| dc.description.abstract | In the face of how the violent erasure of a classed, gendered, and racialized past is the determinant conditions for Cold War modernity, this thesis turns to two Taiwanese nativist literary works, Ying-zhen Chen’s “A Rose in June” and Chunming Huang’s “The Young Widow,” whose portrayal of racialized labors of soldiering and militarized prostitution during the Vietnam War to interrogate classed, gendered, and racialized pasts having been obliterated to highlight U.S.-Taiwan co-construction of Cold War modernity. My reading of African American soldiering reckons with the forgetting of racial violence at the fulcrum of American Cold War liberal thoughts and imperial politics that justifies U.S. moral dominance, establishes its global leadership that Taiwan aligned with, and stages the occasion for (neo)colonial intervention and global militarism. I explore how African American labor of soldiering in material and ideological terms underpins U.S. Cold War military-imperial hegemony and discuss the role of the African American soldier in the desegregated Vietnam War assumes in validating U.S. claims to a distinct national culture of racial democracy and progress, establishing U.S. war power’s moral authority, and thereby shaping the conditions of U.S. Cold War ascendancy. I demonstrate the biopower of U.S. liberal militarized empire: militarized multiculturalism makes life through biopolitical integration of racial humanity, whereas it simultaneously lets die through militarized objectification of certain populations, making them expendable for the racial state’s imperialist expansion. Attentive to the diversity of bar girls’ identities, desires, motivations, and experiences, this thesis shows that they are calculating and desiring subjects—entrenched in material and symbolic disadvantage engendered by social structures of inequalities—who seek ways, through their sexualized labor, to reconcile or get out of their predicament in their intimate interactions with U.S. soldiers. The bar girls’ daily acts of struggle, in showing a complexity of subjectivities and agency and exceeding the identifiable category of female victims, constitutes oppositional critiques of the disavowal of their laboring lives. | en_US |