A Violent Peace offers a radical cultural account of the midcentury transformation of the United States into a total-war state. As the Cold War turned hot in the Pacific, antifascist critique disclosed a continuity between U.S. police actions in Asia and a rising police state at home. Writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois discerned in U.S. domestic strategies to quell racial protests and urban riots the same logic of racial counterintelligence structuring America's devastating hot wars in Asia.
Christine Hong examines the centrality of U.S. militarism to the Cold War cultural imagination. She assembles a transpacific archive—including war writings, Japanese accounts of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, black radical human rights petitions, Korean War–era G.I. photographs, Filipino novels on guerrilla resistance, and Marshallese critiques of U.S. human radiation experiments—and places these materials alongside U.S. government documents to theorize these works as homologous responses to unchecked U.S. war and police power. In so doing, Hong shows how the so-called Pax Americana laid the grounds for solidarity—for imagining collective futures of total liberation.
