Entwined Imperial Networks: Reading Cold War Afterlives in Contemporary Asian American and Asian Representations

This dissertation examines the afterlives of US Cold War military interventions in post-WWII North America and Asia by analyzing representations of war memories and transpacific and inter-Asian migrations in contemporary Asian American/Canadian and Asian cultural texts. Through examining how the selected literary texts, films, and creative nonfictions connect US wars in Asia with US anti-black racism at home, militarization and nuclearization in the Pacific, settler colonial violence, and postwar Asian state violence as entwined networks of complicity by the US, Asian states, and less recognizable Western imperial ally Canada, I argue that by reimagining US wars in Asia in relation to postwar violence in varied sites, the cultural texts complicate a US-centric understanding of the Cold War and Asian America. Adopting inter-Asian and transpacific frames, this dissertation on the one hand reframes the Cold War in relation to post-WWII violence in Asia and the Pacific, and, on the other hand, provides an alternative way of reading Asian American/Canadian and Asian cultural texts as mutual historical resources. The first three chapters analyze how Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998), Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), Lee Issac Chung’s Minari (2020), and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) interweave Korean War memories with Korean migration to the US and less recognizable atrocity committed by US-backed South Korean regimes within South Korea as well as in Jeju island and Vietnam. By examining how the texts depict US War in Korea in relational contexts of Japanese colonialism, South Korean state violence and subimperialism, and contemporary South Korea’s capitalist development, I argue that such relationalities elucidate historical atrocity doubly forgotten by both the US and South Korean nationalist narratives of the Korean War. The following three chapters examine how lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking for (2003), Ku Yu-ling’s Our Stories: Migration and Labour in Taiwan (2008/2011) and Return Home (2014), Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2005), and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) illustrate Cold War afterlives in sites not commonly known as the frontstage of US wars in Asia. By grounding US wars in militarization and nuclearization in the Pacific and foregrounding Japan’s disavowal of war crimes and Canada’s complicity with US empire, obscuration of militarization and colonialism in Okinawa, and the explicit and implicit US presence in Taiwan and Vietnam, I argue that the texts help us further investigate historical atrocities that are intertwined with the more well-known US wars in Asia and yet rendered implicit. In addition to analyzing the entwined imperial networks in the texts, this dissertation also underscores how limits of the texts’ representation foreground the difficulties necessarily involved in comprehending and representing the Cold War. Through highlighting how the texts refuse to render traumatic memories into comprehensive narratives and instead attending to unlikely friendship and alliances, I show that imperial networks represented in these texts are not totalizing; rather, they generate, however briefly, relationalities forged by shared yet distinct histories and positionalities.

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