Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature
Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture

A margin, as Jean-François Lyotard has pointed out, is not a division but a space between, belonging equally to the inside and outside. Because this space of dispute rather than of demarcation, which Lyotard calls the differend, encompasses all that is either/or and neither/nor, it can facilitate fruitful analyses of such topics as, among others, geography, historiography, warfare, and commerce. Both of these books implicitly invoke the concept of the differend to explore the American Cold War imaginary. In Cold War Friendships, Josephine Nock-Hee Park illustrates how the friendly forms a differend at the site where Asian Americans are constructed in representations of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The friendly, as Park explains, is an “adjective first turned into a noun to describe unthreatening ‘natives’, [which] became military terminology most often used to distinguish among raced others” (6). Erik Mortenson uses the broader and vaguer figure of the...