Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"
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