The Making of North Korean Americans in the Afterlife of Cold War Cultural Politics

Abstract

In this article, I propose a discernable shift in the American discursive framework surrounding North Korea and the United States' relationship to North Koreans; namely, moving from projecting North Koreans as absolutely unassimilable foreign objects to then considering them as a potential new wave of immigrant Americans. I contend that political and cultural discourses on North Koreans in the US must be understood within the context of Cold War logics, specifically a lingering unease related to the unresolved Korean War and the US role in perpetuating it. I analyze legal and cultural discourses surrounding North Korean defectors in the United States, and how these are reflected in North Korean defector Yeonmi Park's memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girls' Journey to Freedom (2015), and Korean American writer Suki Kim's investigative journalism, Without You, There is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite (2015). My analysis invites a rethinking of the ongoing repercussions of the Korean War and the legacies of the Cold War in constructing national and transnational Korean subjects in the Korea(s) and the United States.