Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T14:19:49.007Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - Korean Worlds and Echoes from the Cold War

from Part III - Transregional Worlding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

Debjani Ganguly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access

Summary

Since the turn of the millennium a number of novels that look back to the Korean War have appeared in English including Ha Jin’s War Trash, Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest, Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite. These works issue address a location, the Korean peninsula, that interrupts putatively global frameworks for understanding the contemporary. Korea’s postcoloniality remains suspended as it has manifested in two still divided nation-state and its ongoing civil war testifies to the fact that the Cold War’s putative end is not an entirely global phenomenon. Moreover, these works illuminate how the “contact nebulae” (to use Karen Thornber’s phrase) that define East Asia—the formations of transculturation indigenous to that region—are not only shot through by complex asymmetries of power but also intertwined with more global histories of war and empire. As such, the network of literary examined in this essay contribute to a theorizing of the contemporary and of world literature that is attuned tracking the dynamic interaction of the multiple temporal and spatial registers—global, regional and national—in which various modalities of worlding take place.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Chŏng-hyo, An. 1989. White Badge: A Novel of Korea. Soho.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Charles K. 2001. “America’s Korea, Korea’s Vietnam.” Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Sept.): 527–40.Google Scholar
Bahun, Sanja. 2011. “The Politics of World Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’haen, Theo et al. Routledge, 373–82.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, Schocken Books, 253–64.Google Scholar
Choi, Susan. 1999. The Foreign Student. HarperPerennial.Google Scholar
Conway-Lanz, Sahr. 2005. “Beyond No Gun Ri: Refugees and the United States Military in the Korean War.” Diplomatic History, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Jan.): 4981.Google Scholar
Cooppan, Vilashini. 2011. “World Literature Between History and Theory.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’haen, Theo et al. Routledge, 194203.Google Scholar
Cumings, Bruce. 2010. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library.Google Scholar
Dudziak, Mary L. 2000. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ganguly, Debjani. 2016. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Hammond, Andrew, ed. 2011. Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hwang, Sok-Yong. 2005. The Guest. Seven Stories Press. Seven Stories Press.Google Scholar
Hwang, Sok-Yong. 1994. The Shadow of Arms. East Asia Program. Cornell University.Google Scholar
Jaivin, Linda. 2004. “A Scrap Heap Made of People.” Los Angeles Times, October 10, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/oct/10/books/bk-jaivin10.Google Scholar
Jin, Ha. 2004. War Trash. Vintage.Google Scholar
Jung, Keun-Sik. 2015. “China’s Memory and Commemoration of the Korean War in the Memorial Hall of the ‘War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.’” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, Vol. 4, No. 1: 1439.Google Scholar
Kim, Dong-Choon, 2010. “The Long Road Toward Truth and Reconciliation.” Critical Asian Studies, Vol 42, No. 4: 525–52.Google Scholar
Klein, Christina. 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kwon, Hoenik. 2010. The Other Cold War. Columbia University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Chang-rae. 2010. The Surrendered. Riverhead Hardcover.Google Scholar
Lee, Jin-kyung. 2009. “Surrogate Military, Subimperialism, and Masculinity: South Korea in the Vietnam War, 1965–73.” Positions, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Winter): 655–82.Google Scholar
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shih, Shu-mei, eds. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
McAllister, Melanie. 2001. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 2012. Home. Knopf.Google Scholar
Park, Chung-shin. 2003. Protestantism and Politics in Korea. Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. University of Washington Press,Google Scholar
Phillips, Jayne Anne. 2010. Lark and Termite (Vintage Contemporaries) [Paperback]. Vintage.Google Scholar
Ryu, Youngju. 2015, “Truth or Reconciliation? The Guest and the Massacre That Never Ends.” Positions, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Nov.): 633–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scarry, Elaine. 1992. “The Declaration of War: Constitutional and Unconstitutional Violence.” In Law’s Violence, ed. Sarat, Austin and Kearns, Thomas R. University of Michigan Press, 2376.Google Scholar
Slaughter, Joseph R. 2009. “Humanitarian Reading.” In Humanitarianism and Suffering, ed. Wilson, Richard Ashby and Brown, Richard D.. Cambridge University Press, 88107.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. Picador.Google Scholar
Thornber, Karen L. 2014. “Rethinking the World in World Literature.” In World Literature in Theory, ed. Damrosch, David. Wiley-Blackwell, 460–79.Google Scholar
Watson, Jini Kim. 2014. “A Not-yet-Postcolonial Peninsula: Rewriting Spaces of Violence, Division and Diaspora.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 1: 6987. doi:10.1017/pli.2013.10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×