Race. Identity and Memory in Lovecraft Country: A Conversation (Part Two)

Kyu Hyun Kim: Among the strengths of Lovecraft Country as Shawn discusses I was particularly taken by depiction of the series's black characters as organic intellectuals per Gramsci. This observation led me to think about how Asian Americans have been presented in the US mainstream genre works. While there are plenty of occasions for associating Asian Americans with "book-smart" qualities and with technological expertise or academic knowledge, I doubt that these stereotypes really function the way you recognize as organic intellectuals. More often than not, the "book-smart" qualities are merely there to highlight social akwardness or bodily weaknesses. It gets even more complicated when the weight of the US-centered historical perspective (left-anti-imperialist or right-American-Exceptionalist) is added to a character: Hiro from Heroes, for instance.

Shawn's piece also returns me to one of my initial questions, which is how do we make use out of a profoundly racist or otherwise deeply problematic classic source that nonetheless has become greatly influential and remain alluring for the creatives? Would you say that Lovecraft Country basically evades this issue by merely appropriating cultural capital of the author's name? The series was not convincing to me as a critique of the racism underlying the Lovecraftian mythos, provided that it was ever intended as such. The fury of Christine who got excluded from the Order of Adam because of her gender seems to have received a greater attention, and then that angle also seems to become curiously defused as the series reaches its resolution. Where is the equivalent of Nyarlatothep or Fungi from Yuggoth, rethought and transformed in the manner African-American characters were in this series? Maybe we don't need them at all, but then again, this somehow leaves me vaguely cheated: was the series's end somehow meant to suggest the critical inversion of Lovecraft's racism? If so, I still remain unconvinced.

Sorry this is really so incoherent and all over the place. But in any case thank you Shawn for your great thought piece!

Shawn Taylor: Something that Kyu Hyun’s brilliant excavating of Love Country sparked in me is the many ways Asians and Pacific Islanders exist as the every and no-things of (I’ll generically call) the genres of the fantastic. But we’ll get to that. 

I agree with Kyu Hyun that there was little Lovecraft in Lovecraft Country. It makes me wonder if the disconnect was in the LC novel—a book written by a white man, attempting to tell a horror story centering on a Black family; or the adaptation by Black creatives from the source material—in either case, the lack of real Lovecraftian cosmic horror felt like a distorted minor key. It was instantly recognizable, but this false note engendered questions instead of dismissal of the work. At least for me. To see the twin horror of racism and monsters, in the same work, was a revelation—despite some of the plot holes, lip service to every genre, and the blatant omission of a resolution of the most fascinating relationship in the entire series, that of Ruby and Christina.

Their relationship and its Cronenbergian body-horror dynamics could have been an entire series, unto itself. This relationship also brings to the fore questions that always arise when considering shapeshifters: what is racial phenotype and sex to one who can change those qualities? There were a lot of intriguing questions left on the table. Alas. I’ll stick a pin in this, for now. 

 Before the episode, “Meet Me in Daegu”, I had only a passing familiarity with Korea, it’s politics, or its mythology. In the West, in my experience, especially in the States, there is a mashing together of Asian cultures. Not in a useful, transcultural way that highlights exchange, mutual influence, and the very real specter of colonization—but of laziness. No other word for it. Asian, instead of taking the time to explore what this means, becomes a catchall, something to affix as a label without having to do any more exploration.

So, when the Kumiho was introduced, I became angry (through my ignorance) because I thought they’d injected the Japanese Kitsune into the narrative. I couldn’t tell my fox spirits apart. This is a major problem with Asian culture and the Asian diaspora, as understood in the West; unless you’re a scholar, all of the cultures become Asian. No Japanese, no Chinese, no Korean, not Taiwanese, just Asian. Granted, it’s up to us to investigate and gain clarity, but the with the all and nothingness of Asian culture, as it is presented in media, it makes it difficult. 

I first thought about this with Star Trek. As a lifelong fan, I have to fully agree with Kyu Hyun’s assessment that Trek has tokenized not only Asian people (despite George Takei’s Sulu being a revolutionary character, for his time) but Asian cultures as well. The Vulcans and the Romulans seemed to occupy Asian allegorical space, seen through the lens of ill-informed exoticism. Years later, Joss Whedon’s Firefly was not only more glaring and grating than Trek, but more blatantly offensive. The entire show mythology was that there are two cultural cores: One Western and one “Pan-Asian.” The show is peppered with a kind of Chinese-language pidgin, bland and generic Asian characters, symbols, modes of dress—but the show is essentially Space Confederates cosplaying Asian (no particular Asian, ostensibly Chinese, but never firmly verified) but with no Asians of note in the series’ thirteen episode run.

This is the everything and no-thingness I mentioned. The idea and cultural trappings of an Asian society is all around, but Asian people are thoroughly erased. This is why I felt “Meet me in Daegu” was so powerful. 

Outside of M.A.S.H. and the Phillip Rhee starring martial arts film franchise, Best of the Best, I never encountered too much of anything that related to Korea. I had a Korean friend in high school, Myung, but we could only be friends at school because I was Black (American) and his parents would not allow me in his home. After seeing what Korean’s went through during the Fatherland Liberation War/Six-Two-Five depicted in LC, seeing Atticus casually murder and instill fear—and then pine after Ji-Ah—I could understand (not justify) their not wanting me for company. I had two Black Korean war veterans I knew watch this episode and asked them to tell me what they thought about Atticus’ scenes. One refused to tell me anything and the other, through what I interpreted as tears on the telephone, told me that those scenes were mild. It gave my more insight into Myung’s family’s experience. 

Lovecraft Country humanized the Koreans living under occupation and illustrated the ‘just doing my job’ cruelty space American soldiers occupied—something most people in the U.S. are wholly unfamiliar with. We’ve been told North Korea is an oppressive state with wacky leaders and South Korea is a hub of technology and boy/girl band factory. That’s it. But being introduced to a more accurate portrayal of Korean life under wartime conditions, and getting a glimpse of Korean folk/mythic life forces us to see just how much heavy-lifting “Meet Me in Daegu” tried to do and how much further the image industry has to go.] 

Kye Hyun Kim: Thank you so much, Shawn, for a wonderful, super-stimulating and deeply moving response to what I have written. The passage about your conversations with the old African-American veterans of the Cold War was so powerful that I had to literally get up from my seat and pace around the room for some minutes before I could sit down again. So many things went through my mind, including the very real specter of Korean racism-- a people as fiercely nationalistic and ethnocentric as any in the world-- toward the people of color, specifically against the mixed-blood children fathered during the Korean War. Your comments gave me a renewed appreciation of just how far the creators of Lovecraft Country did push the envelope in terms of destabilizing the accepted imageries of Asians and Koreans in the American media.

Kyu Hyun Kim, Associate Professor History at University of California-Davis, was born in Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in history and East Asian languages in 1997 from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (1996-1997), served a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellowship, and was nominated and sponsored in the United States by the Japan Advisory Board, Social Science Research Council in 2000. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Treasonous Patriots: Collaboration and the Colonial Modernity in Modern Korean History and Culture.

Shawn Taylor is one of the founders of Nerds of Color and a founding organizer of the Black Comix Arts Festival, a festival that highlights and promotes artists on the margins of the mainstream comic book industry. Shawn recently published a white paper, We The Fans: How Our Powers Can Change the World, as a Senior Fellow for the Pop Culture Collaborative.