“The Case of the Mysterious Koreans”: The Meaning of Life, American Orientalism and the Korean War in the Age of the World Target

Daniel Y. KIM

탈경계인문학Trans-Humanities

2015, 8(3), pp.7-31
Publisher : Ewha Institute for the Humanities: EIH
Research Area : Other Humanities

Daniel Y. KIM ¹

¹Brown University

ABSTRACT

This article examines the coverage of the Korean War in the popular American magazine Life, focusing on its depiction of Koreans. In these depictions, Koreans figure as an epistemological enigma: as ambiguously friendly/hostile, loyal/disloyal, and as worthy/unworthy of life. But in journalism’s attempted management of that inscrutability we glimpse a crucial element of the shift in epistemes that defined the emergence of what cultural theorist Rey Chow has described as the Age of the World Target: an epoch in which the “countries of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East took on the significance of ‘target fields’ — as fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary to the United States’ continual political and ideological hegemony.” To understand this emergent episteme, however, it is also necessary to engage with the work of cultural critic Christina Klein, who has described the post-1945 period as one in which middlebrow cultural works like Life reveal a U.S. Cold War ideology oriented as much by a desire to integrate subjects of the decolonizing world into the American sphere of influence as by an impulse to contain the Soviet menace.
KEYWORDS

journalism, Cold War, Korean War, Orientalism, American Studies, Area Studies
REFERENCES (12)

[journal] Bell, James / 1950 / The General Gambles / Life 29(8) : 18~20

[book] Chow, Rey / 2006 / The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work / Duke UP

[book] Cumings, Bruce / 2002 / Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies / Duke UP : 261~302

[book] Cumings, Bruce / 2010 / The Korean War: A History / Modern Library

[book] Doss, Erika Lee / 2001 / Looking at Life Magazine / Smithsonian Institution P : 1~21

[book] Hertzstein, Robert E / 2005 / Time, and the American Crusade in Asia / Cambridge UP

[journal] Klein, Christina / 2002 / The Sentimental Culture of Global Integration / The Minnesota Review 55–57 : 153~166

[book] Klein, Christina / 2003 / Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 / U of California P

[journal] Mydans, Carl / 1944 / Tule Lake Pressure Boys / Life 16(12) : 25~35

[journal] Mydans, Carl / 1950 / Things Look Better in Korea / Life 29(17) : 37~

[journal] Mydans, Carl / 1950 / Refugees Get in Way / Life 29(8) : 22~23

[journal] Osborne, John / 1950 / Report from the Orient: Guns Are Not Enough / Life 29(8) : 76~85
KCI Citation (0)

KJC Korea
Journal Central

Statistics

Tools