Cold War Narratives: American Culture in the 1950s

Cold War Narratives reveals the power that representations, understood as both
cultural production and public discourse, have held in shaping the imaginaries of
early Cold War America. By engaging conflicting accounts of the 1950s as either
affirmations of a prosperous and confi dent nation ( in TV shows, popular sociology,
and advertising ) or as critiques of a society in the throes of fear, rebelliousness,
and inequality ( in film, literature, and media ), this study sheds new light on the
ambivalent imaginaries of the American 1950s.
Pitting visions of the Red Scare and of nuclear proliferation against narratives of
an upbeat nation, eager to suburbanize and to adopt the new ethics of televised
consensus, Cold War Narratives illustrates how America’s leading metaphors of
conformity shaped problematic gender roles, domesticity and consumption in the
1950s. It also exposes how dissenting voices to the Cold War consensus converged
around the affirmation of specific identitarian discourses, especially highlighting the
agency of youth and of the rising civil rights movement, and the way in which these
two entered into unprecedented dialog through new discursive formations such as
beat culture and rock ‘ n’ roll.