Description
Book SynopsisWarring Genealogies examines the elaboration of kinships between Chicano/a and Asian American cultural production, such as the 1954 proxy adoption of a Korean boy by Leavenworth prisoners. Joo Ok Kim considers white supremacist expressions of kinship—in prison magazines, memorials, U.S. military songbooks—as well as critiques of such expressions in Chicana/o and Korean diasporic works to conceptualize racialized formations of kinship emerging from the Korean War.
Warring Genealogies unpacks writings by Rolando Hinojosa (Korean Love Songs, The Useless Servants) and Luis Valdez (I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges, Zoot Suit) to show the counter-representations of the Korean War and the problematic depiction of the United States as a benevolent savior. Kim also analyzes Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student as a novel that proposes alternative temporalities to dominant Korean War narratives. In addition,
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“Warring Genealogies offers a sophisticated analysis that compellingly demonstrates the broader significance of the Korean War as a crucible for a variety of U.S. Cold War concerns in the post–World War II era. Crucially, Kim’s juxtaposition and brilliant analysis of unlikely archival materials and cultural texts make an original and exceedingly important contribution to our understandings of the links between the Korean War and U.S. racial, carceral, and settler colonial formations. This is a rigorous and impressive interdisciplinary cultural study.”—Jodi Kim, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Settler Garrison: Debt Imperialism, Militarism, and Transpacific Imaginaries
“In recent years, we have seen the emergence of a vital nexus of works in Asian American and American Studies on the topic of the Korean War. Warring Genealogies makes a vital contribution to this field. Kim organizes her study around the problematic of kinship in illuminating and original ways, synthesizing and inventively finding points of connection among a number of significant approaches. What is most compelling is the archive Kim constructs: Not only are many of the objects she takes up themselves fascinating—the adoption of Bok Nam Om by white prisoners at Leavenworth, the Korean War historiography of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—but they are also placed in startling juxtaposition with more easily accessible cultural works like published histories and novels. The prolific scope of the theoretical and historiographical studies that Kim draws on here provides readers with a comprehensive awareness of the relevance of such fields and persuasively demonstrates how kinship functions as a conceptual through line among them as well.”—Daniel Y. Kim, Professor of English and American Studies at Brown University, and author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War
"The Korean War should not be forgotten. Kim’s work proves that the study of it is relevant to anyone interested in understanding the complex histories and current dynamics of globalized white supremacy, even as it demonstrates just how foundational it is to interrogate, through the lens of US empire, what we think we know."—American Literary History
