The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol'niki Park to Chicago's South Side

by Kate A. Baldwin

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611688634
Publisher:	Dartmouth College Press
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Series:	Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Preface • Acknowledgments • Introduction: Cold War Hot Kitchen • Envy and Other Warm Guns: Ray and Charles Eames at the American National Exhibition in Moscow • Reframing the Cold War Kitchen: Sylvia Plath, Byt, and the Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar • Alice Childress, Natalya Baranskaya, and the Conditions of Cold War Womanhood • Lorraine Hansberry and the Social Life of Emotions • Selling the Homeland: Silk Stockings, Stilyagi, and Style • Epilogue: A Kitchen in History • Notes • Index

What People are Saying About This

Mary Helen Washington

“In the televised Cold War kitchen debate between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in 1959, women were represented only by their radical absence, removed from the very places where gendered, racial, and national subjectivities were being produced. In this astute and fascinating comparatist study of Soviet and U.S. women, Kate Baldwin refutes these illusory Cold War optics and digs up the deeper and more profound meaning of how gender, race, and national identity inform our understandings of global Cold War kitchens.”

Editorial Reviews

“Baldwin’s use of Soviet sources, including reactions to ANEM, literature and movies, household encyclopedias, and magazines is impressive and significant. . . . Baldwin has crafted a fascinating and insightful book that can be appreciated by scholars working in a variety of academic fields.”
—Russian Review


“[A] well-argued and engaging study . . . Baldwin has demonstrated significant ways to nudge the field of diplomatic history toward new and exciting directions. . . . The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side may help to relieve the fears of those who continue to question whether cultural studies enriches diplomatic history or pulls it off course.”—H-Net


“In The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen, absence is more important than presence.”
—Journal of American History


“The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen demonstrates that imaginaries are useful devices for questioning existing narratives and identifying new complexities.”

—Winterthur Portfolio


“There is no part of the Cold War archive that is not animated by the domestic politics that Baldwin takes on, they also feature some surprising and revealing pairings.”
—American Literature

From the Publisher