Writing the Forgotten War: Afro-Korean Antagonism and Solidarity in HBO’s Lovecraft Country, Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) and Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999)

This thesis uses Professor Kodai Abe's theory of Afro-Korean antagonism as a framework to understand literary depictions of relationships between Black and Korean subjects, particularly in the context of the Korean War. Professor Abe proposes that the U.S. government strategically created antagonism between Black soldiers and Korean subjects during the Korean War, to subvert solidarity between these two groups during a period of growing international Afro-Asian solidarity movements, and an association of the African-American struggle against racial oppression in the U.S. with anti-colonial movements in the Third World. The thesis explores how portrayals of Afro-Korean relations in HBO show Lovecraft Country, Toni Morrison's novel Home (2013) and Chang-Rae Lee's A Gesture Life
(1999) deviate from conventional depictions of wartime Afro-Korean antagonism.