From Saviors to Rapists: G.I.s, Women, and Children in Korean War Films

Asian Cinema ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hye Seung Chung
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Women And Children

Nature, Annihilation, and Modernity: China's Korean War Germ-Warfare Experience Reconsidered

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 381-415 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Rogaski
Keyword(s):  
Alien Species ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Biological Weapon ◽  
Heilongjiang Province ◽  
Small Rodents ◽  
Natural Flora ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Yalu River

According to official PRC reports, on the night of April 4, 1952, hundreds of small rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county. The next morning, villagers in this remote corner of western Heilongjiang province awoke to find sickly voles scattered in haystacks, piled on rooftops, and even squirming on kangs next to slumbering women and children. Government reports praise the inherent wisdom and decisiveness of the Gannan villagers. Well-versed in the natural flora and fauna of the region, they immediately suspected that these rat-like animals were an alien species, a form of biological weapon disseminated by American planes that had crossed the Yalu River from the Korean front. By noon the villagers had killed, burned, and buried every vole they could find (ISC 1952, 40–3).

“I’ve Got a Hunch We’re Going Around in Circles”: Exceptions to American Exceptionalism in Hollywood Korean War Films

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Junghyun Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
War Films ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War

Hollywood Korean War films primarily aimed at integrating American citizenry into national narratives of cohesion and teleology by displacing contradictions onto the exteriority of American identity. The films dismiss the Korean War as not worth fighting for, yet simultaneously propose that fighting is the only viable option to cope with the futility of war. This paper argues that this closed rationality of we-fight-simply-because-we-fight is a symptom of cold war liberalism. And the cold war subject, caught in the circular movement of finding-while-missing the meaning, prefigures a postmodern subject of drive that transcends the fundamental lack in the process of subjectivization and finds satisfaction in the endless circular movement with no destination. Crucially, American exceptionalism functions as the state fantasy in this process of denying/displacing inconsistencies inherent to the imagined national identity. This circular rationality, which constitutes the paradigmatic subject-position of latecapitalist American culture, was constructed in the early years of the cold war, and its cultural manifestations can be traced in Hollywood films about the Korean War.

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