About the Book
This book is about cinema and the cultural Cold War in Asia, set against the larger history of the cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the US, Europe, and Asia at the height of the Cold War. From the popularity of CIA-sponsored espionage films in Hong Kong and South Korea to the enduring Cold War rhetoric of brotherly relations in contemporary Sino-Indian co-production, cinema has always been a focal point of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Historically, both the United States and the Soviet Union viewed cinema as a powerful weapon in the battle to win hearts and minds—not just in Europe, but also in Asia. The Cold War in Asia was, properly speaking, a hot war, with proxy military confrontations between the United States, on one side, and the Soviet Union and China on the other. Amid this political and military turbulence, cataclysmic shifts occurred in the culture and history of Asian cinemas as well as in the latitude of US cultural diplomacy in Asia. The collection of essays in this volume sheds light on the often-forgotten history of the cultural Cold War in Asia. Taken together, the volume’s fifteen chapters examine film cultures and industries in Asia to showcase the magnitude and depth of the Cold War’s impact on Asian cinemas, societies, and politics. By shifting the lens to Asia, the contributors to this volume re-examine the dominant narratives about the global Cold War and highlight the complex and unique ways in which Asian societies negotiated, contested, and adapted to the politics and cultural manifestations of the Cold War.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: Locating Asia in the Cinematic Cold War - Sangjoon Lee and Darlene Machell Espeña, Part One: The Cinematic Representations and Constructions of Asian Nations, Identities, and Cultures, Chapter 2: Taiwanese-Language Cinema as Cold War Industry and Culture: Compliance without Commitment - Chris Berry (King's College London), Chapter 3: Landscape, Identity, and War: The Poetic Revolutionary Cinema of North Vietnam - Man Fung Yip (University of Oklahoma), Chapter 4: Screening the Cold War in Cambodia: Films of Norodom Sihanouk and Rithy Panh - Darlene Machell Espeña (Singapore Management University), Chapter 5: Islam and the Cultural Cold War: Tauhid and the Quest for the Modern Muslim - Eric Sasono (Independent Researcher), Part Two: The Cold War Geopolitics on Asian Cinemas, Chapter 6: Third World, First World: Ishihara Y.jir. and the Cold War - Hiroshi Kitamura (College of William & Mary), Chapter 7: Right Screen in Hong Kong: Chang Kuo-sin's Asia Pictures and The Heroine - Kenny K.K. Ng (Hong Kong Baptist University), Chapter 8: Cold War Myth from Elite Democracy to Martial Law in the Genre Cinema of Fernando Poe Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s - Elmo Gonzaga (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Chapter 9: Silver Screen Reversals of the Domino Theory: American Cold War Movies and the Re-imagining of Britain's Experience in Southeast Asia - Wen-Qing Ngoei (Singapore Management University), Chapter 10: Ugly Americans and Indeterminate Asians: Strategies/Symptoms of Southeast Asian Representation in Cold War US Film - Adam Knee (LASALLE College of the Arts), Part Three: Cold War Film Genres, Chapter 11: Counter-Occupying Americanism in South Korea and Taiwan: Taking Back the Spaces of US Base Culture in the Cold War Musical Number - Evelyn Shih (University of Colorado, Boulder), Chapter 12: SOS Hong Kong: Coproducing Espionage Films in Cold War Asia - Sangjoon Lee (City University of Hong Kong), Chapter 13: Cosmopolitan K.jedo: Swing Kids (2018) and Historical Memories of the Korean War - Christina Klein (Boston College), Chapter 14: Spectacle of Violence and the Beiqing Masculine: Post-war Structure of Feeling in Taiwan Pulp - Ting-Wu Cho (Women Make Waves International Film Festival), Part Four: The Long Shadow of the Cold War in Contemporary Asian Cinemas, Chapter 15: Memories of the Future: Speculative Cold War Histories in Yosep Anggi Noen's The Science of Fictions and Daniel Hui's Snakeskin - Elizabeth Wijaya (University of Toronto), Chapter 16: A Frozen Fraternity: Kungfu Yoga and Cold War Archaeologies - Nitin Govil (University of Southern California),List of Illustrations,Notes on Contributors, Index.
About the Author :
Sangjoon Lee is an Associate Professor at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Lee is the author of Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: US Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network (Cornell University Press, 2020). He edited/co-edited The South Korean Film Industry (University of Michigan Press, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinema (2024), Rediscovering Korean Cinema (University of Michigan Press, 2019), and Hallyu 2.0: The Korean Wave in the Age of Social Media (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Lee also guest-edited “Is Netflix Riding the Korean Wave or Vice Versa?” (International Journal of Communication, 2023), “Reorienting Asian Cinema in the Age of the Chinese Film Market (Screen, 2019), and “The Chinese Film Industry: Emerging Debates” (Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2019). Darlene Machell Espeña is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Singapore Management University (SMU). Her research interests include cinema, dance, culture, and politics in postcolonial Southeast Asia, the cultural history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and cultural discourses on education in Singapore. Her writings appear in journals such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and Asian Studies Review. She is working on her first book project, Imagi(ni)ng Southeast Asia: Cinema, Politics, and the Origins of a Region, which traces the cultural and ideological foundations of Southeast Asia as a region until the establishment of ASEAN in 1967.
