Cultures at war: The Cold War and cultural expression in Southeast Asia

摘要

Recent scholarship on the Cold War in Southeast Asia emphasises the importance of centring the local histories of decolonisation and national formation that extended prior to the Cold War period of 1948 to the 1970s. Westad, Karl Hack, Geoff Wade, and others demonstrate the extent to which Southeast Asian leaders controlled and shaped their interactions with the United States and Soviet Union for their own political goals. The editors of Cultures at war, Tony Day and Maya Liem, move this discussion from the familiar terrain of state politics and war to the field of culture. The editors call for a similar acknowledgment of the agency of Southeast Asian cultural producers in shaping their national postwar cultures in confronting the themes of independence, sovereignty, and modernity that had already emerged in the colonial era.