Authoritarianism in the "Free World"
Review of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization by Jini Kim Watson (Fordham University Press)
By Mandy Chi Man Lo
The Cold War is generally understood as a period after World War II when the world was polarized between two major political powers, namely the Western bloc, which consisted of the United States and the countries that allied with its ideology of liberalism, and the Eastern bloc, which was a coalition of the Soviet Union and other countries that were influenced by its ideology of communism. The political tension between these two great powers was also referred to as an ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism, which generated intense global geopolitical discussions in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, communism was believed to have collapsed and post-Cold War capitalism dominated much attention in academic research at the turn of the twenty-first century. An example could be Francis Fukuyama’s widely-read publication The End of History and the Last Man (1992), which dismisses the ideology of communism and celebrates the triumph of the so-called free market and the cultural ideology of capitalism. Despite the various criticisms of The End of History,[1] Fukuyama’s study implies the common perception of capitalism and communism as two opposing ideologies in Cold War studies.
However, in her latest book publication Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization, Jini Kim Watson, an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the New York University, embarks on a study of the complex relationship between capitalism and communism. In it, she debunks the polarization between them by making it visible that totalitarianism (or authoritarianism, which is more common in political debates today) is purposefully and necessarily constructed as "the foil to Western liberal democracy" (7) in Western anti-communist discourse. Having established this thesis, Watson further challenges the seeming associations between Cold War decolonization and liberalism, and capitalist "free states" and democracy.
Specifically, focusing on postcolonial East and Southeast Asian countries, including South Korea (1961-87), the Philippines (1965-86), Singapore (1959-90), Indonesia (1965-98), and Taiwan (1945-49), Watson examines the historical processes and cultural accounts of Cold War decolonization in these postcolonial states. In doing so, the author proposes a novel interdisciplinary examination of Cold War bipolarity and decolonization in postcolonial studies, which are usually studied separately. Particularly, in order to delineate the intersections between Cold War ideological contestation and decolonization, Watson draws upon political theorist Hannah Arendt’s definition of totalitarianism and highlights Arendt’s salient proposition that "the totalitarian ruler or dictator is simply ruling like a foreigner 'in the same sense as a foreign conqueror may occupy a country which he governs not for its own sake but for the benefit of something or somebody else'" (7, original italics). In Arendt’s study, the dictator’s power "defers to a force outside itself" and the source of authority is referred to as an "external authority" that is not limited to the political realm (14). Watson applies Arendt’s thinking to delineate the intersections between Cold War ideological contestation and the economic development of the supposedly emancipated postcolonial world, and identifies an external authority in the case of decolonization as the inclination for material growth:
As long as one essential task of the new nation-state was to overcome the lack of material development understood as colonialism’s legacy, the desire for development could be construed as an indisputable external authority that legitimized the internal hierarchy of the authoritarian state, whether of communist or capitalist inclination. (14, original italics)
In doing so, Watson incisively reveals anti- and non-communist illiberal practices in the "paradoxically unfree spaces within the 'free world'" (3), and argues that authoritarianism is disguised as a necessary political form for postcolonial economic growth in the aforementioned "non-communist states variously aligned with the United States" (3).
In Cold War Reckonings, Watson focuses on fictional representations, including poetry, short stories, novels and films that reflect upon the early postcolonial period, in addition to writers’ conferences and essays of the 1960s to the early 1980s, for its data analysis. As Watson contends, cultural productions of postcolonialism and decolonization that "open up other worlds, political imaginaries, and temporalities" (9) assist in the reimagination of the preexisting narratives in postcolonial and Cold War discourses, and dislodge "the supposed divisions between First World and Third World, liberalism and illiberalism, and capitalist 'free world' democracy and socialist tyranny" (3). For instance, Watson analyzes dissident writer Ninotchka Rosca’s novel State of War (1988), which focuses on the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. According to Watson, State of War does not only affirm oppositional culture and critique state power, but through a unique interweaving of "the ancestral genealogies of the three protagonists and the prehistory of the Marcos regime itself" (91), it also disrupts a linear temporality in understanding the independence of the Philippines, and so articulates "the formation of the post-colonial present" (91) in the Marcos era. The novel’s imaginative renderings thus help reshape "our conceptions of twentieth-century dictatorships and authoritarianism" in the so-called free world of decolonization (61).
Although the intentional use of fictional texts to disclose sedimented conceptual certainties positions Watson’s book as a study specifically relevant for readers in literature and film studies, Cold War Reckonings demonstrates the author’s substantially interdisciplinary knowledge that spans across cultural studies, literature, Cold War studies, postcolonial studies, political theory, and area studies. Mobilizing the works of Hannah Arendt, David Scott, Odd Arne Westad, Chen Kuan-hsing, and Fredric Jameson in various disciplines, for instance, Watson brings breadth to her research and extends its reach to a wider audience that is not limited to those interested in literary studies. In addition, I particularly enjoyed reading this book, not only because of the new angle it provides to understand past and present global and regional politics, but also because of Watson’s clear and accessible language, especially in explaining and interweaving the political theories of authoritarianism and the literary theories of temporality. Her lucid account of theories, I believe, is a key to overcome the difficulty of developing a common knowledge and language in the interdisciplinary research of complex issues.
Indeed, coherently weaving social science theories and perspectives and literary analysis to rethink about postcolonial authoritarianism, Watson successfully exposes the "assumptions we have inherited from both postcolonial and Cold War epistemes" (10), and argues for a reevaluation of authoritarian rule in East and Southeast Asian region. To attain these objectives, Cold War Reckonings is divided into two main parts. Part I, consisting of two chapters, examines East and Southeast Asian writers conferences and dissident literature from 1955 to 1988 in order to explore the meaning of freedom in this region and expound the notions of repressive state. This first part establishes the strong theoretical framework of the book by presenting historical accounts of censorship and political restraints of dissident writers under postcolonial sovereignty and by bridging the themes of decolonization and neocolonial authoritarianism. Part II, composing of three chapters, focuses on cultural texts which are produced between 1997 and 2017 and which turn back to reexamine the earlier Cold War period. This second part provides a retrospective account of the concept of anti-communism in the past decades and the atrocities arisen.
For instance, Watson analyzes Jeremy Tiang’s novel State of Emergency (2017), which centers the stories of the left, especially those of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) in Malaysia and Singapore. Questioning official nationalist historical narratives, Tiang’s novel provides an alternative angle to explore the significance of the MCP in decolonization, the economic motives of the British in declaring the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), the violence that came along with the suppression of communism, and the evolution of an anti-communism episteme in this Southeast Asian context. It also reveals that an infrastructure favoring colonial and authoritarian governance is constructed through the "British counterinsurgency tactics" (119-20).
Similar to Tiang’s novel, Hwang Sǒk-yǒng’s The Old Garden (2000), which spans the period of military dictatorship in South Korea from 1961 to 1987, also focuses on the repression of the communists. As Watson points out, Hwang’s novel enables us to ponder the ambivalent relationship between the authoritarian repression of communism and South Korea’s exceptional economic growth during Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship. Hwang’s retrospective imagination leads us to rethink "the past violence of anti-communist capitalist states that has often been occluded by their ability to maintain remarkable growth rates" (135). Through her penetrating literary analysis, Watson discloses the employment of anti-communism as "an all-purpose justification for frenzied capitalist development" (22), and poignantly shows "the fraught continuities between an apparently 'past' era of Cold War anti-communism and our triumphant neoliberal present" (24). Before she ends this part, Watson emphasizes the significance of the genres of truth commissions in going past Cold War bipolarity, moving away from repression, and approaching "a more liberal and open democracy" (158) within today’s neoliberal order.
Overall, Watson has persuasively and lucidly demonstrated the relevance and value of studying the Cold War period to and in our present day, which is largely dictated by the (neoliberal) capitalist system. In particular, Cold War Reckonings provides a nuanced understanding of the capacity of the chosen imaginative texts to break conceptual binaries, and the significance of these texts in "proffer[ing] notions of justice and ethical reckoning within today’s authoritative temporality of the 'post-Cold War'" (25). Although some of the chosen texts in this book might not be familiar and/or easily accessible to the general public, Watson’s theoretical model is potentially applicable to studies beyond the Cold War era and/or of various cultural genres, such as the study of authoritarian neoliberalism in the twenty-first century as expressed in popular culture, specifically TV dramas on Netflix.
As of the second quarter of 2021, Netflix has around 209 million subscribers worldwide [2]—a surge of over 16 million paid memberships globally from the same period last year. The influence of Netflix in shaping mainstream global culture is undoubtable. A timely example would be Squid Game—a South Korean survival drama series written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk—which has already reached tremendous global viewership and generated widespread attention within days from its date of release. In this drama, a group of 456 characters participate in a survival game in order to win a grand prize of 45.6 billion South Koran won. Different from previous cultural productions that explore survival games, such as The Hunger Games and Liar Game, characters in Squid Game are apparently given a choice to quit the lethal games. However, due to the economic predicaments the characters have to encounter daily in real life, the majority of them choose to escape the dystopic reality and return to the game. This twist in the plot embeds the director’s intelligent deployment of allegory to illustrate the delusion of freedom and fair play in a rigged system, and reveals the false binary between, in Watson’s words, "economic triumphalism [and] authoritarian human rights" (25). Indeed, the theme of authoritarian neoliberalism in Squid Game echoes one of the central concerns in Cold War Reckonings. Watson’s innovative theoretical model and nuanced analysis of textual representations are exemplary and, I believe, may stimulate academic enquiry in new arenas.
Endnotes
[1] In Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1993), he criticizes Fukuyama’s assertion of the "death of communism" and his strong uphold of capitalism.
[2] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/netflix-subscribers/
Mandy Chi Man Lo is Assistant Professor of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, City University of Macau. She obtained her Ph.D. at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests include cosmopolitanism and globalization theories, transnational studies, cultural studies, identity politics, and Asian Literature in English. She has published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, poetry.sg (an online database of Singapore poetry), and EWCC Review.
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