Abstract
In 1948 Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang argued in a UNESCO publication for an increase in stressing cultural cooperation between what he termed the “Orient” and “Occident.” The prolific novelist and newly appointed head of UNESCO’s Arts and Letters Division suggested in his UNESCO Courier article that the postwar world offered an opportunity for those interested in securing peace to do so by focusing on cultural exchange.1 He shunned an “emphasis being laid on the economic values” and the “nascent nationalism” destroying “the spiritual foundation of eastern cultures,” in favor of a synthesis “of the most fruitful” type “between the Orient and the Occident.” Lin argued further, “[A]fter all, a contact of ideas through race mixtures and the meeting of different cultures is one of the most powerful forces in history.”2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Chan Wing-Tsit, “Lin Yutang, Critic and Interpreter,” College English 8, 4 (January 1947): 164. Born in 1895 in China’s Fuijan province, Lin Yutang was educated at Harvard University and Leipzig, Germany. Lin’s career as a novelist and translator of Chinese texts took off with the appearance of My Country and My People in 1935. He won widespread acclaim in 1948 for his novel Chinatown Family. According to one scholar, Lin’s novels repeatedly angered many communists in China and the United States through the 1940s because of their negative interpretations of communism. Between 1930 and 1950 Lin authored 20 novels and English translations of Chinese texts.
Chen Lok Chua, “Two Chinese Versions of the American Dream: The Golden Mountain in Lin Yutang and Maxine Hong Kingston,” MELUS 8, 4 (Winter 1981): 61
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 4.
Lin Yutang, “Orient—Occident Cultural Co-operation Stressed,” UNESCO Courier 1, 8 (September 1948): 3.
On US cultural diplomacy in the twentieth century, please see: Liping Bu, Makingthe World Like US: Education, Cultural Expansion, and the American Century (London: Praeger, 2003)
Richard Arnot, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005)
Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of ldeas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations,1938–1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Naima Prevots, Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1999);, Press, 2008).
The ensuing independence of the Philippines and India, the opportunity to solidify a capitalist democratic ally in Japan, successful communist revolution in China, and military conflict in Korea provided American and UNESCO officials plenty of reason to deepen their interests in Asia. Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 81, 96; Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 5, 61.
One such characterization of anti-racist (Boasian) anthropology comes from Klein, which begins accurately but fails to engage in a deeper examination of the historiography of US anthropology. Klein writes: “Scientific thinking about race began to change in the early twentieth century, when anthropologist Franz Boas moved away from the idea of immutable biological difference as a way to explain the diversity of the world’s people and developed a more flexible model of cultural difference instead. A pluralistic model of society gradually followed from Boas’s work: if intergroup differences resulted from relatively superficial cultural factors rather than essential biological ones, then these differences could be more easily accommodated within a relatively flexible social order” (Klein, Cold War Orientalism, 11). The following authors place Ruth Benedict’s work within the configuration of Said’s Orientalism: Joy Hendry, “The Chrysanthemum Continues to Flower: Ruth and Some Perils of Popular Anthropology,” in Popularizing Anthropology, eds. Jeremy Clancy and Chris McDonaugh (London: Routledge, 1996): 106–121
Douglass Lummis, “Ruth Benedict’s Obituary for Japanese Culture,” in Reading Benedict Reading Mead: Feminism, Race, and Imperial Visions, eds. Dolores Janiewski and Lois W. Banner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005): 126–140.
For critiques of Boasian anthropology more broadly, please see: Faye V. Harrison, “The Persistent Power of ‘Race’ in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism,” Annual of Anthropology 24 (1995): 47–74; “Introduction: Expanding the Discourse on ‘Race,”’ American Anthropologist 100, 3 (1998): 609–631
Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998)
George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
Kamala Visweswaran, “Race and the Culture of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 100, 1 (1998): 70–83.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 12.
Klein, Cold War Oreintalism, 15, 63. Klein describes the contentions of Said and other postcolonial theorists who argue that politicized discourses of the postwar period, which move beyond explicitly racist notions of cultural immutability between “East” and “West,” present a postorientalist position. Klein and others argue that the postwar discourse on the “Orient” focused on affiliation and flexibility and employed the literary trope of sentimentality. Also see: Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1991).
Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory 35, 4 (December 1996): 100.
Marc Frey has made a very similar argument regarding southeast Asia in “Tools of Empire: Persuasion and the United States’s Modernizing Mission in Southeast Asia,” Diplomatic History 27, 4 (September 2003): 543–568; Scott Ladermen, “Hollywood’s Vietnam, 1929–1964: Scripting Intervention, Spotlighting Injustice,” Pacific Historical Review 78, 4 (November 2009): 578–607.
For a broader examination of economic development and modernization in Asia, see Marc T. Berger, The Battlefor Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Arif Dirlik, “The End of Colonialism: The Colonial Modern in the Making of Modernity” Boundary 2 32,1(Spring 2005): 10.
On Orientalism in the postwar period, please see: Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)
Douglass Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)
Sheng-Mei Na, The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1993), 205.
Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 81–91.
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986)
Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2004)
Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Debating Racial Science in Wartime Japan,” Osiris 2, 13 (1998): 354–375.
A sample of recent works include: Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)
Yasuko Takezawa, Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)
Roger Daniels, “Incarceration of the Japanese Americans: A Sixty Year Perspective,” The History Teacher 35, 3 (May 2002): 297–310.
For examinations of the legal aspects of the wartime incarceration, please see Peter Irons, ed., Justice Delayed: The Record of the Japanese American Internment Cases (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); Justice at War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining The Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3–10.
Masako Shibata, Japan and Germany under the U.S. Occupation: A Comparative Analysis of Postwar Education Reform (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005)
Ray Moore and Donald Robinson, Partners for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State under MacArthur (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Mark Sandler, ed., The Confusion Era: Art and Culture of Japan during the Allied Occupation 1945–52 (Seattle, WA: Arthur M. Slacker Gallery, University of Washington Press, 1997).
John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1999)
Mari Yamamoto, Grassroots Pacificism in Post-War Japan: The Rebirth of a Nation (London: Routledge, 2004).
Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms &r the U. S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
Noako Shibisawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 182.
Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants Since1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 147–150.
Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979).
Charles Thomson and Walter Laves, UNESCO: Purpose Progress Prospects (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 248.
UNESCO, “Introduction,” in Interrelations of Cultures: Their Contribution to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 8–9.
Guy J. Pauker, “Forward,” in Human Values in Social Change in South and South and Southeast Asia and in the United States: Implications for Asian-American Cooperation (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1956), iii.
Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: The New Press, 1998), 171.
Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 4–7.
A sample of works include: Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1945–1966 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000)
Mark T. Berger, The Battle for Asia: From Decolonization to Globalization (London: Routledge, 2004)
David Newsom, The Imperial Mantle: The United States, Decolonization, and the Third World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)
Kimber Charles Pearce, Rostow, Kennedy, and the Rhetoric of Foreign Aid (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2001)
Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions (London: Sage, 2001)
Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Willard E. Givens, “Foreword,” in Arthur Goodfriend, Two Sides of One World: An Asian-American Discussion (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1957), vii.
Unlike Japan, which had an established Marxist leaning intellegencia and internal modernizing forces before World War II, these decolonizing states readily fit the US model for postwar modernization. John Dower, “Introduction,” in Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1957)
David Abosch, “Political Consciousness in Japan: A Retrospective on E. H. Norman,” Pacific Affairs 40, 1 (Spring 1969): 25–31.
Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 15–26.
Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij, Dharam Ghai and Frederic Lapeyre, UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 3.
Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 167–170.
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992), 34.
Alastair Bonnett, Anti-Racism (London: Routledge, 2000)
Alana Lentin, Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe (London: Pluto, 2004); “Racial States, Anti-Racist Responses: Picking Holes in ‘Culture’ and ‘Human Rights,”’ European Journal of Social Theory 7, 4 (2004): 427–443. These works challenge the notion that anti-racism is the direct opposite to racism, discursively and practically, by demonstrating how cultural differences signify “racial” difference in western European countries following World War II.
A. Doak Barnett, “In Appreciation,” in Turn East toward Asia: A Report on the 6th National Conference (San Francisco: United States National Commission for UNESCO, 1957).
David H. Price, “Cold War Anthropology: Collaborators and Victims of the National Security State,” Identities 4, 3/4 (June 1998): 391.
Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 118.
Robert McMahon, The Limits of Empire: The United States and Southeast Asia Since World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 67–70.
UNESCO, Appraisal of the Major Project on Mutual Appreciation ofEastern and Western Cultural Values, 1957–1966. (Paris: UNESCO, 1968), 82–83.
Copyright information
© 2012 Anthony Q. Hazard Jr.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hazard, A.Q. (2012). Anti-racism and Orientalism. In: Postwar Anti-racism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003843_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137003843_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43441-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-00384-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)