“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.

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.

“Hiding in Plain Sight”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Racial Passing ◽  
War Films ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Way

This chapter focuses on political passing, in which the specter of passing was utilized in Hollywood films produced in the context of the Cold War. Films about political passing called into question who was who and the nature of identity. The notion that somebody could pass politically mirrored fears about racial passing, complicated by postwar obsessions with Communism. The chapter examines how anti-Communist films such as My Son John and Woman on Pier 13 tackle the “enemy within” and portray Communists as caricatures, either gangster-like or hyperintellectual, thus making visible what was supposed to be an invisible threat. It also considers the way anti-Communism in Hollywood exploited anxieties that were linked to postwar ideas about identity.

Introduction: The Korean War in Britain

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Grace Huxford
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social History ◽  
Korean War ◽  
British History ◽  
History Writing ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This introduction first gives an overview of Korean War historiography alongside a summary of the war itself, before exploring the position of the Korean War and the Cold War in British history-writing. It highlights how selfhood and citizenship have emerged as growing categories of analysis in Cold War studies and argues why it is important to consider them in the context of post-1945 Britain. It closes by exploring the challenges and possibilities of writing the social history of warfare and bringing domestic and military ‘spheres’ together in a meaningful way.

Congress and the Cold War: U.S.-China Policy, 1955

1981 ◽  
Vol 85 ◽  
pp. 80-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Policy Area ◽  
China Policy ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Democratic Parties ◽  
China Mainland ◽  
The Cold War

Perhaps no other foreign policy area brought forth the emotional anti communism characteristic of the 1950s as did American relations with the People's Republic of China. The so–called “ loss of China ”issue beginning in 1949, for which the Republicans primarily blamed the Democrats, severely strained the bipartisan approach towards foreign policy. In addition, four years before he died in 1951, Republican foreign policy leader Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg excluded China policy from the area of bipartisan agreement, while his party's loyalty to the defeated Nationalists remained strong. Senator Joseph McCarthy's“communists–in– government” charges during the Korean War, when American forces were engaged in combat with the People's Liberation Army, further exacerbated relations between the Republican and Democratic parties, and between the legislative and executive branches of government. Ominously, the possibility of a preventive strike on the China mainland also became the focus of serious consideration and possible implementation during the Formosa Strait confrontation of 1954–55.

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