Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization

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Cold War Reckonings is not only a sophisticated work of cultural criticism, but also an astounding articulation of political theory. Analyzing literary and cinematic texts alongside occasions like PEN regional meetings, Jini Kim Watson offers an altogether original story about the Cold War and decolonization in Asia, on the one hand, and about the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism, on the other. The book profoundly shifts our understanding of the Cold War, arrested decolonization, postcolonial sovereignty, and the developmental state within capitalist modernity. In short, it offers a new theory of the state in general, and of the capitalist authoritarian state in particular."-Jodi Kim, University of California, Riverside"Jini Kim Watson's Cold War Reckonings is an important, brilliant, and extremely engaging book that is beautifully written and bold and innovative in its arguments. Watson shows how the social and political promises of decolonization were derailed by the developmentalism that permitted certain sectors of postcolonial states to seize power by vowing 'to fast-forward the time of national development.' Treating third-world dictatorial regimes neither as unprepared political actors nor as dupes, Watson shows the overlapping interests between global capitalism and authoritarianism in some of Asia's 'capitalist success stories.'"-Joseph Slaughter, Columbia UniversityCold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Across a body of transpacific cultural works, Jini Kim Watson reveals the problem of "free world" authoritarianism to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.Focusing on the U.S.-allied illiberal regimes of South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers' conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Watson's book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University.