UC San Diego

"Transnational Assimilation" offers a dis-exceptionalist understanding of the U.S. political rationality in regulating and managing racialized nonwhite populations across its official territorial boundaries during the Cold War. Grounded upon literary texts that occasion the correspondent discursive force field--wrought by the willed-determination out of state policies and narrative stratagem oriented by variant personal and political engagements--this dissertation examines the ways in which the post-Second World War U.S. deploys self-contradictory, but usefully generative, frames to contain the racialized nonwhite constituents and their alien "kins" from minor nations under the sway of Cold War superpowers. The chapters probe cultural consequences of U.S. administration of race in its transnational economic, military and political governance within the global Cold War order. Together the readings demonstrate that the self -congratulatory U.S.-exportation of multicultural (or, racial pluralist) model is probably a necessitated means for the postcolonial empire to tie as well as divide nonwhite populations with an artificial history of diaspora, underscored by essentializing racial differences and a monolinear temporality