Josephine Nock-Hee Park – författare

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.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in Black and White explores the relation between text, author, and reader - a nexus theorized as the 'apparatus' in Cha's study of cinema - by tracing two key literary intertexts in Dictée: Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner,' a submerged literary resonance in Apparatus, Cha's anthology of film theory, and the writing of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a primary intertext at the heart of Dictée. In Cha's film theory, black and white is the flicker of the cinematic apparatus, and the Elements readings consider this contrasting palette in self-reflexive portraits in black and white. This study reads flashes of identification, often in punishing self-encounters, and it dwells on the figure of the martyr to arrive at the death of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the patron saint of artists and scholars fascinated by her art and her suffering.

This volume is devoted to Asian American Literature between 1930 to 1965, a period of immense social, historical, and cultural transformations that continue to shape the conditions of our world. From the Great Depression to the Second World War to the Civil Rights Movement to landmark immigrations reforms, Asian American literature provides unique and insightful perspectives on these historical developments, all while creatively engaging with globally-dispersed decolonization movements. Each chapter, written a by leading figures in their fields, demonstrates how Asian American writing affectingly reveals our complex world and its contested pasts. Case studies of major authors of this era show this as a time when the figure of the Asian American author became newly significant. This volume provides historical grounding, theoretical interventions, and nuanced textual analysis of Asian American literature in this period.

This volume is devoted to Asian American Literature between 1930 to 1965, a period of immense social, historical, and cultural transformations that continue to shape the conditions of our world. From the Great Depression to the Second World War to the Civil Rights Movement to landmark immigrations reforms, Asian American literature provides unique and insightful perspectives on these historical developments, all while creatively engaging with globally-dispersed decolonization movements. Each chapter, written a by leading figures in their fields, demonstrates how Asian American writing affectingly reveals our complex world and its contested pasts. Case studies of major authors of this era show this as a time when the figure of the Asian American author became newly significant. This volume provides historical grounding, theoretical interventions, and nuanced textual analysis of Asian American literature in this period.