Containment Culture

Alan Nadel provides a unique analysis of the rise of American postmodernism by viewing it as a breakdown in Cold War cultural narratives of containment. These narratives, which embodied an American postwar foreign policy charged with checking the spread of Communism, also operated, Nadel argues, within a wide spectrum of cultural life in the United States to contain atomic secrets, sexual license, gender roles, nuclear energy, and artistic expression. Because these narratives were deployed in films, books, and magazines at a time when American culture was for the first time able to dominate global entertainment and capitalize on global production, containment became one of the most widely disseminated and highly privileged national narratives in history.Examining a broad sweep of American culture, from the work of George Kennan to "Playboy Magazine," from the movies of Doris Day and Walt Disney to those of Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock, from James Bond to Holden Caulfield, Nadel discloses the remarkable pervasiveness of the containment narrative. Drawing subtly on insights provided by contemporary theorists, including Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, Sedgwick, Certeau, and Hayden White, he situates the rhetoric of the Cold War within a gendered narrative powered by the unspoken potency of the atom. He then traces the breakdown of this discourse of containment through such events as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and ties its collapse to the onset of American postmodernism, typified by works such as "Catch-22" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence."An important work of cultural criticism, "Containment Culture "links atomic power with postmodernism and postwar politics, and shows how a multifarious national policy can become part of a nation's cultural agenda and a source of meaning for its citizenry.

ISBN 0822316994   Pages 352 ISBN13 9780822316992 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Duke University Press   Weight (grammes) 576 Imprint Duke University Press   Published in North Carolina Format Paperback   Series title New Americanists Publication date 15 Jun 1995   Height (mm) 230 Library of Congress E169.12.N3   Width (mm) 154 DEWEY 973.9   Spine width (mm) 27 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Professional / Scholarly

		Preface
		Introduction		1
Pt. I		The Straight Story and the Dual Nature		11
1		Appearance, Containment, and Atomic Power		13
2		History, Science, and Hiroshima		38
Pt. II		Containment Culture		69
3		Rhetoric, Sanity, and the Cold War: The Significance of Holden Caulfield's Testimony		71
4		God's Law and the Wide Screen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War "Epic"		90
5		Lady and (or) the Tramp: Sexual Containment and the Domestic Playboy		117
Pt. III		Double or Nothing		155
6		The Invasion of Postmodernism: The Catch-22 of the Bay of Pigs and Liberty Valance		157
7		The Rules for Free Speech: Speech Act Theory and the Free Speech Movement		204
Pt. IV		Two Nations Too		221
8		My Country Too: Time, Place, and African American Identity in the Work of John A. Williams		223
9		Race, Rights, Gender, and Personal Narrative: The Archaeology of "Self" in Meridian		245
		Coda: Democracy		273
10		Failed Cultural Narratives: America in the Postwar Era and the Story of Democracy		275
		Conclusion		297
		Notes		301
		Bibliography		315
		Index		327

"[An] interdisciplinary account of a culture dominated by the Cold War consensus and its eventual unravelling; from the sexualised polarities of the Truman Administration's 'containment' policy essays, through the lifestyle features of Playboy magazine, the shooting of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, to the Bay of Pigs, the Free Speech Movement and the emergent fiction of black women writers... [This book is] a welcome advertisment for the creative possibilities of applied theory and impressive in its inderdisciplinarity."NBen Andrews, Journal of American Studies OFor those confused by the giddy climate of recent Cold War revisionism, Nadel is a sure-footed guide to the cultural politics of the period. In pursuit of its solid claims, Containment Culture makes satisfying connections between far flung domains of American expression.O--Andrew Ross

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