Cold War Ruins

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a "transborder redress culture." A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique—of "comfort women" redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

In the Ruins of the Japanese Empire concludes that early East Asian Cold War history needs to be studied within the framework of post-imperial history. Japan’s surrender did not mean that the Japanese and former imperial subjects would immediately disavow imperial ideology. The end of the Japanese empire unleashed unprecedented destruction and violence on the periphery. Lives were destroyed; names of cities altered; collaborationist regimes—which for over a decade dominated vast populations—melted into the air as policeman, bureaucrats, soldiers, and technocrats offered their services as nationalists, revolutionaries or communists. Power did not simply change hands swiftly and smoothly. In the chaos of the new order, legal anarchy, revenge, ethnic displacement, and nationalist resentments stalked the postcolonial lands of northeast Asia, intensifying bloody civil wars in societies radicalized by total war, militarization, and mass mobilization. Kushner and Levidis’s volume follows these processes as imperial violence reordered demographics and borders, and involved massive political, economic, and social dislocation as well as stubborn continuities. From the hunt for “traitors” in Korea and China to the brutal suppression of the Taiwanese by the Chinese Nationalist government in the long-forgotten February 28 Incident, the research shows how the empire’s end acted as a catalyst for renewed attempts at state-building. From the imperial edge to the metropole, investigations shed light on how prewar imperial values endured during postwar Japanese rearmament and in party politics. Nevertheless, many Japanese actively tried to make amends for wartime transgressions and rebuild Japan’s posture in East Asia by cultivating religious and cultural connections. “This third book to emerge from Barak Kushner’s massive collaborative research project on the dissolution of Japan’s empire lays out a new geography of turning the ruins into social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities across Northeast Asia, and with lasting consequences. This book will change the way we research and teach ‘1945’ in a global context.” —Franziska Seraphim, Boston College “Writing imperial history, linking the prewar to postwar, is perilous because it must resist domestic taboos and social pressures. Today’s global society, where history incites extreme nationalism and serves as catalyst for conflict, calls for the creation of a new history of the end of empire as Kushner and his team have done in this volume.” —ASANO Toyomi, Waseda University

As home to 1920s excess and Hitler's Final Solution, Berlin's physical and symbolic landscape was an important staging ground for the highs and lows of modernity. In Cold War Berlin, social and political boundaries were porous, and the rubble gave refuge to a re-emerging gay and lesbian scene, youth gangs, prostitutes, hoods, and hustlers.

On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time when we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten’s stunning photographs. Survival City looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century. “A crucial and dazzling book, masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating.”—Dave Eggers “A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because [Vanderbilt] is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader.”—Los Angeles Times “A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life.”—Greil Marcus, Bookforum

Shows how cinematic treatments of fashion during times of crisis offer subtle reflections on the everyday lives, desires, careers, and self-perceptions of postwar German women.

During the Cold War military and civil defence bunkers were an evocative materialisation of deadly military stand-off. They were also a symbol of a deeply affective, pervasive anxiety about the prospect of world-destroying nuclear war. But following the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 these sites were swiftly abandoned, and exposed to both material and semantic ruination. This volume investigates the uses and meanings now projected onto these seeming blank, derelict spaces. It explores how engagements with bunker ruins provide fertile ground for the study of improvised meaning making, place-attachment, hobby practices, social materiality and trauma studies. With its commentators ranging across the arts and humanities and the social sciences, this multi-disciplinary collection sets a concern with the phenomenological qualities of these places as contemporary ruins - and of their strange affective affordances - alongside scholarship examining how these places embody, and/or otherwise connect with their Cold War originations and purpose both materially and through memory and trauma. Each contribution reflexively considers the process of engaging with these places - and whether via the archive or direct sensory immersion. In doing so the book broadens the bunker's contemporary signification and contributes to theoretically informed analysis of ruination, place attachment, meaning making, and material culture.

This open access edited collection brings together established and new perspectives on Cold War civil defence in Western Europe within a common analytical framework that also facilitates comparative and transnational dimensions. The current interest in creating disaster-resilient societies demands new histories of civil defence. Historical contextualization is essential in order to understand what is at stake in preparing, devising, and implementing forms of preparedness, protection, and security that are specifically targeted at societies and citizens. Applying the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to civil defence history, the chapters of this volume cover a range of new themes, from technology and materiality to media, memory, and everyday experience. The book underlines the social embeddedness of civil defence by detailing how it both prompted new forms of social interaction and reflected norms and visions of the ‘good society’ in an age where nuclear technology seemed to hold the key to both doom and salvation.

The essays and artworks gathered in this volume examine the visual manifestations of postcolonial struggles in art in East and Southeast Asia, as the world transitioned from the communist/capitalist ideological divide into the new global power structure under neoliberalism that started taking shape during the Cold War. The contributors to this volume investigate the visual art that emerged in Australia, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines. With their critical views and new approaches, the scholars and curators examine how visual art from postcolonial countries deviated from the communist/capitalist dichotomy to explore issues of identity, environment, rapid commercialization of art, and independence. These foci offer windows into some lesser-known aspects of the Cold War, including humanistic responses to the neo-imperial exploitations of people and resources as capitalism transformed into its most aggressive form. Given its unique approach, this seminal study will be of great value to scholars of 20th-century East Asian and Southeast Asian art history and visual and cultural studies.