"Bled In, Letter by Letter": Translation, Postmemory, and the Subject of Korean War: History in Susan Choi's The Foreign Student

Abstract

To the extent that Americanist scholars have begun to fill in what Amy Kaplan famously described as “The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” they have done so largely by remembering forgotten wars. While the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War have not eclipsed the US Civil War in significance (or, for that matter, either of the World Wars or the Vietnam War), studies that have stressed the historical significance of these events have been vital to the project of illuminating “the multiple historical trajectories of the anarchy of empire” that connect the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of this one (Anarchy 170). What to do, then, with the American military conflict that is most closely associated with, and certainly merits, the epithet “the forgotten war”? For there are no images that come readily to mind in reference to the Korean War (1950–53), a somewhat surprising state of affairs given the superabundance of images and narratives associated with the conflict that preceded it by five years and the one that followed it by six: World War II (1940–45) and the Vietnam War (1959–75), respectively. There is, moreover, relatively little scholarship in American literary and cultural studies that focuses primarily on this event or on its representation.