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1. COLD WAR LOGICS, COLD WAR POETICS: Conjuring the Specter of a Red Asia
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I begin this chapter by returning us briefly to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, the novel with which I opened the introduction. Even as the Korean War emerges in this text as a problem of knowledge rather than a transparent object of knowledge that is given narrative form after the event, it is a persistent present or presence that informs and haunts the narrator’s subjectivity even though he was born many years after the war. Because the Korean War resulted in the division of the country into a U.S.-controlled South and communist North, in the U.S. neoimperial imaginary there are “good” Koreans and there are“bad”Koreans. In Native Speaker, Lee inserts an account of the pedagogical moment in which his narrator, Henry Park, experiences the lesson of what it means to be a good or bad Korean. This moment literally takes place in the classroom when Henry decides to do an oral report on the Korean War. Henry recalls, “I read my junior encyclopedia. . . . The entry didn’t mention any Koreans except for Syngman Rhee and Kim Il Sung, the Communist leader. Kim was a bad Korean. In the volume there was a picture of him wearing a Chinese jacket. He was fat-faced and maniacal. Bayonets were in the frame behind him. He looked like an evil robot.”1 Pressed to do a presentation that would be favorably received by his class, Henry decides to be a“good Korean”instead of the“bad Korean,”the“Mao lover’s Mao.”To save himself from certain embarrassment, Henry prepares a report that parrots Cold War rhetoric: “the threat of Communism, the Chinese Army, how MacArthur was a visionary, that Truman should have listened to him. How lucky all . . . Koreans were.”2 Given this prescriptive and indeed pre-scripted route that Henry ultimately takes, we might wonder why he chose to do a report on the Korean War in the first place. We learn that Henry’s report is 1 Cold War Logics, Cold War Poetics Conjuring the Specter of a Red Asia 37 38 Cold War Logics, Cold War Poetics not simply an attempt to fill a gap in his knowledge of geopolitics and history , but more deeply an effort to get to know his own family history. He is curious about the KoreanWar,precisely because his father“never talked about the war.”3 For Henry, the Korean War thus represents a paradoxically conjoined event. On the one hand, it remains a personal family history that refuses to be told, that exceeds signification. On the other hand, the Korean War becomes for Henry an entry in his junior encyclopedia and the moment of his pedagogical interpellation as a “good” Korean. Henry’s lack of knowledge , and the Manichaean Cold War rhetoric that stands in for knowledge, index the Korean War not as a congealed and transparent historical event that can be accessed and given facile narrative form (as a junior encyclopedia entry would suggest), but as a complex problem of knowledge. This problem of knowledge saturates not only American nationalist Korean War history and broader Cold War history, but Korean American subjectivity and the very conditions of possibility for the post–World War II formation of Korean America in the first place. Native Speaker thus provocatively demonstrates this chapter’s focus on tracking the rhetorical, affective, and discursive registers of the Cold War’s anticommunism. Specifically, I examine the ways in which narrative and rhetorical strategies, or what could be called“Cold War poetics,”are deployed to construct an exceptionalist U.S. national Bildung against a gendered racial conjuring and projection of Asia. This chapter thus sets the stage for and begins to demonstrate how the contemporary Asian American cultural productions I analyze in the chapters that follow respond in complex ways to a discursive and epistemological regime that precedes them and critically disarticulate a dialogue already in progress. What are the contours of this dialogue , and how does the critical intervention of Asian American cultural forms transform the very terms of this dialogue? My tracking occurs through a sustained reading of select classic Cold War government documents that have been canonized in the historical archive and that have contributed signi ficantly to the“invention”of a Manichaean reading practice that casts Cold War geopolitical relationships as a contest between alternative ways of life, between a universal American “good” and a gendered racial “Asiatic”“evil.” These documents are George F...