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"Christina Klein takes a fresh, stimulating, and enlightening look at the complex visions of Asia dreamed over the decades by American popular culture. She argues her provocative viewpoints with the verve and flair of a showman, in a book which helps us to see the whole world through new eyes."—David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly and Flower Drum Song (2002)
"An extraordinarily interesting study of ‘Cold War internationalism.’ Klein’s brilliant and imaginative reading of such musicals as South Pacific and The King and I enables us to see how culture and geopolitics were woven together to transform the Cold War order into today’s ethnically diverse and economically interdependent world—within the framework of ‘U.S. global expansion.’"—Akira Iriye, Professor of History, Harvard University, and author, Global Community
List of contents
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
About the author
Christina Klein is Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Summary
While most cultural historians of the Cold War have focused on the culture of containment, the author reads the postwar period as one of international economic and political integration - a distinct chapter in the process of US-led globalization.
