Kodai
Abe

Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long
Korean WarO

n September 15, 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois contributed an article titled “The Winds of Time” to the Black newspaper Chicago Defender. “Now that the Second World War has ended,” he begins,“what have we Americans of Negro descent lost and gained?” In answering the question, he itemizes ﬁve “losses” and six “gains” as consequences of World War II from an African American perspective. A
month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this Black intellectual known for his enthusiastic support of imperial Japan laments“the defeat and humiliation of Japan,” that is, “the greatest colorednation which has risen to leadership in modern times.” For Du Bois,
World War II was not an American victor y but a defeat of people ofAmerican Literature, Volume 95, Number 4, December 2023
DOI 10.1215/00029831-10950766 © 2023 by Duke University Press

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Abstract American racial politics during the long Korean War formed what this essay terms
Afro-Asian antagonism, a racial hate between African Americans and Asians (and Asian Americans). When the Truman administration issued Executive Order 9981 and proclaimed its commitment to military racial integration in 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War,it seemed to signal a signiﬁcant step of racial progress. Black servicemen who enlisted in the“liberalized” military, however, were strategically deployed to represent American national violence, especially to the eyes of Asians who were internalizing antiblack racism imported fromthe United States through the military apparatus. In the face of decolonization and an upsurge
in civil rights movements, this article argues, the executive order molded Black Korean War veterans into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian connections while promoting racial liberalism to a
global audience. The Korean War inaugurated the American Cold War racial formation that
endures into the twenty-ﬁrst century. Contrasting two Korean War novels written by Asian
American and African American authors—Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012)—this article traces how Afro-Asian orphans and a Black veteran internalize
and challenge the Afro-Asian antagonisms of the long Korean War.
Keywords Afro-Asia, Executive Order 9981, Toni Morrison, Nora Okja Keller

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color that counted as a loss. He then draws a bigger picture in thegains portion: “We have been compelled to admit Asia into the pictureof future political and democratic power” to the extent that “the development of human beings in the future is going to depend largely upon
what happens in Asia.” Though the dream of Japan’s victor y overwhite violence collapsed, he prognosticates, the future of people ofcolor hinged on Asia as a whole. In fact, the early and mid–Cold War
era witnessed the height of Afro-Asian solidarity, an interracial andtransnational movement that fought American racial violence at home
and abroad— Du Bois himself formed a friendship with Mao Zedong;
Martin Luther King Jr. received inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi’snonviolence; and Black Nationalists were fascinated with Maoist
China and Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam. The Afro-Asia (Bandung) Conference was held in 1955, and Richard Wright’s report, The Color Curtain(1956), situated the American “Negro problem” in a global context.
American domestic racial violence was “so deeply entrenched in U.S.
society,” as Gerald Horne (2018: 11) maintains, that “it required external forces, global currents, to alter profoundly this tragic state ofaffairs.” As early as the 1940s, African American intellectuals formed
a consensus that American racism and militarism must be resisted via
Afro-Asian radicalism. Black civil rights movements have been bolstered by imaginary and concrete transpaciﬁc connections with Asian
comrades.
Three years after the Du Bois article and two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, President Harr y S. Truman (1948) issued
Executive Order 9981, proclaiming the administration’s commitment
to the “equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve inour countr y’s defense . . . without regard to race, color, religion or
national origin.” Truman’s action appeared to be a drastic improvement of what Du Bois (1945) had castigated in the Chicago Defender:“the tremendous disadvantage of a ‘jim-crow’ army and of segregationin army circles which will form and have formed a basis of similar segregation in civil life.” With militar y segregation as a “basis” for antiblack racism, its abolition signaled a signiﬁcant step of racial progress.
Indeed, Truman’s order sanctioning Black men’s “right to ﬁght” hasoften been characterized as a model for the desegregation policies in
the civil rights era that followed. But why did desegregation begin
with military institutions? The ﬁrst answer is that the Truman administration needed more bodies. Armed conﬂict was already imminent
on the Korean Peninsula, which had been divided and ruled by theUnited States and the Soviet Union since 1945. After the Department

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at the time amounted to 10 percent of the United States — the “freedom to serve” was a barter for a partial concession on civil rights.
Yet the military racial integration that began in Korea also usheredin another racial conﬂict. Because of racial “equality” in the armed
forces, every soldier came to be “equally” entitled to represent American national violence regardless of one’s skin color. As Brigadier General John Michaelis declared in 1951, “There’s no color line in a foxhole”1 — American warfare was rendered color-blind. Its use of force
was no longer a race war but a “police action” against the encroachment of illiberal ideology, a new threat after fascism. No sooner had
Black soldiers been enlisted in the “liberalized” militar y than they
became assimilated into the logic of the Cold War American warfare
state wreaking formally deracialized violence. After the armistice —not a peace treaty— in 1953, however, the ﬁgure of the Black soldier,having acquired global visibility, faced deferred and enduring effects
in Asia. In the devastated postwar landscape inhabited by American
militar y personnel, Koreans internalized American racism imported
and ingrained through the apparatus of permanent war, and theylearned to hate Black servicemen as representative perpetrators whobrought about the devastation. By pitting Black victimizers against
Asian victims, I argue, the long Korean War engendered a new racialhate, which I term Afro-Asian antagonism. Behind the escalation of
Afro-Asian movements, the racial animosity inaugurated in Korea prevented Black veterans from imagining solidarity with Asians and viceversa. Truman’s Executive Order 9981 molded Black veterans of the
Korean War into an instrument to abort Afro-Asian political links while,in the age of decolonization and civil rights movements, promoting
Cold War racial liberalism to a global audience. When the American
war machine was liberalized, its racist foundation manifested itself inthe form of the militarized Black body in the far-ﬂung Korean Peninsula. Interrogating how American ofﬁcial discourse enacted, propagated, and perpetuated Afro-Asian antagonism through warmaking
and lawmaking, I will historicize the Korean War as a key moment ofAmerica’s transnational race-making enterprise. American racialization and militarization became mutually constitutive and dialectically
productive after Korea.

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The Afro-Asian framework has attracted growing critical interest
over the past two decades, as seen in studies by Marc Gallicchio (2000),
Vijay Prashad (2001), Yuichiro Onishi (2013), and Gerald Horne (2018)
and in several anthologies such as AfroAsian Encounters (2006) edited
by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen and Afro Asia (2018)edited by Fred Ho and Bill V. Mullen. As signaled by the words
included in these titles, such as “connections,” “solidarities,” and“encounters,” a major portion of Afro-Asia studies has sought to articulate, excavate, and imagine the interracial links between two groups ofpeople of color. In contrast to these studies, Claire Jean Kim (2000) andJulia H. Lee (2011) shed light on the “negative” side of Afro-Asian relationalities. Historicizing the longstanding Black-Korean conﬂict inAmerican society, they demonstrate how the conﬂict has been structurally instigated by white racial dominance. Building on and bridging
both strands of Afro-Asian studies, I turn to ﬁctional narratives as a terrain where the “positive” and “negative” sides coincide and converge.
Literature is ﬁt for illustrating subjects who, though not willingly, areimbued with racist ideology and unable to actualize or even imagine
the need for interracial solidarities. Since Afro-Asian antagonism wasstrategically (and successfully) implemented through “ordinary” people and their everyday lives, we must closely examine how those AfroAsian subjects were conditioned to internalize that ideology and how
they might have challenged it. Afro-Asian stories demand us to ask:
when African American and Asian subjects who ﬁnd themselves having
already subscribed to Afro-Asian antagonism encounter an idea of AfroAsian connection from which they feel alienated, how would it be possible for them to retrieve the affective motivation to move toward solidarity? It is through examining this kind of nonintellectual, nonpolitical,
and nonliberal subject’s conversion —or the failure thereof— that we
can cast a new light on an unexpectedly radical possibility for AfroAsian solidarity. By bringing racist characters into the conversation
about race making, literature reminds us how “unenlightened” people
are as political and politicized as liberal intellectuals who commit themselves to political activism.2 Afro-Asian Korean War stories empower us
to study racial antagonism and friendship not as mutually exclusive but
as historically co-constitutive.
In this context, Afro-Asian antagonism and friendship captured in(long) Korean War narratives by Asian, Asian American, and African
American authors emerge within a collective struggle to envision
other Afro-Asian channels for uniﬁcation after internalizing racial andracist animosities. To chronicle how Afro-Asian antagonism was made

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Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

Black activists increasingly called for militar y desegregation before
World War II. The movement is best known by the Double V campaign, a struggle against fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home thatemerged as a counter to the Selective Training and Service Act of1940.3 At that time, the state’s use of force was already understood as
undergirded by its strategic representation of race to both domestic
and global audiences. As Kimberley L. Phillips (2012: 20–22) demonstrates, the Department of War and the Ofﬁce of War Information collaboratively sought to underrepresent the militar y contributions of“Negro soldiers” during the war. The whiteness of American militaryactivity was inviolable because state ofﬁcials presumed the Second
World War to be “good” and “just”; it was the white soldiers who bravely
fought evil abroad in a mission to protect the liberal world. In the wakeof World War II, however, not only did Black activists’ movements targeting militar y racial policies gain momentum but also the Truman
administration experienced a shortage of soldiers and was forced toreconsider the so-called Negro Policy. For Black activists, the postwar
situation constituted “an unprecedented opportunity to end segregation not just in the armed services but in the entire society as well”(Phillips 2012: 67). The next military conﬂict in East Asia was alreadyon the horizon — Korea seemed to offer an “unprecedented opportunity” for African Americans.
The problems of American militarism and racism were not conﬁned
to domestic racial politics. In the decolonizing world after World War

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during and after the Korean War, I begin by sketching the post–WorldWar II historical background against which civil rights movements, due
to the Truman administration’s manipulation of the Korean War as aneffective race-making machine, emerged as a politics against not only
racism but also militarism. Second, considering American national discourse and cultural representations that strategically reframed theimplications of race and color during the Cold War, I illustrate how
Afro-Asian antagonism was established against the background of supposedly benevolent whiteness. Finally, I turn to two Korean War novels,
Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl (2002) and Toni Morrison’s Home (2012),
as critical interventions to the Cold War militarization and racialization.
Capturing the lived experience of Korean orphans and a Black serviceman, respectively, both stories, when read together, illuminate how thecharacters struggle to reclaim Afro-Asian solidarity after Korea.

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II, racial segregation in American military facilities, as a kind of representative of American power abroad, was beginning to be viewed ascorrelated to its domestic racial violence. It was within this transnational racial-political situation that Truman’s Executive Order 9981
was announced. The president ﬁrst convened the Gillem Board in1945, which would circulate the “Utilization of Negro Manpower in
the Postwar Army Policy” the following year, and the Fahy Committee
supervised the implementation of the Executive Order issued in 1948
and released its report, Freedom to Serve, immediately before the outbreak of the Korean War. It appeared that the government was, nomatter how reluctantly, beginning to remedy its racist policies. The
Chicago Defender (1948) did not fail to herald Truman’s decision witha looming headline, celebrating it as a “dramatic and historic move.”
The post–World War II and pre–Korean War era also represented an“unprecedented opportunity” for the Truman administration to advertise the dramatic inauguration of American Cold War racial liberalism,
and the Executive Order enjoyed an enthusiastic welcome (Phillips
2012: 117–21). In the early Cold War climate, the Korean War offereda fulcrum for state policymakers to bring African American protests
and international criticism under control.
The idea that the Korean War had a liberalizing effect was widely
promoted through the cultural representation of East Asian yellowness. As literary and cultural critics such as Josephine Nock-Hee Park(2016), Christina Klein (2003), Daniel Y. Kim (2020), and Sunny Xiang(2020) have demonstrated, “the racial ambiguity between Oriental
enemies and Asian friends” (Xiang 2020: 6) was foregrounded in the
postwar period. This representational negotiation ﬁnds its best expression in the American depiction of Asians, which shifted from the “yellow peril” framework to a more friendly kind of stereotype.4 Some early
Hollywood Korean War ﬁlms, such as One Minute to Zero (1952) andBattle Hymn (1957), Daniel Y. Kim (2020: 9) argues, helped “justify theAmerican intervention in Korea on humanitarian grounds, highlighting
the role that US servicemen played as protectors and saviors of Korean
war orphans.” By telling a racialized story in which white American soldiers rescue Asian victims from the violence that they, Americans, had
created in the ﬁrst place, these stories cast the Korean War as an altruistic mission carried out by an arbiter of liberal humanitarianism.5 It
was not so much the reality of the Korean War as the narrativization
thereof that disseminated the idea that Cold War America was securing
a racially harmonious world order that needed defending from illiberal ideologies. This is why war ﬁction becomes a critical terrain forAfro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

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advancing counternarratives to imagine otherwise—the stories of thelong Korean War reveal racist and militarist foundations undergirdingthese strategic demarcations of color lines between white, black, andyellow. How, then, were Koreans and African Americans led to hateeach other through the war —how did the American Cold War racialization materialize through and as militarization?
Korea was the ﬁrst to encounter racially integrated American military power, which left an indelible impact on its citizens’ perceptionsof race. During and after the conﬂict, Koreans were initiated into
American racism that was militarized from the very beginning. Throughinterviews she conducted with South Koreans, Nadia Y. Kim (2008:
91–95) documents how they perceived American militar y personnel
while under US occupation. Whereas whiteness had been introduced
through positive ﬁgures like cultural celebrities, Koreans’ “exposure
to Blacks was largely limited to soldiers and unsavory mass media stereotypes.” As one interviewee, a Korean immigrant in the UnitedStates, attests, “When I ﬁrst saw Black people was when they came to
Korea as militar y personnel. Because their looks were dark, theirappearance looked bad to me.” In bars and clubs around US bases andcamptowns, violent incidents involving African Americans in uniform
were constantly witnessed (Moon 1997: 70–71), which helped solidify
the stereotype of “black violence” against Asians, as is still tangible
today.6 Though American global warfare was formally deracialized,
the uneven distribution of US-generated violence between Black andwhite was vividly registered by Koreans. It was dark-skinned soldiers,
in Koreans’ eyes, who perpetuated American violence in their devastated homeland. When the Truman administration began to “utilize
negro manpower,” it did so by exporting militarized blackness to be
fully represented abroad. Despite white Americans’ anti-racist endeavors, goes their racist argument, uneducated, low-class Black soldiers
would not behave in Asia. In this way, the long Korean War’s racial
strategy formed Afro-Asian antagonism.
African American soldiers also came to deeply distrust their Asian“allies.” According to Michael Cullen Green (2010: 113), “American
servicemen moving up the peninsula encountered streams of South
Korean troops headed in the opposite direction,” resulting in “an abiding bitterness among ofﬁcers and enlisted men who believed they
were ﬁghting and dying for a people too cowardly — or too disloyal —to do the same.” Unable to imagine how Koreans perceived the USled coalition’s activity, American military personnel harbored and displayed growing distrust against Korean “friends” who were no longer

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willing to extend the war. The effect of this distrust on African American soldiers was twofold: “black military service in Korea,” Green continues, “encouraged African Americans to hold racialized attitudes
toward Asian peoples, while increasing their support both for the war
and for their nation’s growing military empire in Asia” (110). Warfare
had long been a site where African Americans could demand equality,
and Korea represented an unprecedented opportunity in the ﬁght
against racism. When their call seemed to be answered by Truman,
however, this meant at once disidentiﬁcation from East Asians and,more important, identiﬁcation with American militarism. “By the endof the war,” Green concludes, “most black soldiers had come to identify with American military power in Korea and to eschew a racebased interpretation of U.S. policy in the region” (133). Pushing further, I would contend that it was through the “experimental war” inKorea that the American Cold War racial tactics were established, andthe making of Afro-Asian antagonism was at the tactics’ core.
The mutual hostility between African Americans and Koreans has
led them to misrepresent and underrepresent each other, which is why
the study of Afro-Asian antagonism demands a comparative approach.
While other Afro-Asian Korean War stories such as Susan Choi’s The
Foreign Student (1998), Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999), and Kim
Ki-duk’s ﬁlm Address Unknown (2001) all portray some consequencesof Afro-Asian antagonism, I examine Keller’s Fox Girl and Morrison’sHome not only because these texts focus on racist perceptions harbored by Korean and Black subjects but also because bringing them
together throws into relief the elisions and deformations in Afro-Asian
texts. Keller’s and Morrison’s novels do intervene in Afro-Asian problematics through the eyes of Afro-Asian orphans and a Black vet,respectively, but the intervention is not brought about in an explicit
manner; rather, the novels directly embody and testify to how Koreansand African Americans were conditioned to internalize Afro-Asian
antagonisms. For Keller’s Korean protagonist, Black servicemen are
essentially ugly and violent creatures; for Morrison’s Black vet, Koreans are no more than apparitional and fragmented ﬁgures that he fantasizes he has saved. Examining how African Americans and Koreansrepresented each other in early twentieth-century literature, Julia H.
Lee (2011: 6) demonstrates how both Black people and Korean people“require the other’s presence in order to articulate themselves as
national and racialized subjects.” Keller’s and Morrison’s novels capture the ways in which characters construct their subjectivities throughracist antagonisms toward each other. Regulated by the structure of

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Afro-Asian Orphans in Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl

Keller’s Fox Girl vividly illustrates the wretched postwar lives of
Korean sex workers from the perspective of Afro-Asian children, who
are invariably doomed to replicate their parents’ livelihoods. In Chollak, a satellite camptown for the Kunsan Air Base on the Western
coast of South Korea,7 “the GIs divided the streets into white section
and black section,” as narrated by the protagonist Hyun Jin, where
Koreans are accustomed to the pejorative terms of “pale miguks anddark gomshis” (Keller 2002b: 5) for white and Black servicemen. Hyun
Jin occupies a liminal racial positionality compared to the other main
characters, Sookie and Lobetto, two American Koreans born withdark skin, signaling their African American blood. Though Hyun Jin’s
parents are both “pure” Koreans (this later turns out to be uncertain),she has a conspicuous birthmark on her face, the “stained side” in her
own words, for which she and Sookie are bullied: “Your father must
be a U.S. darkie!” (4). The central focus of the novel is how the residual military segregation maintained in American camptowns damages
and divides postwar Korean lives, irrevocably racializing, sexualizing,and hierarchizing American-Korean relations. When asked in an interview why she focused on “black GIs,” Keller (2002a: 5) refers to her
intention to represent “GI girls” specializing in Black customers intheir position “at the lowest rung of America Town’s social hierarchy”
and, even lower, their Afro-Asian children, who are “invisible, considered neither Korean nor American.” Fox Girl is an effort to cast a lighton these young pariahs by locating them amid the American racemaking in Asia during the early Cold War era. As a result of the perpetuation of American warfare materially embodied and consolidated
by the militar y base, antiblack racism was deeply engrained in the
Korean psyche, cultivating the Afro-Asian antagonism that would manifest not only between African Americans and Koreans but also among
racialized Koreans. By capturing the transpaciﬁc migratory movementof Afro-Asian subjects, Fox Girl addresses the possibility and difﬁcultyof achieving Afro-Asian solidarity after the war.

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the long Korean War, they fail to extricate themselves from mutual animosities; neither story fully articulates what should be done in order tosublimate Afro-Asian antagonism into a basis for interracial solidarity.
When brought together, however, the two complementary “failures”
resonate with each other, and their Afro-Asian antagonisms reveal
their new critical potential.

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Not only were most Koreans unfamiliar with racial others, they,
with their caste system and deep-rooted Confucian authoritarianism,
were also historically imbued with the gloriﬁcation of “pure blood”(Kim 2008: 83–87). This nationalist ideology is best expressed in thenovel by Hyun Jin’s mother who, repeatedly asserting “Blood will
always tell” (Keller 2002a: 51), prohibits her daughter from playing
with “tweggi” (children of mixed breed). While Prashad (2001: 36)
argues that we must remember the “polycultural” constitution of ourcultures and identities, as opposed to the myth of racial purity thatwhite supremacism promotes, this binar y proves inadequate when
considering the process of racial formation in Korea during the Cold
War. Korean people had long upheld their version of ethnonationalist
supremacism that was exacerbated by the transplantation of American
racism. “When the Americans ﬁrst ventured off the base and into ourneighborhoods,” Hyun Jin reminisces, “we thought that they —with
their high noses, round eyes, and skin either too white or too dark—
were ugly. . . . Slowly, though, we began to view their features as desirable, developing a taste for larger noses, double lids, and cow eyes”(Keller 2002a: 14). Of course, what they come to desire are white features; in turn, they learn that it is only “too dark” skin that looks “ugly.”
When Hyun Jin and Sookie encounter Chazu, an African American
customer-boyfriend of Sookie’s mother, their unreserved reaction
speaks to the complete internalization of this racism; in their eyes,
this “black dog” looks and talks “like a trained monkey saying a very
polite ‘How do you do?’ before it bites” (12). When American racism
was grafted onto Korean society, it remolded and expanded traditional Korean class consciousness, ranging from whites at the top to
the tweggi at—or even below—the bottom.
It is noteworthy that the girls perceive Chazu as about to “bite”
them. Throughout the novel, it is almost always Black ofﬁcers who
engage in acts of violence. After a skirmish between Sookie andChazu at the all-Black bar Club Foxa, Chazu chases Sookie. Hyun Jin
secretly follows Chazu because she is “afraid he [is] going to kill her.”
Her anxiety stems from the murder of another Korean sex worker by
a Black soldier just two months prior because, according to Lobetto,
the girl asked him to marr y her and take her to the United States.
Even though her corpse was found “with an umbrella wedged into hervagina,” the Militar y Police “ruled her death a suicide” (138). This
incidence calls for an understanding of the “Black violence” discourse
as sponsored and sanctioned by the structure of American Cold War
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violence in this novel is not merely a matter of the author’s preference; the ratio of African American soldiers in Asia was disproportionately high because American “policymakers’ desire to keep them outof postwar Europe channeled black soldiers to Japan” (Green 2010:109), where most were then relocated to Korea. At one point, a character offers a seemingly derogator y but in fact historically accurate
observation: “How could America have so many gomshis? I thought
they sent them all here” (Keller 2002a: 97). Within the global structure of the American warfare state, the risk of Black violence was strategically relegated to Asia, which gave rise to the impression that
Black soldiers are committing violence in Asia.
The sexually symbolic manner of killing — an umbrella in thevagina — is a typical iteration of Japanese wartime atrocities throughout Asia and the Paciﬁc, an implication that the author of the novel
Comfort Woman (1997), Keller’s ﬁrst, would never miss.8 Recent transpaciﬁc scholars, including Naoki Sakai, Lisa Yoneyama (2016), andLaura Hyun Yi Kang (2020), have demonstrated that the American
Cold War strategy in Asia must be considered with postwar Japan-UStranspaciﬁc interimperiality in mind. As Sakai observes (Sakai andYoo 2012: 1, 7–8), “the United States inherited Japan’s Greater East
Asian Co-Prosperity sphere, and East Asia was re-organized in thetransition from one imperial nationalism to another,” thereby allowing
Japan to “maintain its neo-imperial positioning in relation to its Asianneighbors despite the loss of its empire.” Soon enough, the Korean
War inaugurated and consolidated this mechanism; thanks to thisenterprise, postwar Japan experienced the so-called Korean War boom,
an economic upsurge that would be repeated between Korea and Vietnam, engendering yet another intra-Asian antagonism. The perpetuation of war is a pivotal instrument of transpaciﬁc interimperialism. As
David Vine (2020: 3, 195) argues, “the construction of bases abroad
has actually made aggressive, offensive war more likely” throughout American histor y, and Korea represents a remarkable upturn:“After a period of signiﬁcant base closures during post–World War II
demobilization, the Korean War led to a 40 percent increase in thenumber of overseas bases.” By creating war-struck wastelands andbuilding military bases over them, the American warfare state expanded
its power by continuing to produce extraterritorial domains in which
impoverished and exhausted nations need white protection. Elucidating the continuum between two imperial powers, Fox Girl situates
Korea at the cusp of an interimperial transition from Japan to theUnited States.

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Keller adds Afro-Asian problematics into this perspective of interimperial critique, further complicating the transpaciﬁc racial cartography in East Asia. This entanglement manifests when the novel reveals
the secret of Hyun Jin’s birth. In 1945, Hyun Jin’s father and Sookie’s
mother, Duk Hee, managed to return to their hometown of Paekdu on
the North Korean mountain along the Chinese border—Manchuria, atheretofore Japanese colony and a “distant gestation” of the Korean
War (Cumings 2010: xv–xvi) — only to ﬁnd it completely ruined.
They decide to head south together and arrive at Chollak, where
there is no way for Duk Hee to make a living other than sex work.
Hyun Jin’s father gets married and the couple struggles to have a child.
Eventually, despite the wife’s protestations, the three of them make abargain: in exchange for money, Duk Hee gives birth to the couple’schild as a surrogate mother. This means two things for Hyun Jin:
she and Sookie are half-sisters and, crucially, her biological father is
uncertain owing to the nature of Duk Hee’s profession. As Duk Hee’sclients are exclusively Black GIs, Hyun Jin, who has been proud ofher “pure” Korean blood, might be half-Black, an ambiguity to which
her “ugly” birthmark now loudly attests. When Hyun Jin learns of her
secret past via Sookie and Duk Hee, her father, to our surprise, coldly
expels his daughter from their home, which compels her to become asex worker just as her biological mother and sister had to do —“Blood
will always tell.” Though the reader is not informed of the details, thisunexpected move might suggest that Hyun Jin’s father has less power
than his wife, perhaps because he was taken in by a local, well-to-dofamily running a store. Fox Girl thus aligns Korean nationalism, Japanese colonialism, and American militar y racism through the convoluted historical background of its “Afro-Asian” protagonist.
Hyun Jin’s racial ambiguity is a literar y expression of the newmechanism of American racialization that emerged after World War II.
While American war making and race making have been concomitantsince colonial settlements (Singh 2017: xi–xii, 182), their primar ymechanism underwent a signiﬁcant shift in the postwar era when it
was liberalized and deracialized on the surface. “As white supremacy
gradually became residual after World War II,” Jodi Melamed (2011: 1,
3) writes, “it was replaced by a formally antiracist, liberal-capitalist
modernity” — racial liberalism — and it “extended racialization procedures beyond color lines.” The replacement signaled the end of “colorline racialization”: as “racialized privilege and stigma need not reference phenotype,” Melamed continues, “traditionally recognized
racial identities — Black, Asian, white, Arab — occupy both sides ofthe privilege/stigma divide” (13). Racial identities are no longer onlyAfro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

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determined by one’s biological data; the lines of racialization are
drawn and redrawn on an ad hoc basis, and warfare has always provided the reasons thereof. Hyun Jin embodies this new mechanism ofrace making by crossing the “privilege/stigma divide.” At the beginning of the stor y, this “pure” Korean appears to be the most privileged girl in the neighborhood, assigned the position of “class leader”
as the smartest student, the daughter of store-managing parents, andproviding Sookie with food when necessar y. Her stable foothold isshattered when her biological father’s identity is questioned, yet it is
not necessarily that she has proven to be a tweggi; rather, she has
always occupied a precarious position, and what is divulged here isthe ver y precarity itself, an arbitrar y and ﬂexible characteristic of
American racialization. She becomes racialized regardless of her (im)purity. When schoolboys, including Lobetto, tease her, they call her“Hyung” Jin, adding a g to her original name meaning “wise truth,”thereby rendering it “scarred truth” (Keller 2002a: 4). For a girl steepedin Korean nationalism, what is exposed is indeed her “scarred truth.”Hyun Jin’s racial instability also troubles the Black-white color linethat is supposed to be rigidly drawn within the American militar ybase. Having disclosed her “scarred truth,” she is forced to degrade
herself by turning to sex work; her body is simultaneously racialized
and sexualized. In the pitiful scene of her ﬁrst job, which the novel
calls “honeymooning,” we catch a glimpse of a crucial moment thattends to elude representation in the shadow of Black GIs: white violence. Lobetto, a professional pimp, takes Hyun Jin to an area, “trespassing, crossing over to the white sections of America Town” (150)
where he expects to make a better deal than in the all-Black sections.
There, Hyun Jin is raped by three white soldiers who take “turns at
the stations of her body” (153), a clear implication that the war continues even after the armistice in forms other than military combat — inthis case in a sexualized form, as is repeatedly emphasized throughout the novel (22, 29, 195). When Hyun Jin discovers that she is pregnant after her ﬁrst “honeymoon,” she is tricked into aborting the baby
despite her ﬁrm resolution to give birth to it. In this world, she is only
permitted to cross the Afro-Asian color line, not the white-yellow one.
True, American postwar racialization has incessantly created newraces. In considering American Cold War race makings, however, wemust ask which races have been created, which subjects can cross the
newly drawn divisions, and which types of subordination and antagonism are produced. At the juncture of sexualization and racialization,
Hyun Jin bears witness to the fact that racial stigma and hatred are
strategically and unevenly distributed among people of color.

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Thematizing immigration and the Korean diaspora, Fox Girl offers
a transnational, transpaciﬁc perspective from which to discern the
global continuum of American militarized violence.9 After his African
American father returned to the United States, Lobetto dreamed ofbeing brought there. A cherished letter from his father reads, “I’mthinking of you. I haven’t forgotten you. I been working hard to bring
you to America, but the man is tr ying to keep us down” (97). The letter alludes to an address delivered by “Dr. King” (95) in Washington,
DC, and was written after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have aDream” speech, though Lobetto would have been unaware of this background. At that time, American immigration policy was gradually shifting toward a more inclusionary stance on Asians, as epitomized by the1952 McCarran Walter Act and, more decisively, the 1965 Immigration
and Nationality Act that did away with immigration quotas based onnationality. However, “whether that determination is expressed throughimmigration ‘exclusion’ or ‘inclusion,’” as Lisa Lowe (1996: 10) opines,“the U.S. nation-state attempts to ‘produce’ and regulate the Asians asa means of ‘resolving’ economic exigencies.” Here, American racial
discourse is intertwined with capitalist logic; there would be little
chance for an orphaned pimp to be deemed contributive by a gatekeeper of American national borders. Whether or not Lobetto’s father
is telling his son the truth, this Afro-Asian family is not allowed toreunite due to US-led global militarism and capitalism; the Koreanson is doomed to be forgotten by his father, a Black Korean War vet.
Immigration policy, a legal instrument for implementing racialization, operates as a divisive apparatus that enforces obliviousness,structurally hindering potential Afro-Asian encounters throughout
the transpaciﬁc.
Yet national borders are essentially porous. Later in the novel, awoman called Mrs. Yoon appears at Club Foxa, announcing that she is“looking for girls to work . . . in Hawai‘i” (Keller 2002a: 210), and Hyun
Jin and Sookie leap at the opportunity. Hawaii, an archipelago charged
with transpaciﬁc and interimperial history par excellence, is “in America now” (212) having acquired its statehood in 1959. “No slaves in
America,” promises Mrs. Yoon. To work in Hawaii, Hyun Jin and Sookie
have to forge their identity as visitors following Mrs. Yoon’s directions,and the migration, to their surprise (especially for Lobetto), turns out
to be almost anticlimactically easy. Sex work does offer a way out of
their miserable life in Korea, provided that it serves the capitalist logic
described by Lowe. Whether inclusionary or exclusionary, legal or illegal, the scrutiny of “The Immigration Man” (229) is permeable withthe aid of an agent versed in the rules of American capitalism. The

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girls’ sexualized bodies are a lucrative commodity whose passage istacitly approved by the transpaciﬁc capitalist network. It is no wonder
then that, in Hawaii, Hyun Jin immediately recognizes that “three thousand miles away from Korea,” she is “still trapped in America Town”(269). At Hawai‘i Foxa, a branch of Korea’s Club Foxa, they are
expected to do the same “honeymoons.” While this signals the transpaciﬁc continuity of American militarist violence, the customers in
Hawaii are multiracial (including Asians) and are not in uniform; they
indeed look “liberalized.” Hyun Jin and Sookie’s migration reveals
that the transpaciﬁc expansion of American capitalism entangled withmilitarism, racism, and sexism can be sustained in a color-blind andmulticultural form. It integrates any racial subjects into its mechanics
on a global scale regardless of the “privilege/stigma divide,” thus supporting the liberalist pretext that material inequality can no longer be
attributed to racism.
The novel recounts three versions of the fox girl story, folklore thatpermeates the East Asian cultural sphere, in which a fox can freelytransform into other beings, typically a beautiful woman who seduces
and eats boys. The ﬁrst two versions are contrasted while Duk Hee islecturing the girls on how to apply face makeup to trick Americans, “adisguise” to “move through” (25) a world brimming with violence. In
the version Hyun Jin heard from her father, fox girls are “evil creatures” that devour innocent boys. For Duk Hee and her daughter, on
the other hand, the fox girl is “only tr ying to regain what those boys
stole from her.” Whereas Hyun Jin simply abhors the abstract idea of
violence and sympathizes with “victims,” Duk Hee, a ﬁrst-generation
victim of and witness to two consecutive wars, alerts her daughters to
the historical context of the act of violence. “I suppose it depends
on who tells the stor y” (26)— she warns her daughters not to be
deceived by the hegemonic discourse of victimology, that is, who is a
victim and who is a victimizer. However, the third version, told by thegrown-up Sookie, furthers Duk Hee’s relativizing interpretation andradically refutes the justiﬁcation of violence. When asked if she feels
sorry for the hungry fox, Hyun Jin acknowledges her conditional sympathy. To this observation, the elder sister responds, shaking herhead, “The people still get eaten. . . . I’m changing the ending before I
get eaten” (278; emphasis added). Sookie’s suggestion is remarkable in proposing to rewrite the narrative, rather than just relativizing a victimology that perpetuates an endless spiral of violence andrevenge. Though this criticism is not fully developed in the novel, it
does gesture toward a way of overcoming antagonisms in the act ofquestioning.

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Afro-Asian Victimology in Toni Morrison’s Home

Morrison’s Home critically captures Afro-Asian antagonism after the
Korean War through Frank Money, a Black veteran in the UnitedStates. His trajector y between the integrated combat zone in Korea
and the still overtly segregated United States in the 1950s — a trajectory similar to that of Hyun Jin — also reveals the transnational continuity of American racial violence across the Paciﬁc. “An integrated
army is integrated miser y,” one character warns Frank, “You all go
ﬁght, come back, they treat you like dogs” (Morrison 2012: 18). Pointing out the “transcontinental reach of the colonial-imperial apparatus”
inaugurated in Korea, Donald E. Pease (2019: 164, 160) argues thatthe two places depicted in Morrison’s novel — Lotus, Georgia, andChosin, Korea — are “more or less interchangeable locales” to theextent that “the reader encounters profound similarities between
Korean War refugees and the black Korean War veteran Frank Money.”
From this transnational American studies perspective, one may articulate a possible critical ground shared by Koreans and African Americans, an Afro-Asian solidarity that emerges from the recognition ofshared victimhood under the structure of transnational American

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Sookie’s somewhat mysterious remarks on the revision of a ﬁctional narrative remind the reader of the fact that Fox Girl is narrated
by Hyun Jin, who is now looking after Sookie’s daughter in Hawaii.
This metaﬁctional framework that bookends the whole story bridges
the gap between ﬁction and reality by posing the question: what doesit mean to “change the ending” when it comes to the Korean War? At
the beginning of the novel, Hyun Jin characterizes Sookie as her “oldest friend and truest enemy” (1), and we read the stor y seeking tounderstand what she means. Her ambivalence turns out to be rooted
in Afro-Asian antagonism that she had internalized during her childhood in Korea. Hyun Jin still dreams of Sookie almost nightly — “I
would like to see Sookie again,” she writes, “so that I can reconcile
her in my memory and banish her from my dreams” (2). Keller’s 2002
novel is a testimony to the endurance of the Afro-Asian antagonism of
the unending Korean War. It is difﬁcult for Hyun Jin to imagine theend of violence because it is difﬁcult to imagine the end of the Korean
War; Sookie remains inscrutable because she dares to envision theend of it. By contrasting two differentiated Afro-Asian orphans, Keller’s story renders the unending antagonism a reminder of the Forgotten War that never ends.

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racial violence, which in itself is undoubtedly signiﬁcant. Yet Home
also gestures toward the ver y mechanism that aborts this solidarity,that is, Afro-Asian antagonism of the long Korean War. The novel
identiﬁes Frank’s sense of guilt stemming from his own violent acts in
Korea as a psychosocial basis to morally and affectively discourage
him from imagining transnational, interracial kinship. As a veteran of
an unjust, integrated war, he is an agent of American national violenceagainst Korea — rather than a possible ally of color against white
America’s violence. Morrison’s novel, a correlative of Keller’s Fox
Girl, addresses Afro-Asian antagonism stemming from the bifurcatedperception of the Black perpetrator and the yellow victim, a rigid,
dividing framework, which I term an Afro-Asian victimology, thatwould endure long after the 1953 armistice.
Dubbed the Forgotten War, the Korean War has attracted considerable attention from memory studies scholars over the past decade. In
her inﬂuential study, Jodi Kim (2010: 5) characterizes her Asian American critique as an “unsettling hermeneutic” that “unsettles and disrupts the dominant Manichaean lens through which the Cold War ismade sense of and in turn generates meaning.” When applied to the
Korean War, this critical methodology demonstrates that “every willful forgetting leaves its symptoms and traces, and to label an event a‘Forgotten War’ paradoxically inaugurates an attempt to retrieve thatwhich has been forgotten” (145). Referring to Kim, in contrast, Joseph
Darda (2015: 86) critiques “the ver y rubric of remembering/forgetting” that pervades cultural memory studies because we need to understand the war “not as forgotten but as strategically remembered in
American culture.” In short, American national discourse either willfully forgets (Kim) or remembers to forget (Darda) the Korean War.
The conﬂict between these two approaches, I argue, is overcome in
Morrison’s novel, whose narrative uncovers multiple mnemonic layers sedimented at the bottom of a traumatized Black veteran’s psyche.
The complexity of his multilayered memory is a product of Cold War
America’s racial strategy, which results in him willingly renouncing
his power to imagine Afro-Asian solidarity. I examine the dynamismof memory and oblivion captured in the novel with recourse to the following three frameworks: Asian American memor y studies, trauma
studies, and Afro-Asian antagonism of the long Korean War.
At the beginning of the stor y, having returned from Korea a year
before, Frank is not in his hometown in Georgia but lingering on the
Paciﬁc Rim in Seattle, where he is detained in a psychiatric ward, “thenuthouse” (Morrison 2012: 11), sedated by morphine. To trick nurses

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into skipping his injections and gain the chance to escape conﬁnement, he imitates a state of coma by concentrating on something thatwould stir “no feelings” and conjure “no memor y — sweet or shameful” (8–9). This incarceration of a traumatized vet who carries thememory of a desegregated military experience and its violence against
Asians represents American domestic violence, which enforces oblivion. A man who helps with Frank’s “illegal” journey from Seattle toAtlanta, a kind of inverted, mid-twentieth-century version of the Underground Railroad, refers to the ambiguous and arbitrary legal groundfor Frank’s detention as follows: “Interesting law, vagrancy, meaning
standing outside or walking without clear purpose anywhere” (9). The
peripatetic movement of Frank’s body is restricted within the statecontrolled medical facility so that memories of Korea viewed from an
African American perspective will not be disseminated within the midcentury United States. This ﬁrst layer conforms to the formulation of
Asian American memory studies that Kim exempliﬁes, or what Darda
calls the “rubric of remembering/forgetting”: the Korean War was“forgotten” by the Cold War security state’s politico-racial legislation,
while the Black vet harbors the potential criticality of secretly remembering it.
Second, as we later learn, Frank has his own reasons for not remembering the war. He laments that he was unable to keep his “homeboys,” his old friends Mike and Stuff, from dying in Korea and feelsthat he is “far too alive to stand before Mike’s folks or Stuff’s” (15).
This instance of survivor’s guilt conforms to what Katherine Kinney(2000: 4) terms “friendly ﬁre.” Though her account focuses on Vietnam War stories, such as Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Tim
O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978), the phenomenon “is not uniqueto Vietnam.” She observes, “the idea that we” —Americans —“fought
ourselves, literalized in the repetitious image of Americans killing
Americans, is . . . virtually the only stor y that has been told by Americans about the Vietnam War.” By erasing the existence of Asian
enemies — or real victims — from their representational ﬁeld, thesestories characterize American soldiers as “victims of their own ideals, practices, and beliefs.” This narrative strategy, complicit with
American exceptionalism, an ideology inseparable from the belief ofAmerican innocence, is shared by Frank. In explicating his reluctance to return to Georgia, he further recounts that his own “easybreath and unscathed self would be an insult to them. And whatever lie
he cooked up about how bravely they died, he could not blame theirresentment” (Morrison 2012: 15). During this account, he almost
morally elevates himself; his “guilt” is exclusively explained by his

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I have to say something to you right now. I have to tell the whole truth.
I lied to you and I lied to me. I hid it from you because I hid it from me.
I felt so proud grieving over my dead friends. . . . My mourning was so
thick it completely covered my shame. . . .
I shot the Korean girl in her face. . . .
I am the one she aroused. . . .
How could I let her live after she took me down to a place I didn’t know
was in me?
How could I like myself, even be myself if I surrendered to that place
where I unzip my ﬂy and let her taste me right then and there? . . .
You can keep on writing, but I think you ought to know what’s true.
(133–34)
This confession is an inverted depiction of the Korean recognition ofBlack violence. After Korea, the innermost secret that dismantles
Frank’s identity is the memor y of his own “shameful” perpetration.
Though he became a perpetrator in Korea, “a place” he unexpectedly
ﬁnds within himself — a place that transformed him into a rapist, murderer, and liar — is also the American homeland. He “remembers”
that he, as an American soldier, has endorsed and wielded American
national violence. When African Americans succeed in becoming
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failure as a soldier, attributable to his lack of militar y competence,
including braver y or masculinity. No one would blame him, though;he is one of the victims who was destined to survive, suffering fromthe burden of a “shameful” memor y. On this layer, it is precisely
through this traumatic form that the Korean War is “remembered”
rather than forgotten.
Third, the novel reveals that the second layer of Frank’s memory/
oblivion dynamics is a screen memor y that forgets a more egregious,
scandalous, and indeed “shameful” one. He raped and murdered a
Korean girl during his militar y service, a total iteration of the Black
violence featured in Fox Girl. His survivor’s guilt framework, it turns
out, has “kept the Korean child hidden” (137); his “trauma” was constituted by forgetting Asian victims, and when they resurface to his
consciousness, they take a sexualized and racialized form. He conﬁdes this secret only to an interlocutor, “you,” who is not just listening
to but also writing down what Frank recounts, a ﬁgure analogous toMorrison, in one of the all-italicized chapters:

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way Afro-Asian antagonism is formed once again, this time from theBlack side. Frank is undoubtedly a perpetrator of the Korean girl; theviolence, however, is no more than a symptom of American national
violence, not evidence for Black subjects’ proclivity to violence. Whileacknowledging his “shameful” deed, he explains that it is “she,” a
Korean girl, who “took him down to a place he didn’t know was inhim”—he cannot help ascribing responsibility to the Korean victim as
if she were to blame, or as if either an African American or an Asianmust be a perpetrator when addressing victimhood on either side. Aslong as his thoughts are conﬁned within a framework in which Afro or
Asia must be a perpetrator, he remains unable to address American
national violence as a structural basis producing that victimology.
Within this paradigm of the Afro-Asian victimology of the Korean
War, Black vets are not entitled to imagine solidarity with Asians.
To undermine this Afro-Asian victimology, it is important to recognize that Frank is a perpetrator and victim. Yet the crucial situationthat the novel conveys is not that Afro-Asian solidarity is blocked
despite his endeavor but that it is Frank who believes that he is ashameful perpetrator. The Korean War affectively conditions him torefrain from thinking about solidarity with Asians. Morrison’s stor yproffers a critical mnemonic mechanism of the Korean War, one thatis neither willful forgetting nor remembering to forget, though it does
address both. Once African Americans are interpellated and assimilated into the logic of American national violence, all they can do is toremember it as their own violence, one which they choose to leave
unexcavated. Though white veterans undoubtedly held their own versions of remorse for killing people in Asia, they were able to enjoy apseudo-minoritized and -ethnicized marketable identity as “veteranAmerican” (McGurl 2009, Darda 2021). This racialization of veterans
is why Morrison’s Korean War novel focuses on the depiction of racial
segregation on American soil, where the protagonist struggles toreturn to civilian life, dissociated from American national identity,
Asian victims, and African American peers. For African Americans, toserve in Korea meant experiencing military integration and civil segregation, both identiﬁcation with and disidentiﬁcation from American
normalcy. Frank’s feeling that he is not qualiﬁed to afﬁliate with Asians
based on transnational victimhood emerges precisely because he has
lost a community to belong to, a narrative to identify with. In this sense,an African American sense of guilt needs to be differentiated from awhite one. While the latter is a national lamentation, the former is aneffect of American racial formation, the Afro-Asian antagonism of thelong Korean War.

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Frank’s bifurcated victimology, constructed through rigid racial
identiﬁcation, can be unsettled with reference to what Judith Butler(2016: 26, 32) terms “precarity.” After noting that whether one’s deathcan be recognized as “grievable” hinges on our affective link to thelost life and that its imaginative limit is constantly regulated throughthe ways in which wars are mediatized, Butler argues that “precarity
cuts across identity categories as well as multicultural maps, thus
forming the basis for an alliance focused on opposition to state violence and its capacity to produce, exploit, and distribute precarity forthe purposes of proﬁt and territorial defense.” The state of being
exposed to precariousness vis-à-vis state violence — she is talking
about American warfare — can be reappropriated as a basis for afﬁliations not demarcated by identitarian categorizations constantly produced through wars, such as Afro-Asian victimology. “Such an alliancewould not require,” she continues, “agreement on all questions ofdesire or belief or self-identiﬁcation. It would be a movement sheltering certain kinds of ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing such persistent and animating differences as the sign and substance of a radical democratic politics.” Thus, the juxtaposition ofMorrison’s Home and Butler’s Frames of War (2009) indicates a direction in which to consider the question: what can be done once anantagonism is internalized and the affective ground for friendship isdestroyed? What Butler describes is not so much to undo antagonism
itself as to detour the discourse of victimology. Pease (2019: 162–63;
emphasis added) concludes that “home disrupts and detotalizes thehegemonic cold war narrative that had monopolized understanding of
the 50s . . . through the eyes of a black veteran of the Korean War
who had not internalized cold war ideology.” On the contrar y, I contend that Frank has to seek an alternative narrative precisely because
he has internalized Cold War America’s totalizing ideology. Home is astory after the making of Afro-Asian victimology.
The question brings us to Frank’s younger sister, Cee, whose Black
body, especially her uterus, is utilized by eugenicist Dr. Beau, who
employs Cee as a “maid” in Atlanta. Not unlike her brother, Cee is on
the verge of death under racist medical violence sanctioned by thestate. In Seattle, Frank receives mail ordering him to “Come fast. She
be dead if you tarr y” (Morrison 2012: 8) from Dr. Beau’s cook, aBlack woman; her letter encourages him to escape the ward and travel
to Atlanta. Yet he actually “tarries;” as a justiﬁcation for this delay, hekeeps referring to the screen memor y of his “homeboys” whom he
was unable to save: “I had to go but I dreaded it” (84). Whether or not722

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this prevarication is true, a more profound psychological impedimentthat makes Frank “tarry” is that Cee would remind him of the Korean
girl who, scavenging for food, conjured his childhood memory of thesiblings stealing peaches together (94). Before going to Korea, Frank,
despite Cee’s “sorrow” and “panic,” decided to enlist to escape theirhometown, Lotus, a place that was “suffocating, killing him and his
two best friends,” while assuring “himself Cee would be okay,” and it
turned out “she wasn’t” (35). In his mind, the two young women ofcolor constitute transnational, interracial victimhood—precarity —visà-vis American violence, and he considers himself the victimizer. But
his rescue of and reunion with Cee not only leads him to confess his“shameful” memor y but also brings him to a much older memor y ofwitnessing white violence with Cee, a kind of primal scene that bookends the narrative. While reburying an unnamed Black victim’s bones
in the periphery of their hometown, Frank “remembers” his status asa victim. Thus, the conclusion of this novel seems to be that to avoid
Afro-Asian victimology, shared precarity must be prioritized over both
American national violence and one’s militarized racial identity.
Throughout the entirely italicized chapters, Frank repeatedly challenges the transcriber’s capacity as a ﬁction writer: “Korea. / You can’t
imagine it because you weren’t there. You can’t describe the bleak landscape because you never saw it” (93). This critical gesture led several
critics to acknowledge Frank’s authority to speak about Korea as adirect witness to the war as opposed to the novel’s author who “wasn’t
there.” Mary Dudziak (2012), for example, characterizes the novel as“an exploration of the limits of understanding.” To paraphrase thisinterpretation, this metaﬁctional framework and Morrison’s incapacity
to fully imagine the Korean War, which she intentionally chose to foreground, marks an ethical self-limitation she sets on her faculties as anovelist. Referring to Frank’s PTSD, Dudziak goes on to argue that“even if broken soldiers received better care and resources, theywould still confront the same emptiness — the profound limits of
empathy.” Though they might ﬁnd their “paths to more hopeful
futures, they do so in a context of psychological isolation, not of connection.” This transcriber, however, is the only ﬁgure to which Frankcan confess his “shame”; he cannot conﬁde in his sister, given the similarity he perceives between her and the Korean girl. He can only manage to do so, paradoxically enough, in front of a person who “wasn’t
there.” Toward the end, he says, “You can keep on writing, but I think
you ought to know what’s true” (134). Whether Frank’s “true” story canbe fully told hinges on the transcriber bringing his innermost “shameful” memory to a broader readership who is invited to remember theAfro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War

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Forgotten War. His use of the second person pronoun, “you,” also
addresses the reader and prompts us to remember.
In 1992, Morrison contributed lyrics to André Previn’s song cycle
Honey and Rue (released in 1995) at the request of the African American soprano singer Kathleen Battle, who premiered the work. Home
bears the lyrics of the second number “Whose House Is This?” as its
epigraph. Reframed as Frank’s monologue, he wonders: “Whose
house is this? / . . . / It’s not mine. / I dreamed another, sweeter,brighter / . . . / This house is strange. / . . . / Say, tell me, why does
its lock ﬁt my key?” This embarrassment at the uncanniness of his
own house is concretized as the discover y of “a place I didn’t know
was in me,” his disillusionment and loss of innocence. Since the resurgence of American exceptionalism after 9/11 under the Bush administration, the idea of home has been recharged with conservative sentiments and reinforced by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. How can
we critically locate the 2012 homecoming novel titled Home—with its
ﬁnal sentence “Let’s go home” (147) uttered by Cee — in a post-9/11
context? As Amy Kaplan (2003: 89) remarks, the logic of the homeland security state generates “a profound sense of insecurity, not only
because of the threat of terrorism, but because the homeland, too,proves a fundamentally uncanny place, haunted by prior and future
losses, invasions, abandonment.” Our Black Korean War vet is ahaunting ﬁgure within both the Cold War and the post-9/11 homeland
security state precisely because of the violence he is forced to represent, a vessel under which the United States strategically relegated
the underside of its use of militar y force. Home pushes the idea of aBlack vet as a medium through which American national violence isrepresented to its limits —if Black vets are to represent American violence, let them do so in a radical manner to implode the Afro-Asian
antagonism. As an archival ﬁgure of the Forgotten War, Frank haunts
the contemporary American homeland, reminding us that the KoreanWar’s racial violence remains rampant across the globe.
In considering Afro-Asian antagonism during the long Korean War,reading Keller’s and Morrison’s novels as a set reveals that Hyun Jin
and Frank complement each other’s stories. Hyun Jin gives a voice tothe muted Korean girl in Home, while Frank personiﬁes the demonized Black vet in Fox Girl. Afro-Asia studies is essentially a cross-racial
discipline that requires a comparative methodology, even when it
comes to Afro-Asian divisive victimology. Juxtaposing the two novels
is necessar y not just because they replenish each other; it does not
become quite clear until read together why both Keller and Morrison

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American Literature

Kodai Abe is an assistant professor at University of Tsukuba, Japan. He has publishedarticles in Discourse, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Asian American
Studies, and others. He is working on two book projects: “Afro-Asian Antagonism
and the Long Cold War” and “The Making of Japan-U.S. Transpaciﬁc Exceptionalism.”
Notes
I would like to thank Joseph Keith for motivating me to begin this project andfor providing feedback on early drafts of this essay.
1 At this point, “61 percent of the line infantr y companies in Korea had
become racially mixed” (Mershon and Schlossman 1998: 226).
2 Christine Hong (2012: 142) argues that it is precisely because the knowledge about the Korean War cannot be reduced to positive evidence thatﬁctional narratives become “a potent instrument of political warfare.”
When it comes to the “Forgotten War,” ﬁction becomes an archival sitewhere something ofﬁcially forgotten can be effectively remembered.
3 The Double V campaign culminated in the 1941 Washington march,organized by A. Philip Randolph and others, against racial discriminationin the American war industry. After the war, Randolph continued to leadthe resistance by establishing the Committee against Jim Crow in Militar y Service and Training in 1947 and the League for Nonviolent Civil
Disobedience against Militar y Segregation in 1948 (Taylor 2013: 17).
For an early historiography of the militarization of the Black body, see
Nalty 1986.
4 On the yellow peril and model minority discourses, see Lowe 1996; Bascara 2006; Phu 2012; Tchen and Yeats 2014; Klein 2003.

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chose to have their characters mis- or underrepresent their racial
counterparts. Through the characters’ delimited and deformed frameof recognition, both novels document how Afro-Asian antagonism has
already been neutralized and naturalized in their ever yday lives.
Hyun Jin and Frank testify to how historical, social, and cultural structures deﬁne the ways in which Afro-Asian subjects feel and act, andthus how it seems impossible for them to imagine otherwise. Whenconsidering racial antagonisms through the lens of ﬁctional narratives, what seems to be a failure or inadequacy in the text can be thecore of real-life interventional efforts. Comparative reading of twoworks that depict opposite sides of racial antagonism can transform
into a basis for solidarity. Beyond Korea, Keller’s Fox Girl and Morrison’s Home tell us how to read Afro-Asian war stories as counternarratives against American war making and race making during thelong Cold War.

Afro-Asian Antagonism and the Long Korean War
5

7
8

9

Another cultural project that contributed to promoting the idea of American humanitarian war was Operation Babylift, a mass adoption of Korean
mixed-race orphans or “GI babies” to the United States, implemented by
the American philanthropist Harr y Holt. This was a precursor to thesame Cold War enterprise Gerald Ford deployed in the aftermath of theVietnam War. For Korea, see Moon 1997; Prébin 2013; Nelson 2016; Woo
2019; McKee 2019; Kim 2020. For Vietnam, see Eleana J. Kim 2010;
Nguyen 2012; and Espiritu 2014, among others. On the idea of “humanitarian violence” in general, see Atanasoski 2013.
Documenting the 1990 Red Apple Boycott, a retail boycott campaign led
by Black Nationalists and others against two Korean-owned stores in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Claire Jean Kim (2000: 2, 11) challenges the stereotypes
of Afro-Asian conﬂict, such as the racial scapegoating narrative (frustrated African Americans venting their resentment on economically successful Koreans). It is what she terms racial power, that is, “the racial status quo’s systemic tendency toward self-reproduction,” which “shapes
the structural setting for Black-Korean conﬂict.” Pitting Black people as“the pathological underclass” against Koreans “as the hardworking
model minority,” racial power allows whites to remain as “neutral enforcers of colorblind justice.”
See Calvin Tafel’s (2009) useful webpage, Where Is Fox Girl?, which maps
the novel’s locations.
In this earlier novel, a comfort woman is murdered by being “skeweredfrom her vagina to her mouth” by the Japanese militar y (Keller 1997:
20–21).
On the subject of the Korean diaspora, studies by Baik (2020: 8) and Roh(2021: 20) are especially relevant to the present discussion. The former
argues that “U.S. militarized occupation generates its own seeds ofdemise,” which she terms “diasporic excesses,” that is, “non-normative
subjectivities and spaces” that can “activate cultural practices of resistanceand regeneration.” The latter attempts to bring together two heretofore
unlinked Korean diasporic subjects, Zainichi (resident Koreans in Japan)
and Korean Americans, stressing how American military juridical systems
in East Asia have been crucial in forming diasporic Korean subjectivities.
See also Chuh and Shimakawa 2001; Cho 2008; Parreñas and Siu 2007.

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