Reclaiming the Korean War Minor: Beyond a Politics of Childhood Innocence

Abstract

Abstract: This essay employs the "Korean War minor" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike . I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the "girl" from US military archives, as the rubric of the "boy-mascot" and "camptown woman" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice.