The Demilitarized Zone: American Representations of the Korean Korean War

The Demilitarized Zone: American Representations of the Korean Korean War

Daniel Y. Kim - Associate Professor of English, Brown University

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Room 101, Linsly-Chittenden Hall See map
63 High Street
New Haven, CT 6511

Professor Kim’s research and teaching interests include Asian American literature, 20th-Century U.S. literature, the 1950s, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies. He is the author of “Writing Manhood”, “Writing Race: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin and the Literary Politics of Identity” (Stanford University Press, 2006). Kim is currently working on a book provisionally entitled “The Dematerialized Zone: Representations of the Korean War in U.S. Culture”. He has published articles in “Criticism, The Journal of Asian American Studies”, and “Novel”.

The Demilitarized Zone: American Representations of the Korean War
Kim’s book examines American cultural representations of the Korean War from a comparative, multiracial perspective. One of its primary aims is to work against the seeming historical erasure of this event. It does so by returning us to cultural texts from the 1950s (novels, films and journalistic accounts) that enable us to understand how this conflict was framed by dominant domestic racial narratives of the period–narratives that tend to focus on African American and Japanese American subjects. This study also reflects upon the psychic and political issues raised by the works of a recent generation of Korean American authors (Susan Choi, Nora Okja Keller, Chang-rae Lee) as well as the writing of Mexican American author, Rolando Hinojosa. These works attest to the lingering if unarticulated influence of the war, and lead us to a reconsideration of the forms of political and racialized subjectivity that emerge through the remembrance of an injurious though largely “forgotten” past.

Sponsored by the Asian American Cultural Center, Council on East Asian Studies, English Department, and Korean American Students at Yale.
Region: 
Korea