Overview

"Cold War Friendships explores the plight of the Asian ally of the American wars in Korea and Vietnam. Enlisted into proxy warfare, this figure is not a friend but a ""friendly,"" a wartime convenience enlisted to serve a superpower. It is through this deeply unequal relation, however, that the Cold War friendly secures her own integrity and insists upon her place in the neocolonial imperium. This study reads a set of highly enterprising wartime subjects who make their way to the US via difficult attachments. American forces ventured into newly postcolonial Korea and Vietnam, both plunged into civil wars, to draw the dividing line of the Cold War. The strange success of containment and militarization in Korea unraveled in Vietnam, but the friendly marks the significant continuity between these hot wars. In both cases, the friendly justified the fight: she was also a political necessity who redeployed cold war alliances, and, remarkably, made her way to America. As subjects in process--and indeed, proto-Americans--these figures are prime literary subjects, whose processes of becoming are on full display in Asian American novels and testimonies of these wars. Literary writings on both of these conflicts are presently burgeoning, and Cold War Friendships performs close analyses of key texts whose stylistic constraints and contradictions--shot through with political and historical nuance--present complex gestures of alliance."

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9780190257668

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Josephine Park compellingly elucidates the instrumentality of the Asian 'friendly'--at once an ally and an object of Orientalist contempt---to securing the morality of U.S. modernity in and after the Cold War era. The deep imbrication of Asian American subjectivity and U.S. geopolitical hegemony that Park traces reminds us of the centrality of Asiatic racialization to the formation of the U.S. nation. -- KANDICE CHUH, author of Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique In Cold War Friendships, Josephine Park perceptively turns to literature in order to demonstrate how the political divisions, enmities, and alliances forged during the so-called Cold War have thoroughly imbued Asian American formation. Park illuminates both the very real costs of the 'proxy' wars in Korea and Vietnam, as well as the conditions of possibility that these wars entailed for Asian American national and social belonging. -- CRYSTAL PARIKH, author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literature and Culture Tracking the depiction of 'friendlies' in literary treatments of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Park deftly explores how the aesthetics of those processes ultimately found-and continues to find-expression in the literary production of Asian America. Cold War Friendships shows the unique revelatory power of both literary works and literary criticism as it traces 'an Asian American genealogy of war' and the Cold War legacy it makes manifest. -- PRISCILLA WALD, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative

Author Information

Josephine Nock-Hee Park is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics was awarded the Literary Book Award by the Association for Asian American Studies.

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