The Unending Korean War

This special issue assembles critical perspectives on the unending Korean War from scholars and creative practitioners working within and across the fields of Korean studies, Asian American studies, and American studies. Examining the war beyond its standard 1950-1953 periodization and status as a past event, this issue draws upon an innovative archive of Korean War-era American comic books, declassified prisoner-of-war (POW) political documents, Chicano war narratives, photos of North Korean reconstruction, recent North Korean defector memoirs, South Korean Manchurian action films of the 1960s, a South Korean novel about North Korean war memories, and Korean adoptee documentaries in order to shed light less on the war’s known contours than on its unexamined recesses, forgotten potentialities, and undertheorized afterlives.