Asian Inclusion and the Racial Pedagogy of Allyship in James A. Michener’s Cold War Novels

Abstract: This essay examines the Cold War cultural politics of Asian inclusion through the Cold War novels of the popular mid-twentieth-century American writer James A. Michener. An analysis of his Korean War novel, The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), and his historical novel, Hawaii (1959), draws out the transnational dimension of his representation of Asian inclusion and the constitutive role that US militarism plays in this. Michener’s novels show a cultural vision of an American way of life for Asians built from the sites of combat and war ruins. By tracing what it calls a racial pedagogy of allyship in Michener’s cultural construction of East Asian subjectivity, the essay queries how a flexible and dynamic hierarchy of developmentalism guides Asian inclusion in postwar US imperial formation. Contending with the limits of Cold War racial liberalism for Asians entails an active rethinking of ideals such as freedom, justice, and equality against Cold War militarism.