Introduction

This chapter examines the ways in which the linearity of Cold War temporality is complicated by French photographer and Korean adoptee Agnès Dherbeys’s photographs of Korean birth mothers and her own adoptive father; in turn, it exposes the neoliberal effects underpinning the politics of Cold War temporality. The Cold War has conventionally been viewed as the binary opposition between American-style democratic capitalism and Soviet-style communism from 1945 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the communist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989. In the history of the Cold War, Asia has played a pivotal role. Among various accounts of the Cold War’s beginnings, Marc Gallicchio explained in 1988 that it started with the United States’ East Asian policy after Japan’s defeat in 1945. The present volume examines visual manifestations of the postcolonial struggles in artworks from East and Southeast Asia that were made while the world was being shaped by neoliberal political, ethical, and economic pressures.