Anti-Red: Global Anti-communism and Transpacific Mobilities

FAIN: FT-286021-22

Jini Kim Watson
New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)

Research and writing leading to a book on how the Cold War has shaped attitudes toward migration, refugees, and national borders in the Asia Pacific, and how this history is reflected in fiction and film. 

While scholars and activists have decried the global rise in ethno-nationalism and the closing of borders to ever-growing numbers of migrants, recent tragic scenes of people attempting to flee Afghanistan—widely interpreted as a “repeat” of Saigon in 1975—remind us of the Cold War origins of many key principles around refuge, borders and humanitarianism. My book project, “Anti-Red: Global Anticommunism and Transpacific Mobilities,” argues that understanding today’s contemporary migration regime requires a deeper engagement with the way the Cold War shaped mobility and refugee policy during the violent upheavals of postwar decolonization, especially in the Asia Pacific. Assembling a body of transnational Asian fiction and film from the 1950s to the present—including works by refugees, exiles, former soldiers and detainees—I show how these narratives map the way the Cold War rerouted the struggles of decolonization into regimes of selective mobility.