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British Association for American Studies

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Jannik Vandré

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“They Need Us and They Want Us”—Erecting the Empire in the Vietnam War

In the view of the late Amy Kaplan, the practice of US imperialism is denied and projected onto other nations in the discourse of American culture studies (13). Whereas the research in this field only marginally engages with the idea of the US being an imperial force, a cursory look at US political rhetoric, literary productions, and Hollywood blockbusters of the last decades discloses that the United States indeed seems to employ an imperial mindset. A close investigation of US-based representations of West-East encounters—during the Cold War period, for instance—reinforces Kaplan’s assertion that “US culture was from its origins grounded on ‘an imperium’” (22) and that US imperialism would “go unrecognized as an American way of life” (23). The difficulty of understanding that US culture was and still is, according to Alyosha Goldstein, formed by colonialist practices within and outside the United States can be explained by a closer look […]