Since the early 1990s, facilitated by New Americanists’ disclosure of the U.S. literary canon as “consensus” and its complicity with Cold War cultural deployment, studies of the cultural Cold War have revealed how official institutions such as the U.S. State Department, private foundations like the Rockefeller and the Ford, and other cultural institutions such as International P.E.N., the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and elite American universities were instrumental in the U.S. cultural diplomacy—and that American literature was an integral part of of this program. A number of studies have clarified how Cold War cultural programs functioned. Studies by Frances Saunders, Greg Barnhisel, and George Blaustein, to name a few, eloquently show the function of various cultural institutions and the importance of books and magazines as the medium. These studies have introduced a vantage point from which to view the cultural Cold War as a complex, global process. Studies by Michael Denning, Andrew Hammond, and Peter Kalliney demonstrate how these cultural institutions and products intertwined U.S. literature not only with the first world but also the third as well, and introduce a reconsideration of Cold War culture as a reciprocally transformative cultural process.

This panel, consisting of three 15-minute-paper, then, focuses on three Cold Warriors who laid the foundation for American literary studies with a specific version of modernism as its canon and thereby disseminated and inculcated U.S. cultural Cold War policies and ideas, especially in the first and third worlds. Focusing on these cultural intermediaries who were engaged in dominant literary production and circulation, often sponsored by various cultural institutions, the panel will examine how American literature and literary studies constituted an arena of hegemonic and aesthetic negotiation in countries like Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Australia, and continue the expansion of scholarship on the cultural Cold War beyond Europe.

In Barnhisel’s “Norman Holmes Pearson and the Exportation of American Studies,” he examines the career of Pearson, a Yale professor, editor, and critic, who helped create the field of American Studies and founded its most prestigious department. Pearson traveled frequently to Japan, South Korea, and Australia to help universities create American Studies programs, national associations, and scholarly journals, and shape the understanding of American literature and culture among professors and students at elite institutions in those nations. His activities promoting American Studies in Asia and Australia epitomize the Cold War collaboration between foundations, elite universities, and the U.S. government, and show how the export of this scholarly field beyond the U.S. was a centrally directed undertaking that often had to change strategy due to local conditions.

Ochi, in her “C. Vann Woodward and Southern Studies in American Studies,” takes up the U.S. Southern historian’s visit to Japan in 1953 as a lecturer at the Stanford-Tokyo University American Studies Seminars, and the longstanding impact of his essay “The Irony of Southern History” (1953) on refashioning American studies in postwar Japan. The essay, connecting the U.S. South with other parts of the world that underwent defeat in war, incorporated the Southern (literary) studies into American (literary) studies. His analogy anticipated William Faulkner’s speech addressed to the Japanese in 1955 and contributed to how Japan re-entered international society including the Bandung Conference through the Japanese identification with the victorious U.S. by way of the defeated South.

Yoshihara’s “Wallace Stegner goes to Asia: Creative Writing and Its Asian Mission” is an examination of another cultural practitioner, Wallace Stegner, a novelist and founder of Creative Writing programs at Stanford University and an ambassador for modernist literature, who had a lecture tour in Egypt, India, the Philippines, Thailand and Japan (1950). Stegner’s tour and his efforts to produce Asian cultural Cold War warriors exemplify how such a tour induced the hegemonic negotiation. Although he found in Japan a strong supporter in the translator Mikio Hiramatsu, who would be a staunch advocate of anti-communism at the World P.E.N. Club Conference in Dublin, his aim was frustrated in the Philippines. These negotiations reveal the complex cultural construction of the cultural Cold War.

Peter Kalliney, the well-known scholar of the cultural Cold War in decolonizing regions, will serve as a chair and respondent for the panel. Each paper, strictly limited to 15 minutes, as well as Kalliney’s response, will showcase the complex nexus of the military, the political and the cultural spheres, and the function of human agency threaded into cultural networks, and will induce a fruitful discussion.