This introduction establishes the historiographical and methodological orientation to the Korean War adopted by The Intimacies of Conflict, which works against the erasure of this event in US cultural memory in two ways. First of all, it returns us to cultural works from the 1950s: films and journalistic representations that used the conflict to stage a number of compelling dramas of interracial and transnational intimacy. Such texts articulate two cultural logics central to US Cold War liberalism and military multiculturalism: “military Orientalism,” which frames Japanese American soldiers and other Asian combatants as loyal allies, and “humanitarian Orientalism,” which constructs Korean civilians as worthy objects of humanitarian care. Both logics, however, legitimate any Asian deaths that occur in the course of the fighting, revealing the particular biopolitical and necropolitical formations that emerged during the Korean War. Second, this study looks to a body of recent novels on the conflict authored primarily by US writers of color. These offer trenchant critiques of the forms of intimacy privileged by midcentury Cold War ideologies and constitute an exemplary assemblage of cultural memory that highlights the intimacies of the multiple histories of race and empire that converged in the conflict.
