Hardly Emotion: The Minor Feelings of US Empire and the Translational Poetics of Don Mee Choi

Abstract:This essay focuses on two recent books of poetry by Don Mee Choi, Hardly War (2016) and DMZ Colony (2020), for both the historiographical work they do and how poetry and emotion are crucial to that work. These books bring into focus the neocolonial role that the United States has played in Korea, dating from the peninsula's liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 through the military dictatorships that governed South Korea through the 1990s as well as the subimperial role that country has adopted in relation to the United States. They do so, however, in ways that steep their readers in a version of what Cathy Park Hong has termed minor feelings and deploying a poetics of translation akin to what she has dubbed Bad English. By extending the historiographical reach of American studies to better address this "forgotten war" and its lingering violence, this essay strives to be responsive to the American Studies Association's recent resolution calling for an end to the Korean War. It also asserts that engaging more fully with issues of aesthetics and poetics might help us better acknowledge how subjects of color negotiate and even resist formations of race and empire.