Navigating the Ruins of Pax Americana

Abstract

lthough the United States has been engaged in continuous, escalating military conflict around the globe since the Second World War, a mistaken view persists in the US of the post-1945 period as an era of relative world peace: our overseas military conflicts are depicted in mainstream discourses as minor and peripheral, prophylactic if not benevolent, reactive rather than aggressive, a means for maintaining world peace rather than violent interventions that generate new enemies. Meanwhile, in Americanist scholarship, studies of Cold War culture still tend to imaginatively center the white middle-class family amid a domestic atmosphere of prosperity fostered by this so-called “long peace.” Accordingly, the cultural productions we associate with the Cold War tend toward paranoia and kitsch, focusing on Americans’ (read: white Americans) feelings of existential dread evoked by the potential threat of nuclear weapons rather than acknowledging the real, horrific losses that the use and testing of these weapons inflicted on their racialized targets. That the post-1945 era marks the expansion of the US military into the largest and most destructive force in the world remains outside the main picture, something additional rather than foundational to US culture. A. J. Y U M I L E E