<p>My dissertation
is an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation
to the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to
post-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel
with three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the
institutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the
institutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that
storytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security
politics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> (1956),
and <i>The Manchurian Candidate</i> (1962)
in the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories
cooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the
national security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie
Lee’s <i>Still Life with Rice</i> (1996),
Susan Choi’s <i>The Foreign Student</i>
(1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s <i>Memories
of My Ghost Brother</i> (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase
Korean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance
against the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of
racial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further
reading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s <i>Home</i> (2012), Ha Jin’s <i>War
Trash</i> (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s <i>The
Surrendered</i> (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories,
the Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on
Terror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives
on healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society.
Taken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling
that engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual
narratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing
of the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the
“forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/10565468 |
| Date | 21 November 2019 |
| Creators | Jingyi Liu (7901657) |
| Source Sets | Purdue University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis |
| Rights | CC BY 4.0 |
| Relation | https://figshare.com/articles/Storytelling_and_the_National_Security_of_America_Korean_War_Stories_from_the_Cold_War_to_Post-9_11_Era/10565468 |
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