Transpacific Freedom Dreams Across Korea-Mexico: The Korean War and Insurgent Kinships in José Revueltas’s The Motives of Cain

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This talk examines Mexican writer José Revueltas’s literary text The Motives of Cain, which in its counterhegemonic representation of the Korean War critiques U.S. raced narratives of empire that shape dominant Cold War knowledge production, in particular the representation of the United States as a benevolent savior of peoples in the Third World. By drawing connections between U.S. settler imperialism in Mexico and Korea, the novella unsettles prevailing interpretations of the Korean War, making intimate what is rendered distant, rendering tactile what is made invisible, and making present what has been ghosted by U.S. militarized technologies of abstraction, thereby conjuring forms of embodied critique that can imagine a world within and beyond geographies of war, carcerality, and colonial racial capitalism. In The Motives of Cain, the fabulation of an insurgent kinship between a Chicano soldier and a North Korean prisoner that betrays state-sanctioned formations of family, friendship, or camaraderie offers a glimpse of transpacific freedom dreams marked by etchings of war’s death and dispossession. By fabulating an insurgent intimacy, Revueltas’s literary text conjures decolonial futurities across U.S-Mexico borderlands and the Korean peninsula.

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