterogeneity in the process of the subject formation in Korean national cinema was one common characteristic of many filmmakers of the post-Korean War era.

In the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the United States Information Service (USIS) at the American Consulate General in Hong Kong frequently published translations of American books into Chinese.  In the early 1980s, a new bilingual edition of "Living Documents of American History" included Dr. Martin Luther King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech. The article relates the editorial choice to translate the full text, rather than selections.

Although Public Diplomacy has a diminished share of America's engagement with the world, its goals have become more expansive; this is a recipe for frustration.  Public Diplomacy is too light to effect social change, there's no money to match its dreams; it is no longer the case that Country Public Affairs Officer at an embassy is the Ambassador's "principal public affairs advisor."  Although they were never written down, the U.S. Information Agency had doctrines – focus on foreign policy goals; two-step communication with defined audiences; focus on "policy" rather than "culture"; "field-driven" programs; an annual plan; a three-step concept (policy, audience, program); the collaboration of American and local employees; and truthful and attributed communication.  In a world changed by the social media and a new international environment, it's time for Public Diplomacy to debate "lessons learned, "best practices," and doctrine.

This essay argues that the Cultural Cold War is one of the indispensable backgrounds against which the story of modernisms in India must be reconsidered. Using a wealth of unpublished or forgotten documents, it throws light on the ways by which the Cold War shaped the publishing, critical and literary scene in India in the 1950s–1970s, when both blocs were engaged in “pressing the fight” and devising or funding a vast arsenal of “cultural weapons”, such as book programmes, translations and magazines. This background helps to shed light on the “new cultural conversations”, the transnational and translational traffics that were taking place at the time; why and how certain texts and little magazines travelled. By examining in particular the role of two institutions, the ICCF (Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom) and USIS (United States Information Services), as well as pivotal modernist figures such as Nissim Ezekiel, and the editorial stances and choices of English-language journals such as Quest and damn you, the aim is to illuminate some of the “travelling literatures”, the affiliations, rebellions and negotiations which nurtured modernisms in India. “What filters through that curtain is only fit for the international shit-pot” provocatively wrote Adil Jussawalla in 1972, while criticizing the “dreadful dilution” of the literature disseminated by USIS. Many Indian writers also “used” the Cold War (and the worldliness it gave rise to), struggled for the means of political, cultural and literary independence, and defined themselves against the bi-polarization of the world. Bypassing official circuits and dictates, they strove to clear alternative spaces for themselves, to invent their own signature of modernism and define in their own terms the many meanings and forms of “freedom”

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2019.1649183

Reviews "Journey into Diplomacy: A Black Man's Shocking Discovery -- A Memoir," by Leaford Williams (Professional Press, 1996).  Born in Jamaica, recruited as a farm worker in the U.S. during the Second World War, Leaford Williams later immigrated, served in the Air Force in Okinawa and Korea, studied at Georgetown and American Universities, and became a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Information Agency.  Disappointed by the lack of opportunity for African Americans to rise in the Foreign Service, he became a federal executive in Washington.  He ran for the District of Columbia's city council in 1974.

Reviews "Travelers to the New Naation, 1776-1914: An American Studies Reader," Marc Pachter, editor -- the public diplomacy edition published by the U.S. International Communication Agency in 1976.  The book is a collection of essays on foreign visitors to the United States. Alexis de Toqueville is the most well known, but the 20 other essays address the visits of such figures as Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Georges Clemenceau, Jose Marti, Antonin Dvorak, Swami Vivekanada, Hu Shih, and Liang Ch'i-chao.

Introduction to the "Teachers Guide" to accompany the 1982 English-Chinese edition of "An Outline of American History [美国历史文献选集]." Philip M. Hosay and Donald J. Johnson edited the Teacher's Guide, prepared for the Press and Cultural Section of the American Embassy in Beijing, 1983.  The Teacher's Guide introduced themes, teaching approaches, lists of historical works, and 52 readings of primary source documents.  History is a renewable discipline; every generation of historians reviews the past with fresh questions.

Public talk at the Young Art Historians' Forum, LASALLE College of the Arts, MA Asian Art Histories programme, September 2015.
Abstract:
After being forbidden in French Cambodge, representational painting was introduced by a Japanese teacher following the Japanese occupation in 1945. Sentimental images depicting the Cambodian landscape quickly boomed in popularity, and representational drawing and painting became synonymous with artistic modernism in the years following independence in 1953. Its growth was aided by intensive involvement in cultural affairs by the United States, as part of their attempt to influence “neutralist” Cambodia in the “Cold War” context of war in neighbouring Vietnam. This paper explores how the Cambodian “modern” is articulated in the work of the most prominent visual artist of the period, Nhek Dim (1934-78). Drawing on research in the archives of the United States government, particular attention is paid to the intersections between Nhek Dim’s paintings and the cultural activities of the United States, who organized numerous exhibitions in Cambodia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and sponsored the artist’s study in the US from 1964-67. This paper will argue that Nhek Dim’s work embodies the possibility of nationalism amidst a policy of non-aligned neutralism: a balance that was endorsed by the US and became defining of the modern in this context.

On October 4, 1999, a few days after the U.S. Information Agency became part of the Department of State, Representative Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,  entered remarks on Public Diplomacy in the Congressional Record. Almost twenty years later, Public Diplomacy has been reshaped by the war on terrorism, by the internet revolution, and by the new disinformation, but the principles Smith expressed remain relevant.

A 1963 essay by George Gallup, the pioneer of opinion surveys and founder of the Gallup Poll, addressed key issues in U.S. Public Diplomacy -- "propaganda," messages, ideas, research, pre-testing, English teaching, exchanges, "ideological warfare," and truth.