America and Europe in Twentieth-Century Southeast Asia

In psychoanalytic theories, “projection” functions as a defense mechanism that shifts the causes of psychic pain on to someone else and is, as Peter Gay has observed, part of most human beings' natural tendency to make the “unbearable bearable.”1 Even if a range of conservative politicians in England and the Netherlands—or former colonial residents displaced from British-India and the Dutch East Indies—may have indulged in a Freudian form of projection during the early 1950s by blaming U.S. foreign policymakers for their nation's traumatic loss due to an allegedly premature independence of European colonial possessions in South and Southeast Asia, Anne Foster's use of the term projection is hardly burdened by such psychoanalytic resonances. Instead, in choosing the title Projections of Power, Foster invokes the active form of the verb “to project” as a straightforward reference to the process of (broad)casting American images of power onto the surfaces of colonial Southeast Asia. In both focused and more blurry ways, such projections of power transmitted U.S. notions of proper governance and civil society—as well as a contagious fear of worldwide communism—through free trade and modern culture. The United States had assumed formal colonial control of the Philippines in 1898 and by the 1920s and 1930s, Foster argues, U.S. officials and businessmen operating in Southeast Asia's colonial arena assumed that “American methods, American investment, and American purchases would produce prosperity, modernity, and natural evolution towards an end to formal colonialism in the context of shared commitments to a particular, mutually beneficial economic arrangement” (p. 6). At the same time, Foster inventively addresses the manner in which the great diversity of colonized populations in the Indonesian archipelago, Straits Settlements, Burma or Indochina perceived—and interpolated—the imagery of cultural power projected onto Southeast Asia's screens, in which America's laissez-faire capitalist practices, missionary activities, and the allure and impact of Hollywood movies play starring roles

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