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Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red.
 
John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends.
 

Of Vagabonds and Fellow Travelers recovers the history of the writers, artists, and intellectuals of the African diaspora who, witnessing a transition to an American-dominated capitalist world-system during the Cold War, offered searing critiques of burgeoning U.S. hegemony. Cedric R. Tolliver traces this history through an analysis of signal events and texts where African diaspora literary culture intersects with the wider cultural Cold War, from the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists organized by Francophone intellectuals in September 1956 to the reverberations among African American writers and activists to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Among Tolliver’s subjects are Caribbean writers Jacques Stephen Alexis, George Lamming, and Aimé Césaire, the black press writing of Alice Childress and Langston Hughes, and the ordeal of Paul Robeson, among other topics. The book’s final chapter highlights the international and domestic consequences of the cultural Cold War and discusses their lingering effects on our contemporary critical predicament.
 

When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America’s atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, Oppenheimer Is Watching Me, takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation.

Asian and Asian American studies emerged, respectively, from Cold War and social protest ideologies. Yet, in the context of contemporary globalization, can these ideological distinctions remain in place? Suggesting new directions for studies of the Asian diaspora, the prominent scholars who contribute to this volume raise important questions about the genealogies of these fields, their mutual imbrication, and their relationship to other disciplinary formations, including American and ethnic studies.
With its recurrent themes of transnationalism, globalization, and postcoloniality, Orientations considers various embodiments of the Asian diaspora, including a rumination on minority discourses and performance studies, and a historical look at the journal Amerasia. Exploring the translation of knowledge from one community to another, other contributions consider such issues as Filipino immigrants’ strategies for enacting Asian American subjectivity and the link between area studies and the journal Subaltern Studies. In a section that focuses on how disciplines—or borders—form, one essay discusses “orientalist melancholy,” while another focuses on the construction of the Asian American persona during the Cold War. Other topics in the volume include the role Asian immigrants play in U.S. racial politics, Japanese American identity in postwar Japan, Asian American theater, and the effects of Asian and Asian American studies on constructions of American identity.

Contributors. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Rey Chow, Kandice Chuh, Sharon Hom, Yoshikuni Igarashi, Dorinne Kondo, Russell Leong, George Lipsitz, Lisa Lowe, Martin F. Manalansan IV, David Palumbo-Liu, R. Radhakrishnan, Karen Shimakawa, Sau-ling C. Wong