Imperial Moods: Mid-Century Music and the Cold War | Kylyn APIA Arts & Culture Festival

A Talk and Q&A with Indian Actor and Comedian Manan Desai

Desai’s presentation explores U.S. media representations of the Third World, the global bloc of decolonizing nations in Asia and Africa during the Cold War, through the development of the mid-century music genre known as Exotica. Emerging after the Second World War, Exotica was a popular form of ersatz “world music” which, I argue, responded to anxieties around racial integration and the decolonizing world.

Manan Desai is a 2023-24 Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Associate Professor of American Culture and Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies.