The Korean War and Its Literary Legacies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Korean American ◽  
The Body ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Korean Diaspora ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
American Authors

Since the late 1990s, a growing number of US authors has been drawn to the Korean War, hoping to undo its status as “The Forgotten War.” The fact that it has served as the focus of novels by eminent Korean American authors like Chang-rae Lee and Susan Choi is not entirely surprising, given that they are the children of immigrants whose early lives had been shaped by the conflict. Given the extraordinarily high number of civilian deaths that resulted from the war and the many families that were fractured, the war is clearly a defining event that helped create a Korean diaspora. It has also become the focus, however, of novels by non-Korean American authors, including Toni Morrison, Rolando Hinojosa, and Ha Jin, which testifies to the fact that it was an event in which a number of domestic histories of race and transnational histories of empire converged. The body of literary works that have emerged around this event can be thought of as constituting an archive of what Michael Rothberg has termed “multidirectional memory,” one that suggests the intimacies of multiple histories involving not only Koreans and Korean Americans, but also other US racialized groups including African, Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese Americans as well as their connections to the complicated formations of empire that have shaped the relationships between Asian nations. Contending with the complexity and range of literary works that have centered on this event enables a reconsideration and expansion of what the proper subjects and objects of Asian American literary criticism are. If the field has outgrown its origins, in which the projection of a cultural nationalist vision of Asian American identity was a paramount goal, the vibrancy of these works stems from their soundings of a subject that is not univocal but multivocal. The political desires they seek to animate in their readers are not reducible to an agenda of combating domestic racism or consolidating a nativist notion of Asian American cultural identity, though they may contribute to such endeavors. More expansively, however, they articulate a multivalent range of progressive political aspirations and proliferate an array of identificatory possibilities.

North Korea in Asian American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Hong
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
The Korean War

To the extent North Korea features within Asian American literature and culture, it primarily does so in a body of Korean American cultural production—memoirs, biographies, documentary films, oral histories, fiction, and multi-media political advocacy—that is distinctively post-9/11 but not-yet post-Korean War. The irresolution of the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended by a peace treaty, serves as defining extraliterary context for representations of North Korea. Not reducible to historical setting, much less an event safely concluded in the past, the Korean War, as a contemporaneous structure of enmity between the United States and North Korea, conditions the significance of this cultural archive—its urgency, politics, and reception. Often markedly instrumental in nature, indeed defined by the antithetical political ends it wishes to foster, Asian (mainly Korean) American cultural production on North Korea falls into two broad camps: on the one hand, “axis of evil” accounts that advocate, at times explicitly, for US intervention against North Korea, and on the other, more emergent cultural expressions that seek to expose the human costs of unending US war with North Korea.

The Intimacies of Conflict

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Asian American ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Transnational American Studies ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Rolando Hinojosa ◽  
Chinese Subjects

Though known primarily in the United States as “the forgotten war,” the Korean War was a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of US imperial endeavors as they took shape during the Cold War. The Intimacies of Conflictworks against the historical erasure of this event first by returning us to the 1950s, revealing the emotionally compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy that were staged around this event in Hollywood films and journalistic accounts. Through detailed analyses of such works, this book illuminates how the Korean War enabled the emergence of not just a military multiculturalism but also a military Orientalism and a humanitarian Orientalism: cultural logics that purported to make surgical distinctions between Asians who were allies and those who were legitimately killable. This book also demonstrates how an emergent tradition of US novels, primarily by authors of color, provides an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory, illuminating the intimacies that join and divide the histories of Asian American, African American, and Chicanx/Latinx subjects, as well as Korean and Chinese subjects. Novels by eminent US writers like Susan Choi, Chang-rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Toni Morrison and the South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong speak to the trauma experienced by civilians and combatants while also evoking an expansive web of complicity in war’s violence. Drawing together both comparative race and transnational American studies approaches, this study engages in a multifaceted ethical and political reckoning with the Korean War’s unended status.

“Bled in, Letter by Letter”

2020 ◽  
pp. 173-202
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Foreign Student ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Diasporic Identity ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Do So

This chapter examines how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered negotiate the ethical and political complexities that shape the relationship between Koreans who directly experienced the trauma of war and Korean American authors who have constructed literary memories of that event. These are novels that are engaged in the cultural process that Marianne Hirsch has termed “postmemory.” These works constitute exemplary postmemorial texts that refrain from making the trauma of the war into the essentialist foundation of an ethnonationalist conception of Korean or Korean diasporic identity. These novels do so by highlighting the artifice of their constructions of memories that only belong, properly speaking, to those who experienced the war. In so doing they enact a form of postmemory that involves a kind of translation that is structured by approximations, interpolations, and gaps. Choi’s The Foreign Student is particularly noteworthy for gesturing as well toward the Korean War’s significance for Japanese Americans and African Americans without engaging in a problematic politics of racial comparison. This novel theorizes a mode of cultural memory that resonates not only with Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” but also with Alexander Weheliye’s notion of “racializing assemblages.”

A Not-yet-postcolonial Peninsula: Rewriting Spaces of Violence, Division and Diaspora

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Jini Kim Watson
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Historical Accounts

In his controversial 2001 novel,The Guest(Sonnim), Hwang Sok-yong tells the story of elderly Korean American Ryu Yosŏp, who embarks on a journey back to his childhood home in Hwanghae province, now North Korea. At once a spatial, temporal, and psychological return, the novel revisits the early years of the Korean War to unveil the truth behind one of the war’s most horrific crimes: the slaughter of 35,000 Korean civilians in the Shinch’on massacre of 1950. In particular, Hwang examines the arrival of the two “guests” of the title—Christianity and Marxism—during the colonial period and their subsequent role in the violence of Shinch’on. By making visible forms of political agency achieved through the assimilation of these two guests, the novel complicates the ideological binaries that appear to have arrested decolonization of the Korean peninsula. Watson’s article reveals how Hwang’s experimental, multivocal narrative structure rewrites usual historical accounts of the Korean War and division by attending to the spatialized production of regions, nation, state, and diaspora. It offers a rethinking of the congealed ideologies, stories, desires, and topologies of this not-yet-postcolonial peninsular.

Disappearing Acts: An Immigrant History

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 307-313
Author(s):  
Grace M. Cho
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Korean Immigrant ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
Korean Diaspora ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This piece is an experimental autoethnographic text that juxtaposes the author’s childhood experiences of growing up as a mixed-race Korean immigrant in a xenophobic small town in the United States with her mother’s dreams of migrating from Korea to America. The story of the family is contextualized within the history of the Korean War and postcolonial Korea and is based on several conversations the author had with her mother and aunt, in addition to her research on the Korean War and its aftermath. It reveals the many physical and symbolic disappearances in both the author’s family and Korean diaspora.

Comparative African American and Asian American Literary Studies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia H. Lee
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
American Authors ◽  
Political Radicalism

Comparative African American and Asian American literary studies traces the diverse (if uneven) ways that African American and Asian American authors have explored the relationship between the two groups and delves into the histories and the politics behind these interracial representations. The literature ranges from the polemical to the fantastic, from the realist to the postmodern, and from the formally innovative to the generically conventional. While some may assume that the politics behind such representations are either coalitional or conflictual in nature, the literature is highly ecumenical, including narratives that engage in Orientalism and/or Negrophobia, Third World rhetoric, postcolonial critique, and political radicalism. African Americans have long been interested in Asia as a potential site for resistance to American racism and empire, while Asian American authors have looked to the experiences of black Americans to understand their own experiences of racism within the United States. Despite the fact that there is a long-established tradition of Afro-Asian literary representation, literary criticism has only taken up a sustained and in-depth study of this topic within the past two decades. Afro-Asian literary studies is part of a late-20th-century “comparative turn” within US-based race studies, which goes along with the increasing transnational/diasporic orientation of formerly nation- or area-based disciplines.

Military Orientalism and the Intimacies of Collaboration

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-114
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Mainstream Press ◽  
The Military

The participation of Japanese American soldiers in the Korean War as it was depicted in Hollywood films, the mainstream press, and the Pacific Citizen is the focus of this chapter. Such texts reveal the “military Orientalism,” a subset of military multiculturalism, that took shape during the conflict, which posited Japanese Americans as citizen-subjects par excellence. This ideology asserted that the willingness of Japanese American men to serve their country in World War II (despite the racism of the internment) and in newly integrated combat units during the Korean War exemplified an ethos of sacrifice, a racialized value system crucial to their status as model minority subjects. This chapter traces the emergence of this military Orientalism across several cultural sites: two films that were released in 1959, Pork Chop Hill and The Crimson Kimono; tributes that appeared in the mainstream press to Nisei soldiers like Hiroshi Miyamura, who received the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Korean War; Go for Broke!, a 1951 film set during World War II but released during the Korean War; and finally, the exhaustive coverage of this film’s production and reception in the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League.

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