Jason C. Parker – författare

For over four decades, the Cold War superpowers endeavored mightily to "win hearts and minds" abroad through strategies that came to be called public diplomacy. While many target audiences were on the original front lines of the conflict in Europe, other larger audiences resided in areas outside Europe, regions then in the throes of decolonization. This book explores how, for all the blood and drama of intervention, crisis, and revolution during the Cold War, the vast majority of these non-Europeans experienced it as a media war for their allegiance rather than as a violent war for their lives. In these outlying regions, superpower public diplomacy encountered volatile issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization--all of which intersected unpredictably with the dynamics of the Cold War and anti-imperialist currents. The challenge to U.S. public diplomacy was acute. At a time when the United States' image was inseparable from Jim Crow and Washington's European-imperial alliances, the cresting of these issues put U.S. outreach on the defensive.Yet, as Jason Parker argues, the greater consequence of these Cold War campaigns was international, not U.S.-centric, in scope. The non-European world responded to this media war by joining it. A proliferation of newly independent voices launched public diplomacy campaigns of their own, offering a roundabout validation of strategic public diplomacy while articulating an alternative vision of the postwar world. By reappropriating the geopolitical and intellectual space between the Cold War superpowers, this global conversation formulated a "Third World project" that coalesced around principals of nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. The global South's response to the injection of the Cold War into their social, economic, and political reality thus helped to create the "Third World" as a transnational, imagined community on the postwar global landscape.

The Cold War superpowers endeavored mightily to "win hearts and minds" abroad through what came to be called public diplomacy. While many target audiences were on the conflict''s original front-lines in Europe, the vast majority resided in areas in the throes of decolonization and experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy- as a media war for their allegiance rather than as violence. In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered volatile issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization-which intersected with the dynamics of the Cold War and with anti-imperialist currents. The challenge to US public diplomacy was acute. Jim Crow and Washington''s European-imperial alliances were inseparable from the image of the United States and put American outreach unavoidably on the defensive. Newly independent voices in the non-European world responded to this media war by launching public-diplomacy campaigns of their own. In addition to validating the strategic importance of public diplomacy, they articulated a different vision of the postwar world. Rejecting the superpowers'' Cold War, they forged the "Third World project" around nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. In doing so, Jason C. Parker argues, the United States inadvertently helped to nurture the "Third World" as a transnational imagined community on the postwar global landscape.Tracing US public diplomacy during the early years of the Cold War, Hearts, Minds, Voices narrates how US foreign policy engaged with and impacted the Global South and international history more broadly.

The Cold War superpowers endeavored mightily to "win hearts and minds" abroad through what came to be called public diplomacy. While many target audiences were on the conflict''s original front-lines in Europe, the vast majority resided in areas in the throes of decolonization and experienced the Cold War as public diplomacy- as a media war for their allegiance rather than as violence. In these areas, superpower public diplomacy encountered volatile issues of race, empire, poverty, and decolonization-which intersected with the dynamics of the Cold War and with anti-imperialist currents. The challenge to US public diplomacy was acute. Jim Crow and Washington''s European-imperial alliances were inseparable from the image of the United States and put American outreach unavoidably on the defensive. Newly independent voices in the non-European world responded to this media war by launching public-diplomacy campaigns of their own. In addition to validating the strategic importance of public diplomacy, they articulated a different vision of the postwar world. Rejecting the superpowers'' Cold War, they forged the "Third World project" around nonalignment, post-imperial economic development, and anti-colonial racial solidarity. In doing so, Jason C. Parker argues, the United States inadvertently helped to nurture the "Third World" as a transnational imagined community on the postwar global landscape.Tracing US public diplomacy during the early years of the Cold War, Hearts, Minds, Voices narrates how US foreign policy engaged with and impacted the Global South and international history more broadly.

In 1962, amidst the Cuban Revolution, Third World decolonization, and the African American freedom movement, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became the first British West Indian colonies to gain independence. These were not only the first new nations in the western hemisphere in more than fifty years; they also won their independence without the bloodshed that marked so much of the decolonization struggle elsewhere. Jason Parker''s international history of the peaceful transition in these islands analyzes the roles of the United States, Britain, the West Indies, and the transnational African diaspora in the process, from its 1930s stirrings to its Cold War culmination. Grounded in exhaustive research conducted in seven countries, Brother''s Keeper offers an original rethinking of the relationship between the Cold War and Third World decolonization.