| Ends of Empire tracks a critical genealogy of the Cold War through an analysis of Asian American literature and film. The dissertation reframes the U.S. - Soviet Cold War rivalry in contending that it was a conjoined geopolitical, cultural, and epistemological project of racial formation and imperialism undergirding U.S. global capitalism, and demonstrates the centrality of Asia to that project. I argue that Asian American culture, by registering its vexed emergence as an index of the Cold War and its protracted afterlife, provides a diagnosis of the racial optics, imperial logics, and historical stakes under and through which the U.S. goes "there" to Asia and subsequently impels Asians to come "here" to the U.S. In doing so, I depart from analyses of the Cold War that assess its cultural dimensions as anti-Soviet/pro-American propaganda and its military interventions in Asia in diplomatic terms. This study intervenes as well in the history of Cold War American literary criticism, whose privileged object has been the "liberal imagination," and has heretofore not considered Asian American works. Finally, by critically triangulating Asian American culture, the Cold War, and U.S. global capitalism, it seeks to contribute to recent disciplinary and interdisciplinary critiques of American empire.;Through readings of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker, Le Ly Hayslip's When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, and Trinh T. Minh-ha's Surname Viet Given Name Nam, I trace the spatial, temporal, functional, and discursive "ends of empire" within the context of the globalization of American capitalism. In particular, I analyze the complex ways in which these cultural productions thematize the figuration of Asia in the American geopolitical imaginary as a foreign market, at once desired and disparaged; the racial formation of the Asian American as a domestic bearer of capital, at once a peril and a model; and the gendered terrain of the military engagements or wars of empire in Korea and Vietnam, at once cold and hot. |
