The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's cultural presence, going against the critical commonplace that the war was insignificant and calling for a reckoning with the cultural legacies of the Korean War. Christine Hong's A Violent Peace, Daniel Y. Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict, and Crystal Mun-hye Baik's Reencounters illustrate new directions and new possibilities in the scholarship on the Korean War, which is dominated by historical studies often guided by traditional approaches to international relations or foreign policy. Informed by approaches in ethnic studies – and particularly the field's interest in racialization as transnational and cross-border phenomenon – these books show that it is not only productive to revisit the “forgotten war” but imperative to do so. Through a wide range of cultural texts and with an exclusive focus on the perspectives and experiences of people of color, these studies probe the underexamined role the conflict has played in shaping liberal ideas on freedom and justice, attend to the contradictions of the cultural forms that clothed these ideas in post-World War II US culture, and point to new cultural interventions that challenge and dislodge long-standing Cold War orthodoxies.
Viewing the culture of democratization in the post-1945 world order through the lens of US militarism, Christine Hong's A Violent Peace offers the opportunity to survey some of the intellectual currents behind the revival of scholarly interest in the Korean War among literary and cultural critics. First, it is staunchly situated in ethnic studies scholarship which reexamines the post-World War II promise of democracy and prosperity through the perspectives of populations to which the promise failed to deliver and by placing the issue of race front and center in Cold War biopolitics. The chapters on the Japanese writer Ōe Kenzaburō and occupied Japan and on the toll that nuclear testing exacted on Pacific islanders bring into high relief the fact that the promises of democracy and prosperity were realized for some at the expense of others. Second, A Violent Peace adds fascism to the vocabulary and practices of US imperialism. “Democracy within the teeth of fascism,” a phrase Hong borrows from Ralph Ellison, captures how US militarism employed tactics of dehumanization it decried as it established itself as the global defender of freedom. The chapter on Ellison's “tales of failed flight” (40) – his short story “Flying Home” and ideas for an unfinished manuscript with the generic title “Airman Novel” – illustrates the concept through what Hong calls Ellison's “Double-V politics” (29), the black American imperative to support victory over both racism at home and fascism abroad during World War II. Third, a transnational frame and optic guides A Violent Peace, reminding readers that transnationalism, like empire and imperialism, is a current keyword in American studies. The transpacific cultural geography that Hong maps and examines in the book is crucial to the critical objective of connecting devalued human lives across national borders and histories. Against the salience of the nation-state as the primary unit of organizing knowledge on the Cold War, Hong opts to construct a geography shaped by US militarism with the effect of highlighting connections among peoples whose lives have been upended by US national interest. Japanese and Filipino writers such as Ōe and Luis Taruc thus appear in conversations with Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, and Carlos Bulosan in Hong's investigation of the culture of US militarism. As I discuss later, this critical tendency to look outside national(ist) geography can be seen in both Kim's and Baik's studies.
Hong persuasively shows that post-World War II democracy and democratization are best understood as claims yet to be fulfilled rather than as achievement or fact. One of the most compelling moves in the book is Hong's tracing of the convergence and divergence between top-down democratization projects and grassroots, people-led democracy movements. Particularly in the chapter on Carlos Bulosan and the Filipino struggle for independence, Hong shows the changing relationship between the Hukbalahap guerillas and the United States. In the eyes of the US the status of the Huks changed quickly as the guerillas fought for independence from US influence after defeating the common enemy, Japan. In this rapid reclassification of the Huks from friend to enemy, all narratives were susceptible to being turned into intelligence, and intelligence was a precarious affair as the information the Huks shared with the United States during a time of friendly relations became lethal intelligence directed against them (155). Against this backdrop, Hong argues that Bulosan's Cold War fiction – The Cry and the Dedication and All the Conspirators – “demonstrates the lethal susceptibility of information to instrumentalization in a time of anticommunist terror” (153). Instead of authorial intentions or exclusive attention to forms, Hong's approach emphasizes the structural conditions under which a writer of color writes. The “counterrevolutionary framework shaped by an epistemology of enmity,” then, is the milieu within which Bulosan's novels are written and read, and which critics should note (151). As top-down democratization projects initiated by the US in various parts of Cold War Asia and people-led democracy movements compete for legitimacy, cultures of democratization are laced with both fascist and antifascist possibilities in Hong's study.
Hong's query on the cultures of democratization, however, at times tends to veer in the direction of a somewhat deterministic view of culture. A quote from James Baldwin – which appears in the chapter where Hong examines US domestic surveillance and policing of left-leaning black American organizations, political leaders, and activists during the time of mounting international indictment of US military actions in Vietnam – may well summarize a key premise of her approach to US militarism: “A racist society can't but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth” (quoted at 193). Baldwin's trenchant critique of structural racism as a foundational and abiding element of the US certainly resonates with A Violent Peace's critical outlook, and it provides a rationale for Hong's interweaving of domestic and foreign policies that creates and links racialized peoples and supports the claim of the erasure of distinction between the home front and the war zone. At the same time, the reach and scope of Baldwin's statement possibly complicates critical engagements with tracking the mutating, fluid, and often variegated and contradictory definitions of race globally.
Perhaps a different way of raising this question on the place of culture in A Violent Peace is to ask to what degree the influence and violence of US militarism is synchronous or congruous with American culture. The ambivalent relationship between Ōe and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in A Violent Peace registers an irresolution on the relationship between the spheres of culture and war. Arguably, culture follows war as Twain's classic novel became a hallmark of the democratizing project the US set about in Japan after the Occupation. But Ōe's childhood love of the book, which Hong takes care to note precedes the induction of the book into Cold War propaganda, somehow evades the propagandist directive to result in a tale of relational attachment in the social margins, according to Hong. My point here is merely that there is probably a wider swath of a zone of indeterminacy between top-down democratization projects and people-led democracy movements, between propaganda and literature/the arts, than is accounted for in A Violent Peace.
Likewise Hong's reading of Miné Okubo – the Japanese American artist and writer who is best known for Citizen 13660, a graphic novel that chronicles Okubo's experience of evacuation and incarceration during World War II – leaves behind some questions about the conditions under which a writer or artist of color creates and the effects of their creation. With innovative research that takes the reader to Okubo's commissioned work for Fortune magazine after the Japanese defeat and with critically adroit analysis that shows the alignment between Okubo's illustrations and the US goal of Japanese rehabilitation on American terms, Hong makes the case that Japanese American artists such as Okubo were inducted into an “art of democratization” that utilized “racialized humanity” only to “disavo[w] the impact of state violence” (101). The fact that Citizen 13660 was enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the War Relocation Authority bureaucrats who managed the incarceration camps is evidence of how Okubo's creative works could not escape the directives of Pax Americana, lending itself to “interpretive practices that minimized the structures in which race was captured in the first place and, in so doing, colluded in that originary violence” (101). Collusion and complicity are important aspects of cultural work that need to be examined. But in a situation like Okubo's can the effects of creative work go beyond, or against, the institutions that support the writer or artist?
Hong's book and Daniel Kim's The Intimacies of Conflict both engage with the concept of indistinction as a way of drawing attention to the points of convergence between domestic US policies of race and Cold War US militarism abroad. In A Violent Peace, indistinction is simultaneously a term that echoes the concept and discourse of color blindness – characterized in the book as “the theoretical nonperception of difference,” a principle that came to be “enshrined as a postracial ideal at the very heart of American conceptions of liberal democracy” (1) – and a term that refers to the erasure of differences that result from structural conditions to serve the aims of the military–imperial state. Indistinction, or indiscrimination, as it is interchangeably called, is also a key concept in The Intimacies of Conflict. Kim modestly states that one of his goals is to simply show that the lack of critical attention to the cultural memory of the Korean War is not due to the paucity of cultural materials or their insignificance. Rather, in Kim's words, “most of us simply have not registered that an event of significance and sorrow has, as it were, taken place before us” (4). Kim's argument that the cultural representations of the Korean War register a key moment in US recalibrations of race relations, especially in relation to Asians, revolves around the idea of distinction, or discrimination, as it emerges in mid-twentieth-century discourse of wars, the rule of law, and justice to refer to who has the right to kill (i.e. legitimate combatants) and who does not (i.e. guerillas and insurgents who do not wear the uniforms of the enemy state) (38–39, 46–47).
Kim deftly traces how the principle of distinction, or discrimination, buttressed the theoretical idea of lawfulness in wars. He also incisively shows how this principle was belied by the civil-war character of the Korean War in which racial distinction did not cleanly map onto friend or foe status – Koreans were both allies (South Koreans) and enemies (North Koreans) – and by new military technologies (such as the atomic bomb and airpower) which enabled indiscriminate killing. Kim's contribution to theorizing the biopolitics and necropolitics of military in/discrimination, more specifically, lies in his advancing the notion of the “racial DMZ, a zone of indiscrimination” in which “technologies of knowledge production that purport to distinguish between those who constitute the proper object of humanitarian care and those who are legitimate objects of military violence” are used to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Asians (12, italics in the original). While they are used somewhat differently in each book, the shared critical interest in the concept of indistinction between The Intimacies of Conflict and A Violent Peace is definitely noteworthy, and the concept seems generative for further critical engagement in post-World War II racialization processes under the US imperium.
Hong's assertion in A Violent Premise that US militarism pervades all sectors of American society is echoed in Kim's examination of the Korean War's imprint on literary and journalistic representations of the war, which he examines in the 1950s during wartime, in the decade after, and in the millennium when leading writers such as Toni Morrison revisit the topic. This keen attention to the reach of US militarism, though, is coupled with a sharp engagement with Christina Klein's argument on Cold War orientalism, which Kim advances mainly through the two terms “humanitarian Orientalism” and “military Orientalism.” On the one hand, they reflect a critique of what Kim suggests Klein omitted in her influential study of Cold War US culture in relation to Asia: the hot wars of the Cold War and the place of military violence in the cultural logic of integration (9–12). On the other hand, they are most helpful as critical addenda to Klein's study. Illuminating applications of humanitarian orientalism appear in relation to Kim's attention to the portrayals of Korean civilians in the Korean War films of the 1950s. In his analysis of Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet in chapter 1, for example, Kim argues that the film embraces a legalistic understanding of the Korean War which depends on the ability to discriminate between those who can rightly be killed and those who cannot, only to ultimately show that “the principle of discrimination it has so carefully elaborated is completely inadequate to the realities of war” (47). In his analysis of Korean refugees in the films One Minute to Zero and Battle Hymn, and of John Osborne's Korean War journalism in chapter 4, Kim persuasively shows how the sympathies for Korean refugees in these works appear in the service of American humanity and national interest. Even in the case of John Osborne, a journalist of the Korean War remembered for his robust criticism of US interventionism and his attention to the Korean victims of the war, Kim points out a humanitarian orientalism that seriously limits Osborne's ability to see how the technologies being proposed to distinguish the North Korean spies from the Korean refugees operate within the frame of viewing Korean deaths as collateral and inevitable damage.
If humanitarian orientalism is most pointedly developed in relation to Kim's analysis of Korean civilians in the cultural texts, military orientalism is the term for his examination of interracial intimacies engendered by the US armed forces. A note on intimacies here seems necessary since Kim's use of the term departs from the common meaning of closeness that comes from sexual relationships and liaisons. Following Lisa Lowe's use of the term in her study of the imbrication of Asian labor and African slavery in the making of modern liberalism in the West in The Intimacies of Four Continents, Kim uses the term to refer to complex, and often unintended, relations that emerged between those who experienced the war as ordinary people swept up in the cross fire, between men of color and between white Americans and people of color. While the majority of American literature and film on the Korean War dwells on the plights and frustrations of white American soldiers who had to fight in a conflict whose cause they neither understood nor supported in a faraway land, Kim focusses on the few films that contain multiracial and multiethnic friendships to expound on military multiculturalism. Chapters 2 and 3 are respectively devoted to the black American soldiers who were in integrated armed forces for the first time in US history during the Korean War and the Nisei soldiers for whom service in the Korean War was empirically and symbolically a step toward Japanese American rehabilitation after the incarceration camps. Chapter 2, in particular, demonstrates Kim's expertise in comparative racialization, as can be seen in his previous scholarship. His discussion of the “metaphor of race war” in Clarence Adams, a black American turncoat, so to speak, echoes the perspective of black leftist politics Hong generously cites in her study. Kim judiciously avoids either idolizing black radical perspectives on the Korean War or falling back on Bill Mullen's thesis on Afro-orientalism, instead drawing out the subtleties of integration brokered by a war abroad in an Asian country. Likewise in his analysis of the film Go for Broke!, which was released during the Korean War and which thematized the heroism of Japanese American men who fought valiantly in World War II as part of the all-Nisei unit the 442nd Regiment, Kim focusses on the nuances of the collaboration between the Japanese American Citizens League and the film to highlight narrow economic terms of Japanese American rehabilitation as model minority.
In Part 2, Kim turns his attention to US fiction on the Korean War published in the millennium to examine how these works critique the humanitarian orientalism of an earlier era. The chapters in this part are organized mostly according to a writer's ethnic and national identification, although chapter 5 also includes a discussion of Jayne Anne Phillips's Lark and Termite. Through analysis of the cultural memories of the Korean War as they appear in Korean American novels (Chang-rae Lee, Susan Choi), novels by US writers of color (Clarence Adams, Toni Morrison, Rolando Hinojosa, Ha Jin), and a Korean novel (Hwang Sok-yong), The Intimacies of Conflict encourages readers to reflect on the wide-ranging and enduring impact of the Korean War. With his reading of Rolando Hinojosa's novels Rites and Witnesses, Korean Love Songs, and The Useless Servants, Kim offers a unique look into the impact of the Korean War on Chicano literature – a little-studied topic. Among other elements, white domination that spans Texan corporations and the US Armed Forces, and parallels between the US–Mexican War and the Korean War, emerge as sites of interracial intimacy. Kim astutely notes that the millennial novels he reads are not historical novels in the conventional sense. The historical imagination in these works, he implies, is about getting at the omissions and violence that often accompany totalizing views of history in conventional historical novels. The Korean American novels of Choi and Lee, for example, are not interested in conveying authentic Korean American perspectives on the war. As post-memorial novels they encourage readers to question such authenticity even as their storyworlds are based on historical knowledge of the Korean War that is much deeper than most US novels on the Korean War that precede them.
As a study of the cultural memory of the Korean War, The Intimacies of Conflict charts new territory. Kim's thoughtful views on how his work at once is indebted to the field of Asian American studies and departs from some of the common features of scholarship in this field actually contain important points on how the book achieves this. As Kim mentions, an indebtedness to Asian American studies as a field is apparent in the book. An Asian Americanist critique is what leads Kim to query the links between the Korean War and Asian American racial formation in the US and to hold as central to his study the unrecognized violence visited on Koreans in the Korean War. At the same time, Kim also notes that his work departs from some of the common features of Asian American studies scholarship. It does not focus on one Asian group, instead showing multiracial experiences, memories, and representations of the Korean War. It also is deeply suspicious of nationalism, including Korean nationalism. While Kim mentions these two as pointing in different directions, it is actually the combination of the two that makes The Intimacies of Conflict both original and wide-reaching in its significance.
Crystal Baik's Reencounters employs some of the features Kim identifies as common to Asian American studies scholarship, such as focussing on one Asian group. Reencounters is about Korean American cultural memory work, with its sight unwaveringly on the meaning of the Korean War as it is explored through Korean American perspectives, with the exception of Jane Jin Kaisen, a Danish filmmaker and Korean adoptee. Its focus on Korean American cultural memory, however, shows many ethno-nationalist tendencies. Baik's feminist diasporic approach is instrumental to the book's engagement with multimedia memory works that tap into the seams and cracks of state-oriented, official histories and memories of the Korean War. Baik's conceptualization of “reencounters,” the key term for her analysis of the memory work performed by the oral histories, performances, and independent cinematic texts she examines, derives from the observation that “diasporic memory works catalyze moments of return and remembering that denaturalize naturalized temporalities, solidified presumptions and historical knowledges” and that they “draw our attention to contradictions and critical oppositional memories that trouble the Cold War temporalization and prolongation of the Korean War as a good and just project” (6, 10). Baik's approach to diaspora is also inflected by women-of-color feminism and queer diasporic scholarship, particularly “the pivotal role played by relational differences in the coalescing of social affinities and episteme at odds with the heteronormative logics of the nation-state” (24). Through this theoretical frame, Baik's diasporic approach effectively delves into what official narratives of the Korean War eschew and mines aesthetic renderings of lived experiences to uncover what falls outside the boundaries of state-sanctioned collective memory.
A thorough engagement with Korean American scholarship that employs a postcolonial lens to probe the discrepancies and distance between Korean American lived experiences and the official narratives of US–Korea relations undergirds Reencounters. Historian Ji-Yeon Yuh's study of Korean American war brides’ pioneering place in the making of Korean America and her notion of Korean American immigrants as “militarized migrants” (a term that rejects the view of Korean immigration as voluntary and highlights the Korean War as catalyst for waves of Korean immigration to the US), and Grace Cho's exploration of the repressed trauma of the Korean War in Haunting the Korean Diaspora, are important precedents to Baik's study. While it engages in productive conversations with existing scholarship, the contributions of Reencounters are singular. I touch on two of the most important insights from Baik's study here. One is the idea that the Korean War's effects and repercussions reside in mundane, everyday life as opposed to “spectacular forms of militarized violence solely affixed to combat warfare” (5). What Baik calls an “analytical shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary” corresponds to her emphasis on the “present-pastness” of the Korean War (40), a term that registers the fact that the Korean War has technically never ended and draws on the title of Still Present Pasts, an exhibit that is part of the Legacies of the Korean War Project (2003–4), led by Ramsay Liem, among others. The second is her call to move beyond “a singular focus on trauma-related concepts such as intergenerational hauntings and postmemory” (13). Acknowledging the importance of these frames, Baik suggests that they tend to focus on “the invisible or lingering remnants of war that exist beyond an ocular scope or the traumatic secrets vertically passed down from one generation to another” at the expense of the “durable repercussions that are readily seen, heard, and felt by different publics but are intuited or named as something else altogether” (14). The book as a whole illustrates the benefits of these two insights.
Baik's archive of multimedia texts and projects in Reencounters also stands out because cultural scholarship on the Korean War has largely focussed on literature and film. In addition to the Legacies of the Korean War Project mentioned above, Baik offers a compelling analysis of the Intergenerational Korean American Oral History Project founded in 2012 by visual artist and writer Sukjong Hong and the multimedia artist Danny Kim and sponsored by a left-leaning Korean American community organization based in New York City, Nodutdol. While her respect for the aesthetic medium is consistent throughout the book, Baik's engagement with this project is exemplary in how it navigates the challenges of researching and analyzing an unconventional memory archive. Hong and Kim's awareness of the problems of official forms of Cold War knowledge leads them to rethink access and authority in relation to archives and to view “memory as practice rather than memory as repository” (88). Community participation and listening, therefore, are emphasized not only in the interview sessions themselves but also in the stewardship of the stories that are shared. Respecting the rules of the project, Hong makes great use of the sessions she was able to attend and the interviews she was able to hold with members of the project to show that “privileging listening as the pivotal mnemonic praxis” can lead to knowledge that “escape[s] the conventional ways in which we might hear and remember war” (71). Baik's attention to Jane Jin Kaisen's film The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger and video installation Reiterations of Dissent, to kate-hers RHEE's performance Sex Education for Finding Face in the 21st Century, and to Dohee Lee's performance MAGO draws out the variegated ways in which the Korean War seeps into everyday life for those in the Korean diaspora and the creative ways in which artists note and confront the legacies of the war.
Reencounters delves into the exclusions and repressions that resulted from both the US and South Korean states’ imperial and, one may say, sub-imperial practices. In this regard, South Korea is not dichotomously positioned in relation to the US in a victim–oppressor binary. Rather, the dichotomy, as it were, is between the two states and Koreans who are rendered disposable and invisible. Baik's recourse to militarized migration and transnational adoption is productive in pointing out the specific contexts in which (willful) misrecognition or disavowal of certain groups takes place in both South Korea and the US. Addressing the fact that the two countries have become complexly entangled in a special relationship after the Korean War is admirable. Yet to trace these entanglements is a huge project, and one wonders about the historical scope of militarized migration and transnational adoption as they are used in Reencounters as the cultural memory of the Korean War. Can all Korean immigration to the US since the Korean War be viewed as militarized migration? And is all transnational adoption out of South Korea since the Korean War a testament to US militarism in South Korea? Doubtless the first wave of Korean immigration to the US after the Korean War and the 1965 liberalization of immigration in the US are militarized migration. Likewise, South Korean transnational adoption is originally a consequence of the Korean War, of US militarism, and of exclusionary practices of South Korean nation building. But does this origin determine the adoption industry as it has developed in South Korea? I raise questions about the historical specificity of either militarized migration or transnational adoption not to deny the imperial and nationalist practices and the resulting violence that constituted the Korean diaspora but to further inquiries on the legacies of the Korean War in the geopolitics of the Cold War and the post-Cold War.
A Violent Peace, The Intimacies of Conflict, and Reencounters take us back to the mid-twentieth century and suggest that the Korean War was not only a world-changing event for the Koreans who experienced the hot war but also a seminal event in shaping the post-World War II US imperium. If the Korean War has been regarded as culturally insignificant in the United States, this body of scholarship shows that it was likely critical complacency to Cold War orthodoxies that generated this view. They draw attention to the fact that technologies of culturally mediating racialization changed substantially after the Korean War as the need to reconcile racism with liberal ideals of freedom, equality, and justice became acutely apparent. Uncovering these technologies, they suggest, is necessarily tied to sharpening inquiries on the nature of the US empire and the contradictions of US liberalism. Further research in the intersecting biopolitics and geopolitics of the Cold War which centers the Korean War and reexamines accepted narratives of the Cold War would be a welcome and productive scholarly endeavor.
