Abstract
Narrating the fictional story of an African American veteran of the desegregated Korean War, Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel Home links the violence of US military “police action” in Korea to the long history of police violence at home. This article argues that Home’s critical portrayal of the Korean War punctures two enduring 1950s myths: the myth of a peaceful domestic “color-blind” society and the myth of heroic US military intervention abroad. The article reads Home as 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. This reading shows that Morrison’s rewriting of the 1950s in Home places the contemporary idioms of police and prison abolition and transformative justice in a broader historical and global imaginative frame.
