Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.

Summary
While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, Christina Klein reads the postwar period as one of '''international economic and political integration'''—a distinct chapter in the process of U.S.-led globalization. This book examines the relationship between the expansion of U.S. power into Asia between 1945 and 1961 and the simultaneous proliferation of popular American representations of Asia. Through her analysis of a wide range of texts and cultural phenomena—including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, James Michener's travel essays and novel Hawaii, and Eisenhower's People-to-People Program—Klein shows how U.S. policy makers, together with middlebrow artists, writers, and intellectuals,''' created a culture of global integration''' that represented the growth of U.S. power in Asia as the forging of emotionally satisfying bonds between Americans and Asians. She argues that the representations of Asia and the Pacific was imbued with politically salient meanings and reinforced the Cold War consensus: the domestic bloc that supported postwar expansion of U.S. power around the world. These texts constructed a national identity for the United States as a global power; delved into contemporary political issues between the U.S. and Asia; and linked questions of race to U.S. expansion. As a result, middlebrow intellectuals in the late 1940s and 1950s “saw themselves as educating Americans about their changing relationship to the world at large”; “they sought to situate their audience in relation to a world increasingly understood as interconnected, whose ligatures were defined by the logic of the Cold War.” (13) The texts repudiated imperialism and attempted to present narratives of “anti-conquest”  which legitimated U.S. expansion and placed it within in a system of reciprocity. Together, she argues, “middlebrow intellectuals and Washington policymakers produced a sentimental discourse of integration that imagined the forging of bonds between Asians and Americans both at home and abroad.” (16) Because expansion was predicated on integration, rather than territorial imperialism, it demanded an ideology of global interdependence, rather than of racial difference. This was “Cold War Orientalism.”

See also: Andrew Rotter