The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War

by Daniel Y. Kim

Overview

Winner, 2020 Peter C Rollins Prize, given by the Northeast Popular & American Culture Association

Enables a reckoning with the legacy of the Forgotten War through literary and cinematic works of cultural memory

Though often considered “the forgotten war,” lost between the end of World War II and the start of the Cold War, the Korean War was, as Daniel Y. Kim argues, a watershed event that fundamentally reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on to establish. He uncovers a trail of cultural artefacts that speaks to the trauma experienced by civilians during the conflict but also evokes an expansive web of complicity in the suffering that they endured.

Taking up a range of American popular media from the 1950s, Kim offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while they were experiencing it in real time. Kim expands this archive to read a robust host of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi, Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and in Korea. The Intimacies of Conflict offers a robust, multifaceted, and multidisciplinary analysis of the pivotal—but often unacknowledged—consequences of the Korean War in both domestic and transnational histories of race.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479800797
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/03/2020
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Daniel Y. Kim is Associate Professor of English at Brown Universitywhere he teaches classes in Asian American literature, American literature and Ethnic Studies. He has also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Yale Universityand as a Norman Freehling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (2006) and the co-editor (with Crystal Parikh) of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (2015). His essays have been published in a number of journals including American Literary History, Criticism, Cross-Currents, Journal of Asian American Studies, Novel and positions.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Korean War in Color 1

Part I The "Forgotten War" Before It Was Forgotten

1 "He's a South Korean When He's Running with You, and He's a North Korean When He's Running after You": Military Orientalism and Military Humanitarianism 31

2 "Tan Yanks" and Black Korea: Military Multiculturalism and Race War in Movies and the Press 53

3 Military Orientalism and the Intimacies of Collaboration: Sacrifice and the Construction of the Nisei Citizen-Soldier as a Model Minority 85

4 Picturing Koreans: The Age of the World Target and Humanitarian Orientalism 115

Part II Assemblages of Memory

5 Angels of Mercy and the Angel of History: The Disfiguring of Humanitarian Orientalism 149

6 "Bled in, Letter by Letter": Postmemory and the Subject of Korean War History 173

7 The Racial Borderlands of the Korean War 203

8 The Intimacies of Complicity 241

Conclusion: "The Delicate Chains of War" 263

Acknowledgments 291

Notes 295

Index 317

About the Author 327

Editorial Reviews

"The Korean War is often dubbed the Forgotten War, as it took place between the two larger conflicts of World War II and the Vietnam War. Kim. Kim provides an interpretation of how this 'forgotten war' was remembered through a variety of mediums, including motion pictures and novels ... Highly recommended."

Library Journal

"Part of an increasingly robust turn toward the cold war in American studies, Intimacies of
Conflict denies that compulsion to forget and ambitiously recuperates the importance of the Korean War in a squarely US and Asian American studies context. Woven together with muscular readings of texts, films, and memorial sites, Intimacies makes the case for rethinking the Korean War’s centrality in US racial and geopolitical projects and in Asian
American postmemorial reconstitution.

"

ALH Online Review

"The book will become a must-read for all serious scholars of the Korean War. Kim’s thoughtful analysis and fluid writing help him skillfully weave together a diverse set of literary and cinematic works. With its emphasis on previously unexplored aspects of the war’s cultural legacy, The Intimacies of Conflict enables us to better understand just how profoundly the conflict reshaped the individuals and nations that fought in it."

The Journal of Asian Studies

"A learned, eloquent, and necessary account of the significance of the Korean War for race relations in the U.S. The study is remarkable for the depth and wealth of knowledge it exhibits on the cultures of this conflict, from the period of its unfolding to the present – all rendered with nuance and in Daniel Kim’s masterful style."

Josephine Park

"Daniel Kim’s The Intimacies of Conflict provides a new approach to our understanding of the Korean War, which has been poorly remembered outside of Korea despite its devastating human losses. Working with consummate skill through novels, films, and photos, Kim approaches the war through the perspectives of Koreans, Asian Americans, and people of color, asserting throughout that the cultural memories of war belong to more than just generals, soldiers, and white men. The Intimacies of Conflict is a crucial new work in our understanding of how the Korean War continues to reverberate through history, memory, and feeling."

author of The Sympathizer Viet Thanh Nguyen