Unforgetting the Korean War: Cultural Representation and Memory, 1950-2017

FAIN: FT-269903-20

Jeehyun Lim
SUNY Research Foundation, University at Buffalo (Amherst, NY 14228-2577)

Writing of a chapter and related article for a book examining cultural representations of the Korean War.

The Korean War is commonly known as the “forgotten war.” Curiously, however, it was first named as such in a US News and World Report in 1951 when the war was still active. While the moniker has come to generally mean that there is scant cultural memory of the Korean War, memory is an ironic pathway to understanding the forgetting which first concurred with the unfolding of the events of war. My current book project, purposefully entitled “Unforgetting the Korean War,” comparatively examines representations of the Korean War in American literature and culture during the 1950s and the post-Cold War era to elucidate the cultural politics of memory on this war. It attempts to locate the cultural politics of the war in the very trope of forgetting by analyzing assemblies of Korean War representations—which are surprisingly numerous, varied, and noteworthy—at two high points of literary and cultural engagement with the war.