The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen
ISBN: 9781611688641
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / Dartmouth College Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Kitchens; Kitchens in literature.; Sex role; Race; Kitchens; Kitchens; Propaganda; Cold War; Soviet Union; United States;

This book demonstrates the ways in which the kitchen--the centerpiece of domesticity and consumerism--was deployed as a recurring motif in the ideological and propaganda battles of the Cold War. Beginning with the famous Nixon-Khrushchev kitchen debate, Baldwin shows how Nixon turned the kitchen into a space of exception, while contemporary writers, artists, and activists depicted it as a site of cultural resistance. Focusing on a wide variety of literature and media from the United States and the Soviet Union, Baldwin reveals how the binary logic at work in Nixon's discourse--setting U.S. freedom against Soviet totalitarianism--erased the histories of slavery, gender subordination, colonialism, and racial genocide. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen treats the kitchen as symptomatic of these erasures, connecting issues of race, gender, and social difference across national boundaries. This rich and rewarding study--embracing the literature, film, and photography of the era--will appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.

KATE A. BALDWIN is an associate professor of communication studies, rhetoric, and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain.

hidden image for function call