Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Asian Studies, Spring 2027

This project examines how Chinese diasporic communities and cultural movements in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States negotiated the competing demands of local nation-building, Cold War anticommunism, and cultural attachment to China through grassroots cultural production. Bringing literary and visual analysis into conversation with Cold War history, Sinophone studies, and political theories of alliance, I argue that diasporic cultural production transformed the demands for diasporic Chinese communities to declare unambiguous political loyalties into “ambiguous alignment”: a set of aesthetic tactics and ethical commitment for sustaining multiple attachments without resolving them into fixed political identities. Each chapter reconstructs a neglected grassroots archive: the Equator Art Society’s social-realist paintings and public pedagogy in Singapore; Chinese-language magazines, popular fiction, and film culture produced by the Chinese diasporic community in South Korea; and the photography, underground periodicals, and literary afterlives of the transpacific Baodiao movement. These materials reveal that diasporic writers and artists were neither simply absorbed into Cold War blocs nor free to choose among them. Instead, they used intermedial forms to negotiate racialized suspicion, authoritarian nation-building, and rival claims by Beijing and Taipei. The dissertation thus reframes Cold War Asia as an interconnected political and cultural field shaped not only by state diplomacy but also by the provisional, locally improvised alignments of diasporic communities themselves.