Yumi Lee

I teach, research, and write on post-1945 and contemporary U.S. literature with an emphasis on Asian American literature and history, coming from a framework of critical race & ethnic studies. I'm currently working on a book titled Someone Else's War: Race, Empire, and the Korean War in American Literature. The Korean War, long considered the “forgotten war” of twentieth-century U.S. history, has been the subject of a newfound wave of interest in American culture over the past decade. In my book project, I read contemporary American literary works, including novels by Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee, Rolando Hinojosa, and Ha Jin, to trace the transformative effects of the Korean War and U.S. militarism in Asia on U.S. racial formations from midcentury to the present. Examining the war’s impact on policies and practices around desegregation and immigration, I argue that the Korean War heralded a new mode of liberal inclusion for racial minorities in the United States. Through close readings of literary texts paired with a critical analysis of historical and legal documents, my book investigates both how and why we are remembering and retelling the Korean War in the present. It seeks not only to assess the war's significance for understanding U.S. racial formation in the past half-century but also to reveal what the recent literary reckoning with the Korean War’s legacy can tell us about endless war and U.S. empire in our current moment.

In addition to this book, I'm working on a few other projects: I'm currently writing an essay on incarceration in Asian American literature and culture. I've also begun research for a second book-length project, which investigates the institutionalization of ethnic literature as a site of knowledge production in and around the postwar university. Across all of these projects, I'm interested in both examining contemporary "ethnic" American literary texts and developing a critical understanding of our reading practices and their institutional histories.