I actually like this book so far … I like that Klein seems pretty neutral, expository, analytic rather than critical (it makes the book more useful). I like the way she delineates the sections conceptually (unlike Williams’ choppy and uninformative headings). This book also feels more LCS than The Making. Klein gives the history and analyzes cultural artifacts in their contemporary context; she also uses literature, discourse as primary sources of evidence. The only complaint I have so far is that it was hard to “zoom out” and see the entire trajectory of American attitudes towards Asia, how they changed in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This is probably because the book is structured conceptually rather than chronologically. And since I generally like the way that the book is set up, I am not quite sure what I would do to fix this problem.
One historical claim that I found a bit puzzling: “the New York intellectuals sought to protect the realm of culture from corruption by insisting on a clear separation between art and politics” (66). I would have liked some more details. It leaves me feeling like the highbrows were kind of apolitical, which – in my experience – I know to be untrue, but I guess I could see this being true in a modernist context. Also do we think Klein’s claim is still true? (I.e. do highbrow intellectuals really want apolitical art and literature?) My feeling is no, but I would like to hear what other people think. I think that institutions/places of higher education are so politically charged themselves that it would be quite hard to answer yes, but …
I also wanted to know more about why the American public willingly adopted the Cold War foreign policies put forth by the government. I think Klein kind of glosses over all this towards the end of the first chapter, but she just puts forth this series of questions without ever actually answering any of them satisfactorily. I thought she needed some more theory here, to explain why certain people would be motivated to accept such things (maybe some psychoanalytic theory, maybe even some sociological theory). She also could have looked what middlebrow people were writing/saying in response to the propaganda in magazines like Reader’s Digest. I think she is talking about what the middlebrows were saying they should do, rather than what they were (probably) really doing. For example, what were the participation levels in organizations like the People-to-people program? I am not convinced that their motivations for joining such organizations were as positive as Klein renders them.
I also like Klein's book and I agree that it's a LCS type project. She's trying to do a historical/cultural analysis of emotional attitudes as a way to not to necessarily challenge, but to build on and texture the dominant Cold War narrative of containment. Pinning down "the structures of feeling" is challenging, and the construct of sentimental integration she provides as a way of understanding prevailing transnational flows is persuasive.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you that she has a tendency to over-extend interpretations of the intentions of her subjects to suit her argumentative purposes. For example she makes Dooley out to be a representative figure of 1950's male flight from committment because of his homosexuality. This seems a bit of a stretch. It's difficult to confidently articulate the inner motivations behind people's choices. Klein also unhesitatingly asserts that Dooley's American and Laotian assistants "were as much refuges from the compulsory heterosexuality of the 1950s America as they were expressions of internationalist national identity" (95). Is she so certain that Dooley's assistants were gay, let alone fleeing constrictive gender roles? Making Dooley and assistants out to be symbolic representations of Ehrenriech's ideas concerning manhood in the 1950's, is a little reductive. I think Dooley and his assistants deserve more agency than Klein grants them.