“The Broken Break”: Run Me to Earth and the Legacies of the American Cold War
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Having explored historical ramifications of the Korean War in his previous works, Paul Yoon focuses on the rarely accounted-for Laos War in his new novel, Run Me to Earth. The novel demonstrates how the region’s Cold War experience differs from a triumphalist understanding of the Cold War, highlighting and simulating local experience of the time and its aftermath. The official version of the Cold War, which has been so prevalent in U.S. politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, defines the earlier global conflict as fully terminated, having proven the supremacy of the U.S.-led economic and political system once and for all. It thus has served to shape and justify the U.S. international policies henceforth. Focusing on the less-known American military engagements in Laos—later nicknamed ‘the Secret War,’ Run Me to Earth challenges this triumphalism. The novel traces the harrowing trauma of the Cold War back to European colonial violence and depicts the war’s permanent impact on the present lives of the people from the region, reminding the reader of the lasting legacies of European colonialism and American Cold War interventions. This paper analyzes the unique way Run Me to Earth reconfigures the way the Cold War is remembered and narrativized and argues that by shedding light on the experiential reality of the Laos war, the novel challenges the official memory of the war and suggests a way to recover the too-easily-dismissed, unspoken past.
Abstract
Having explored historical ramifications of the Korean War in his previous works, Paul Yoon focuses on the rarely accounted-for Laos War in his new novel, Run Me to Earth. The novel demonstrates how the region’s Cold War experience differs from a triumphalist understanding of the Cold War, highlighting and simulating local experience of the time and its aftermath. The official version of the Cold War, which has been so prevalent in U.S. politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, defines the earlier global conflict as fully terminated, having proven the supremacy of the U.S.-led economic and political system once and for all. It thus has served to shape and justify the U.S. international policies henceforth. Focusing on the less-known American military engagements in Laos—later nicknamed ‘the Secret War,’ Run Me to Earth challenges this triumphalism. The novel traces the harrowing trauma of the Cold War back to European colonial violence and depicts the war’s permanent impact on the present lives of the people from the region, reminding the reader of the lasting legacies of European colonialism and American Cold War interventions. This paper analyzes the unique way Run Me to Earth reconfigures the way the Cold War is remembered and narrativized and argues that by shedding light on the experiential reality of the Laos war, the novel challenges the official memory of the war and suggests a way to recover the too-easily-dismissed, unspoken past.
참고문헌 (21)
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