Review of A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific by Christine Hong (Stanford University Press)

Abstract

Christine Hong’s 'A Violent Peace' examines local and global democratization projects and the many ways that postwar US military tactics and strategies functioned to suppress both counterrevolutionaries abroad in Asia and Black radicals at home in the US. Through literary and visual analyses of works by Ralph Ellison, Ōe Kenzaburō, Miné Okubo, Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Hong questions how to navigate US post-World War II policies that claim a period of democratized "peace" and racial integration while simultaneously dehumanizing "foreign" bodies through military tactics that police cultural and political belonging.