(Re)Living the Forgotten: Memory, War, and Re-enactment as Imperial Nostalgia

• In Event: Militarism, Memory, and Media

Abstract

“I wouldn’t say it’s over for Korea, but that it never really started.” This 2013 comment on an online forum for Korean War re-enactors highlights the crux of the issue of the ‘forgotten’ war. This is a war that never really ‘started’—despite its two to three million body count and global scale, it is often only seen as a ‘police action’—but also is not yet over, as the two Korea’s are technically still at war. For the American public, too, the Korean War and its true scope never registered in national memory to the degree that the far more visually spectacular war in Vietnam did.

The year 2000, however, seemed to be a major turning point in public interest, as the first decade of the twenty-first century saw a boom in Korean War re-enacting groups. Indeed, in June 2000, re-enactors gathered at Fort McPherson, Georgia to (re)perform the war as part of the joint celebrations of the 225th birthday of the U.S. Army and 50th Anniversary of the Korean War. In honor of the veterans present at the ceremony, re-enactors brought out ‘authentic’ tanks, machine guns, and uniforms as they attempted to relive the forgotten. They also took several photographs to mark the occasion. And yet, by 2009, interest in re-enacting the Korean War had sharply declined. As one commentor on the re-enactors’ forum indicated, the Korean War was once again “dead.”

In this 2000 re-enactment of the Korean War, what visions of America were these actors nostalgic for? Why was the Korean War the best candidate for reliving the past at that particular historical moment, and not in the following decades? What does it mean to re-enact a war as form of observing an anniversary and also as a way to honor veterans? This project is therefore concerned with how conflicts are remembered, the motivations behind re-enacting wars, and the relationship between nostalgia, memory, and performance. Through reading a collection of photographs of the 50th Anniversary of the Korean War at Fort McPherson in their historical context, I argue that these re-enactors attempted to tap into and (re)generate a collective memory of a war that, despite being brutal and in many senses deeply undemocratic, could be glossed as a successful defense and instantiation of democracy in a Third World country. This was also precisely the moment when the U.S. had deeply intensified its intervention in the Middle East under the name of democracy and freedom. Thus, this collection suggests that re-enactment (and photography) is both a mode of reaffirming imperial ambitions and also cultivates a nostalgia for an imperial past that appears more just.

Biographical Information

Clara Nam-Lee (she/her) is a first year PhD student in American Studies and Provost’s Diversity Fellow at the George Washington University. A first-generation immigrant from New Zealand and Korea, Clara’s scholarship is deeply focused on questions of race and belonging. She is a Cold War historian who works in the fields of visual studies, Asian American studies, memory studies, politics, and race. She earned her A.B. in History with Honors at the University of Chicago in 2022.

Author

• Clara Nam-Lee, The George Washington University