In this article, I depart from the typical discussion of the Korean sociocultural concept of han as a collective feeling of unresolved resentment, pain, grief, and anger that runs in the blood of all Koreans. Scholars, artists, writers, and critics frequently characterize han as ''the Korean ethos'' and the soul of Korean art, literature, and film. It is said to be unique to Koreans and incomprehensible to Westerners. I argue, however, that its contemporary biologistic-oriented meaning emerged first during the Japanese colonial period as a colonial stereotype, and that tracing the afterlife of han gives us a postcolonial understanding of its deployment in culture. I examine how han originated under the contradictions of coloniality, how it evolved from a colonial construct to its adoption into Korean ethnonationalism, and how it travels into a completely new context through the Korean diaspora. Rather than dismissing han as nothing more than a social construct, I instead define han as an affect that encapsulates the grief of historical memory-the memory of past collective trauma-and that renders itself racialized/ethnicized and attached to nation.
Regarding her highly acclaimed first book of poetry, Notes from the Divided Country, 1 second-generation Korean American poet Suji Kwock Kim has stated that she considers the representation of the traumatic experiences of the Korean War as "the responsibility that one has, in terms of using the imagination as a means of compassion, and understanding things one couldn't have experienced." 2 If Notes from the Divided Country (hereafter Notes) is a work created from a sense of ethical responsibility, we could perhaps also see it more specifically as a project of ethical memory and ask, along with ethnic studies scholar Jodi Kim, "What does it mean to want to represent or 'remember' a war that has been 'forgotten' and erased in the US popular imaginary, but has been transgenerationally seared into the memories of Koreans and Korean Americans, and experienced anew every day in a still-divided Korea?" 3 Notes in many ways grapples with this very ques
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