억압된 인종 공포 : 미국문화와 이데올로기로서의 한국전쟁

Abstract

This paper tries to c1arify and explicate the implications of the ideologization of

Korean War in American culture, devlving into the deep-seated guilt and fear of

American POW experiences in the 50 called " forgotten war." Caught between

the national heores of World War II and the wounded but self-determined

veterans of Vietnam War, POWs of Korean War have been treated as nuisance,

or even a national trauma; their experience was neither properly acknowledged

nor entirely repressed. Korean War has been down-sized when it was culturally

necessary to forget how they failted in Asian misadventures, but forcefully

represented as a significant event to start off the long and complicated drama of

Cold War and the happy outcome thereof. Especially, Korean War films like

Manchurian Candidate subtly demonstrates how Korean War has been accepted

and at the same time repressed in American culture as a contradictory but

threatening affair which is chielfy concerned with racial as well as red fear

towards the Asian communist Other. The film brilliantly shows that Korean war

is not entirely forgotten but remains to this day a distortεd image, or a poweful

ideology in service of racial containment in American cultural politics. Still, the

film unexpectedly illustrates how Korean War would work as an ideologized

image in American culture, a far more fancy ghost than the Vietnamese

counterpart for the obliteration of national trauma at the time of cultural crisis.