Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-11, Section: A, page: 4319.

Director: Michael Denning.

This dissertation examines the role of middlebrow culture in winning consent for the Cold War in Asia. Focusing on the links between popular Orientalism and the rise of the U.S. as a global power, it argues that two genres--musicals and travel narratives--encouraged Americans to feel a sense of political obligation to Asia at a time when the U.S. was committing itself to the defense of that region from Communism.

This project puts producers of popular culture and makers of foreign policy into conversation with one another. It shows how these two discourse-producing groups used the language of sympathy to construct a national identity that legitimated the U.S. expansion into Asia while denying imperial ambition and disavowing racism. By drawing on the internationalist traditions of both nineteenth-century missionary culture and 1930s-era Popular Front culture, they produced a global imaginary that bound Americans to Asia through personal ties.

This dissertation uses Reader's Digest and the Saturday Review as archives of the middlebrow and interprets a wide range of texts, including Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and The King and I, Philip Wylie's The Innocent Ambassadors, and William Lederer and Eugene Burdick's The Ugly American. By reading these narratives of cross-racial adoption and round-the-world travel together with a variety of foreign policy documents, it charts the emergence of a sentimental language of Cold War globalism.