Dr. Lee's timely essay looks at the way Toni Morrison's 2012 novel Home links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea in the early 1950s to the long history of police violence at home. She argues that the novel's critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring myths with origins in the 1950s: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. In Dr. Lee's reading, Home is an allegory that invites readers to imagine forms of justice outside of a policing framework, both globally and domestically, through its narrative of repairing trauma and harm through community care rather than punishment or retribution. Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in Home therefore places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and global imaginative frame.
