Collective Memory and Historiographic Enclaves in the Post-Cold War World: The Korean War (1950-1953) in the United States

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Korean War (1950-3) to raise the question of memory sites as historiographic enclaves, that is, not only as places of “cultural comfort”, but also of historical convenience. Since such a designation has been rarely used in history as an academic discipline, these historiographic enclaves were addressed in both their potential ethnic and political acceptations. In order to build bridges between these two levels of meaning, the concept of “collective memory” was brought up to discuss the memorialization of the Korean War in the United States, both in opposition to and in congruence with Korea, North and South. Once the political aspects of these historiographic enclaves have been brought to the fore, this study is meant to analyze them in relation to all the memory sites dedicated to the war, more specifically, in the US. Since these lieux de mémoire (in P. Nora’s term) have become the site of specific commemorative practices, the historiographic enclaves are likely to be entwined with some discourses which reflect various national imaginaries and can therefore create contestation. If such contestation exists, it would suggest the history of the Korean War, known as the “forgotten war” in the US, has been enclosed within the larger realm of Cold War history so as to fit it in the anti-Communist teleology of the latter, removing the ethnic particularities of what post-revisionists would rather call a “civil war”.