Two recent Korean War novels, Ha Jin’s War Trash and Paul Yoon’s Snow Hunters, both highlight a critical yet virtually unknown controversy over the voluntary or non-forcible repatriation of POWs that strung out armistice negotiations for fifteen months. By highlighting voluntary repatriation, War Trash and Snow Hunters produce revisionist accounts of the Korean War. Yet in the process of remembering this issue, both novels disconnect the cultural programs offered to prisoners from the psychological warfare operations that were conceived with the explicit goal of encouraging prisoners to defect. As writers of imaginative fiction, Ha Jin and Paul Yoon are obviously under no obligation to include any particular historical data or to address any specific historical context; it is the task of the critic of historical novels to contextualize the particular forms of historical consciousness they generate.
I. Introduction
II. War Trash
III. Snow Hunters
IV. From Major to Minor Transnationalism
V. Conclusion
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