Racial orientations: United States nationalism and the production of Eastern Europe in the mapping of the free world, 1950--2000

The U.S. orientation toward Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century marked the unprecedented prominence of Eastern Europe in U.S. policy and culture. My title, "Racial Orientations," points to the complex cultural dynamics by which Eastern Europe has been apprehended through U.S. racial thinking during the Cold War and its aftermath. During the Cold War, the coding of the U.S.S.R. and the Eastern Bloc in the U.S. imaginary as predominantly white enabled U.S. foreign policy to portray Soviet foreign interests as expansionist and "imperialist." In contrast, the U.S. self-portrayal as a racially diverse nation, with the paradigm of multiculturalism taking the place of early Cold War civil rights, buttressed its logic of "containment" of the Communist threat that justified U.S. intervention in the Third World. After the fall of Communism, arguments for U.S. intervention abroad continued to foreground domestic diversity by contrasting multicultural democracy with ethnic conflict in the former Eastern Bloc nations, and especially in the Balkans. In the contemporary moment, ethnic difference is understood both as a sign of universal human values embodied in U.S. multiculturalism, and as a sign of primordial violence embodied in the Balkans.; Although the U.S. has claimed exceptionalism from older European empires and Soviet "empire," my contention is that U.S. culture and policy in the second half of the 20th century have in fact been structured by Western European imperial concepts of racial difference and spatial liminality, and that dominant U.S. representations of the nation's racial progress have reproduced racialized and imperial structures of power both at home and abroad. U.S. rewritings of European imperial narratives reveal the contradictions of U.S. exceptionalism based on the dual narratives of racial progress and anti-imperialism. I analyze U.S. cultural reworkings of three European imperial narratives, Prosper Merimee's novella Carmen, the European imperial travelogue, and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. In contemporary U.S. musicals, travelogues, print and televised media, and political speeches and writings, the position of the Gypsy in these narratives as a racialized figure for Europe's pre-modern past is appropriated and refigured to narrate U.S. national progress against racialized spaces, such as Eastern Europe.