Suzuki, Erin (Advisor)
Streeby, Shelley (Advisor)
Bui, Keva X. (Author)
Technologies of the Cold War Human examines the scientific apparatus of the U.S. Cold War military-industrial complex as a racial-meaning making project that deploys race as the raw material of liberal capitalist securitization across Asia and the Pacific. As a global formation of interlocked material and ideological conflicts binding multiple geographies and histories, the Cold War, I contend, is an episteme that defines the “human” as an abstract universalism predicated on the entwined expendability and malleability of Asian and Pacific Islander life. Analyzing central case studies of the nuclear bomb, Agent Orange, and napalm, this dissertation argues that this dialectic of the Cold War human transforms Asian and Pacific Islander human and nonhuman bodies into malleable matter to be destroyed, and remade, in service of imperial expansion. Through literary, visual, and historical analysis, this project revises how we approach the archive of Cold War military science by situating it within longer genealogies of U.S. racial science. I approach an array of cultural texts—including works by Quan Barry, Mai Der Vang, Don Mee Choi, Octavia E. Butler, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Jane Chang Mi, Dinh Q. Le, and Ocean Vuong—as political critiques of war’s imbrication within circuits of knowledge that consolidate racial meaning. While racial science has long been associated with its epistemological work in defining racial hierarchies through biological inferiority, this dissertation argues that Cold War science trafficks in race’s utility in constructing both expendable and assimilable bodies in the consolidation of U.S. global capitalism. In a moment when fantasies of racial liberalism and decolonization across the United States, Asia, and the Pacific begin to take shape, I suggest that a reassessment of the conditions Cold War science reveals racial logics that inhere across human, ecological, and molecular scales of militarization. In doing so, this dissertation charts U.S. militarism not only through its empire of bases and battlegrounds, but through material and metaphorical laboratories of race- and war-making that proliferate across zones of occupation and war in Asia and the Pacific.
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Thesis
Ahuja, Neel;
(2008)
Cultures of Quarantine: Race, U.S. Empire, and the Biomedical Discourse of National Security, 1893--1960
(/isis/citation/CBB001561238/)
Book
Jones, Matthew;
(2010)
After Hiroshima: The United States, Race, and Nuclear Weapons in Asia, 1945--1965
(/isis/citation/CBB001231456/)
Article
Herrala, Meri Elisabet;
(2019)
Challenges for Soviet-American collaboration in the Cold War: The capitalisation of pianist Sviatoslav Richter for American musical markets
(/isis/citation/CBB707486248/)
Book
Cullather, Nick;
(2010)
The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB001212219/)
Thesis
Zachary B. Wasserman;
(2015)
Inventing Startup Capitalism: Silicon Valley and the Politics of Technology Entrepreneurship from the Microchip to Reagan
(/isis/citation/CBB482900475/)
Book
Andrew Bickford;
(2021)
Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military
(/isis/citation/CBB049126185/)
Book
Briggs, Laura;
(2002)
Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico
(/isis/citation/CBB000630141/)
Article
Victor M. Gwande;
(2023)
The Political Economy of American Businesses in British Central Africa, 1953–1963
(/isis/citation/CBB238425726/)
Book
Laura Ciglioni;
(2020)
Culture atomiche. Gli Stati Uniti, la Francia e l'Italia di fronte alla questione nucleare (1962-68)
(/isis/citation/CBB178026218/)
Thesis
Bridger, Sarah;
(2011)
Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research
(/isis/citation/CBB001567285/)
Book
Rohde, Joy;
(2013)
Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War
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Book
Hargittai, Istvan;
(2010)
Judging Edward Teller
(/isis/citation/CBB001023155/)
Book
Jewett, Andrew;
(2012)
Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001320921/)
Article
Petersen, Nikolaj;
(2013)
The Politics of US Military Research in Greenland in the Early Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001212894/)
Book
Mark Wolverton;
(2018)
Burning the Sky: Project Argus, The Most Dangerous Scientific Experiment in History
(/isis/citation/CBB958011130/)
Article
Jacobs, Robert A.;
(2010)
Curing the Atomic Bomb Within: The Relationship of American Social Scientists to Nuclear Weapons in the Early Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB001211593/)
Article
Doel, Ronald E.;
Friedman, Robert Marc;
Lajus, Julia;
Sörline, Sverker;
Wråkberg, Urban;
(2014)
Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge---Interwar Era through the Cold War
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Book
Bridger, Sarah;
(2015)
Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research
(/isis/citation/CBB001551957/)
Book
Elisabetta Bini;
Elisabetta Vezzosi;
(2020)
Scienziati e guerra fredda: Tra collaborazione e diritti umani
(/isis/citation/CBB957549150/)
Article
Christian P. Ruhl;
(2020)
“It’s better to forget physics”: The Idea of the Tactical Nuclear Weapon in the Early Cold War
(/isis/citation/CBB327730665/)
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