UCLA

In this thesis, I apply Avery Gordon’s theorization of haunting to argue that Evangelical fundamentalism unevenly preserved historical narratives and memories in the conservative Korean American churches I studied. By tracing the origins of this conservative political- theology, I offer an articulation of Korean American Evangelical fundamentalism as a belief system that was shaped by the Cold War as South Korea was reconfigured into a subimperial position within U.S. empire, and (re)produced in these churches through a transpacific pastor training circuit. This modulated the saliency and communicability of Korean Cold War history, preserving those that reaffirmed the subimperial relationship between the U.S. and South Korea, while those that did not were present only through absences, ruptures, and other ghostly traces.