The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokolniki Park to Chicagos South Side [Paperback]

This book demonstrates the ways in which the kitchenthe centerpiece of domesticity and consumerismwas deployed as a recurring motif in the ideological and propaganda battles of the Cold War. Beginning with the famous NixonKhrushchev kitchen debate, Baldwin shows how Nixon turned the kitchen into a space of exception, while contemporary writers, artists, and activists depicted it as a site of cultural resistance. Focusing on a wide variety of literature and media from the United States and the Soviet Union, Baldwin reveals how the binary logic at work in Nixons discoursesetting U.S. freedom against Soviet totalitarianismerased the histories of slavery, gender subordination, colonialism, and racial genocide. The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen treats the kitchen as symptomatic of these erasures, connecting issues of race, gender, and social difference across national boundaries. This rich and rewarding studyembracing the literature, film, and photography of the erawill appeal to a broad spectrum of scholars.

KATE A. BALDWIN is an associate professor of communication studies, rhetoric, and American studies at Northwestern University and the author of Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain.

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Cold War Hot Kitchen Envy and Other Warm Guns: Ray and Charles Eames at the American National Exhibition in Moscow Reframing the Cold War Kitchen: Sylvia Plath, Byt, and the Radical Imaginary of The Bell Jar Alice Childress, Natalya Baranskaya, and the Conditions of Cold War Womanhood Lorraine Hansberry and the Social Life of Emotions Selling the Homeland: Silk Stockings, Stilyagi, and Style Epilogue: A Kitchen in History Notes Index