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. Tonal Intelligence considers how the meaning of
race, war, and empire came under pressure during two interlinked periods
of geopolitical transition: American "nation-building" in East and
Southeast Asia during the mid-twentieth century and Asian economic
modernization during the late twentieth century. By reading both state
records and aesthetic texts from these periods for their tone rather
than their content, Xiang shows how bygone threats of Asian communism
and emergent regimes of Asian capitalism have elicited distinct yet
related anxieties about racial intelligibility. Featuring bold methods,
unlikely archives, and acute close readings, Tonal Intelligence
rethinks the marking and making of race during the long cold war.
