Remembering the “forgotten war” after 9/11

Abstract

This study looks closely at the treatment of the Korean War (1950–1953) in Indignation, by Philip Roth (), and Home, by Toni Morrison (), and reads in those works a re‐evaluation of the American experience in Korea in light of the conditions and concerns of the post‐9/11 era. In their portrayal of the forgotten Korean War, Roth and Morrison challenge redeployment of 1950s Cold War‐style frames and rhetoric by the Bush–Cheney administration in the context of the “War on Terror” and state violence at home and abroad. In other words, the two novels reveal the way the violence and repression harbored in American society during the 1950s spill over onto foreign societies and, having been amplified on foreign battlefields, are brought back home—not only a historical observation, but a productive response to 9/11.