Resumo

The Cold War superpowers worked hard to “win hearts and minds” abroad through public diplomacy.  Many of the target audiences were on the Cold War front-lines in Europe.  However, other, larger ones lived in areas outside Europe then undergoing decolonization.  Among these, for all the blood and drama of war, intervention, crisis, and revolution, the majority experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy; as a media war for their allegiance rather than as a violent war for their lives.  In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered a set of challenges around the issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization– all of which were in volatile flux, as they intersected with the Cold War, and with anti-imperialist currents that predated it.  The non-European world responded to this media war by joining it, rejecting the Cold War in favor of forging an imagined community grounded in nonalignment, economic development, and racialized solidarity: the “Third World".

Nota biográfica

Jason Parker is an Assistant Professor at the History Department of Texas A&M University.  He is the author of Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937-1962 (Oxford University Press, 2008) and of articles in Diplomatic History, the Journal of African American History, and International History Review. He has received research fellowships from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University and the Smith Richardson Foundation in support of his current project on U.S. Cold War public diplomacy in the Third World. His broad research interests are U.S. foreign relations, decolonization and the Cold War, race and diplomacy, and Caribbean/inter-American affairs.