This presentation traces the transpacific journey of Limin Chu, who would later be credited as the pioneer of American literature studies in Taiwan. Chu’s academic career started in the early Cold War. In 1958, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Duke University; in 1965, he obtained his doctorate in American literature from the same university. At Duke, Chu studied with Clarence Louis Frank Gohdes, a prominent scholar of American literature not only at Duke but also nationwide. After Chu completed his studies, he returned to Taiwan and assumed the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University in 1966. Before long, in a series of curriculum reforms, Chu made “American Literature” into a required course. The changes brought by the reforms laid the foundation of Taiwan’s English studies for decades to come.

Notably, Chu’s studies at Duke were sponsored by the United States Information Service (USIS) and the Asia Foundation (TAF). This presentation highlights this aspect of the cultural Cold War while revealing other factors that might have affected Chu’s academic career and his devotion to the studies of American literature. These factors include the following: the cross-Taiwan Strait tension that prompted Chu to study abroad in the U.S., the U.S.-led cultural Cold War networks in East Asia that brought Chu to Duke, the racial segregation in the U.S. that might have influenced Chu’s research interests, and the ways in which Chu’s advisor, Gohdes, aspired to establish the status of American literature in the U.S. This presentation looks at these factors, illustrating the transpacific currents that allowed American literature to find a significant place in Taiwan.

In his introduction to Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War, Richard Cavell notes that “Considerable reticence prevails to this day in Canada about political aspects of cultural production generally, let alone with reference to an ‘event’ – the Cold War – which was fundamentally concerned with the politicization of the cultural life of the nation” (8). This apolitical conception of culture resonates in the way culture was used by Canadian authorities and elites during the Cold War as a way of controlling “national self-representation” (Cavell 7) with the overriding, if concealed, purpose of consolidating regulation of national security through social and creative control.

Consequently, Cold War Canadian culture became a statist project that sought to create narrowly proscribed discursive conditions for self-expression and self-monitoring that would allow English Canadians to see themselves as not-American, while at the same time as part of the broader anti-Communist Western security structure. The creation and consumption of national culture – or at least a narrow, Eurocentric menu of ‘high’ cultural forms – would allow the English Canadian subject to emerge as a part of a national whole, more easily controllable because grateful and proud of the culture produced by the ‘home team’, while also not feeling ‘colonized’ by American culture. Culture was thus aestheticized – an affair of affect, style, emotion, creativity, and entertainment, with the political sub-text repressed. In fact, the only culture for which the political was acknowledged was Soviet propaganda.

One effect of this insular, conservative statist cultural project was to render Canadian literature in East Asian contexts a niche subject. The Eurocentric, high culture biases of Canada’s Cold War cultural diplomacy meant that East Asia was not a priority, as such it was left largely to private or small-scale efforts by individuals with strong personal links to Asia. While the Canadian government did contribute to the establishment of a handful of Canadian literature scholarships and programs, ironically many of them were merged into North American or American-Canadian studies. Ultimately, Canada’s cultural development would be determined by Cold War geopolitical dynamics, a condition that has echoes in the present historical moment.

In Saito (2023), I focused on Stephen Spender and his criticism on Japanese atomic war poems during 1950's. A famous British poet and critic, Spender was editor-in-chief of Encounter, a magazine that was part of the Western Cold War cultural machinery. He read English translations of a few Japanese poems selected from Shinohai Shishu [The Ashes of Death Poems] (1954), a collection of poems edited and published to protest the American hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll. In 1957, Spender made a public lecture in Hiroshima city in which he criticized the journalistic tone of the occasional poems in Shinohai Shishu and he instead praised T. S. Eliot’s traditionalism in the third chapter of The Wasteland (1922) in which Eliot put together Edmund Spenser's gorgeous depiction of an Elizabethan wedding on the Thames side and his own depiction of the destituted intercourses between men and women on the bank of the same river in the early 20th century. Importantly, there have been some Japanese writers who tried to write back to Spender’s provocation. In this presentation, I would like to focus on Hiroko Takenishi’s novel, Kangen-sai [The Festival of Classical Court Music ] (1978). This novel depicts the changes in people and landscapes before and after the atomic bombing on Hiroshima from several different perspectives, but at the core of the work is a description of the Kangensai, the most elaborate festival held on the sacred island of Miyajima, commonly known as Itsukushima Shrine, located in far western side of Hiroshima prefecture; the ceremony was introduced by Heike warlord Taira-no-kiyomori in the 12th century. This work could be interpreted as a 20-year delayed response to Spender's traditionalism.