Storytelling and the National Security of America: Korean War Stories from the Cold War to Post-9/11 Era

Abstract

My dissertation\nis an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation\nto the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to\npost-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel\nwith three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the\ninstitutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse\nof the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the\ninstitutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that\nstorytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security\npolitics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956),\nand The Manchurian Candidate (1962)\nin the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories\ncooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the\nnational security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie\nLee’s Still Life with Rice (1996),\nSusan Choi’s The Foreign Student\n(1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories\nof My Ghost Brother (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase\nKorean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance\nagainst the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of\nracial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further\nreading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s Home (2012), Ha Jin’s War\nTrash (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s The\nSurrendered (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories,\nthe Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on\nTerror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives\non healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society.\nTaken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling\nthat engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual\nnarratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing\nof the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the\n“forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.