Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War
Sunny Xiang, "Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War "
English | ISBN: 0231196962 | 2020 | 368 pages | PDF | 6 MB
English | ISBN: 0231196962 | 2020 | 368 pages | PDF | 6 MB
Why were U.S. intelligence organizations so preoccupied with demystifying East and Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century? Sunny Xiang offers a new way of understanding the American cold war in Asia by tracing aesthetic manifestations of “Oriental inscrutability” across a wide range of texts. She examines how cold war regimes of suspicious thinking produced an ambiguity between “Oriental” enemies and Asian allies, contributing to the conflict’s status as both a “real war” and a “long peace.”
Xiang puts interrogation reports, policy memos, and field notes into conversation with novels, poems, documentaries, and mixed media work by artists such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ha Jin, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. She engages her archive through a reading practice centered on tone, juxtaposing Asian diasporans who appear similar in profile yet who differ in tone.
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