Consuming Empire: Food Aid, Hunger, and Benevolence in the Cold War Asia and Pacific

Abstract

This dissertation traces legacies of imperial intervention and cultures of debt in Asia and the Pacific Islands during the Cold War by reading U.S. food aid as an imperial discourse and an integral component to the infrastructure of U.S. colonial governance. Through a close reading of literary, cultural, and state narratives and archives, I examine the imbricated projects of military intervention and humanitarian assistance in three sites—South Korea, the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, and Hawai‘i—places that hold distinct legal and political relationships to the United States. I argue that the interpellative pull of U.S. might is not only through military muscle, but also through the psychic and biopolitical impact of food assistance and aid rooted in Cold War legislation.

Drawing from Asian American studies, American studies, diplomatic history, and postcolonial literary studies, this dissertation works at the intersection of several fields of inquiry to address questions of how hegemony and power are constituted, negotiated, and even contested. I argue that Asian and Pacific Islander literary and cultural productions comprise a counter-archive that undermines benevolent claims of American foreign policy and imperial governance. In these sources, I show how food serves as both an escapist fantasy and a material necessity that enables cultures of violence, control, and exploitative labor in the foreign and “domestic” spaces of U.S. dominion. Literary and cultural performances, I argue, present not only an alternative historiography of liberation and Cold War rescue that the archives attest, but a generative space for creative imaginings and a site for alternative political and coalitional futurities.

This dissertation argues that official historiographies of “liberation” and Cold War rescue through food assistance constitute a colonial discourse that masks American empire. In four chapters, I examine several flashpoints of the Cold War—the Korean War, the U.S. administration of the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, and Hawai‘i statehood—to argue how American benevolence work to render colonialism invisible. I contend that U.S. food aid from American agricultural surplus, dispersed through various legislative pipelines, comprise an imperial feeding infrastructure.