“The Case of the Mysterious Koreans”: The Meaning of Life, American Orientalism and the Korean War in the Age of the World Target

Abstract

This article examines the coverage of the Korean War in the popular American magazine Life, focusing on its depiction of Koreans. In these depictions, Koreans figure as an epistemological enigma: as ambiguously friendly/hostile, loyal/disloyal, and as worthy/unworthy of life. But in journalism’s attempted management of that inscrutability we glimpse a crucial element of the shift in epistemes that defined the emergence of what cultural theorist Rey Chow has described as the Age of the World Target: an epoch in which the “countries of East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East took on the significance of ‘target fields’ — as fields of information retrieval and dissemination that were necessary to the United States’ continual political and ideological hegemony.” To understand this emergent episteme, however, it is also necessary to engage with the work of cultural critic Christina Klein, who has described the post-1945 period as one in which middlebrow cultural works like Life reveal a U.S. Cold War ideology oriented as much by a desire to integrate subjects of the decolonizing world into the American sphere of influence as by an impulse to contain the Soviet menace.