A Not-yet-postcolonial Peninsula: Rewriting Spaces of Violence, Division and Diaspora

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
Jini Kim Watson
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Korean American ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Childhood Home ◽  
Historical Accounts

In his controversial 2001 novel,The Guest(Sonnim), Hwang Sok-yong tells the story of elderly Korean American Ryu Yosŏp, who embarks on a journey back to his childhood home in Hwanghae province, now North Korea. At once a spatial, temporal, and psychological return, the novel revisits the early years of the Korean War to unveil the truth behind one of the war’s most horrific crimes: the slaughter of 35,000 Korean civilians in the Shinch’on massacre of 1950. In particular, Hwang examines the arrival of the two “guests” of the title—Christianity and Marxism—during the colonial period and their subsequent role in the violence of Shinch’on. By making visible forms of political agency achieved through the assimilation of these two guests, the novel complicates the ideological binaries that appear to have arrested decolonization of the Korean peninsula. Watson’s article reveals how Hwang’s experimental, multivocal narrative structure rewrites usual historical accounts of the Korean War and division by attending to the spatialized production of regions, nation, state, and diaspora. It offers a rethinking of the congealed ideologies, stories, desires, and topologies of this not-yet-postcolonial peninsular.

scholarly journals LIBERTY AS THE IMPOSSIBLE, THE LANGUAGE OF SILENCE: IN REREADING KIM SUYǑNG’S WORKS IN 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Seoyoon CHOI
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The 1960S

This article examines several works written by Kim Suyǒng in the 1960s with a focus on negation as the poetic method in accordance with revolution. He lived through a late colonial period, the Korean War, the April Revolution, and Park Chung Hee’s regime and he was keenly aware Koreans had not spoken of liberty as the invention of modernity in our mother tongue throughout our history. He dedicated all his poems to demonstrating why liberty was impossible to be spoken in Korean. In the course of his writing, his authentic poetic language developed into silence as a martyr, the language of death and love. In so doing, he could “live liberty” through his poetry in accordance with his conscience in the authoritarian society.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Korean War ◽  
State System ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Territorial Sovereignty ◽  
The Korean War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book tells a story of the changing script of warfare in the mid-twentieth century through the Korean War. At stake in this conflict was not simply the usual question of territorial sovereignty and the nation-state. The heart of the struggles revolved around the question of political recognition, the key relational dynamic that formed the foundation for the post-1945 nation-state system. This book argues that in order to understand how the act of recognition became the essential terrain of war, one must step away from the traditional landscape of warfare—the battlefield—and into the interrogation room.

Ku Ponung (구본웅, 具本雄) (1906–1953)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jungsil Jenny Lee
Keyword(s):  
Korean War ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Korean Art ◽  
Oil Paintings ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Literary Magazine ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Spine Curvature

Ku Ponung was a modern artist and critic active during the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War. Due to his spine curvature and eccentric personality, Ku was likened to the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and called "The Seoul Lautrec." Ku attended the Taiheiyō School of Fine Arts in Tokyo, where he was introduced to Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and other modern Western art styles. He later pioneered the acceptance of these styles in Korea. Many of Ku’s oil paintings were lost during the Korean War, but several portraits and still lifes survive. Ku worked closely with contemporaneous writers, and his friendship with the modern poet Yi Sang is well known. Ku also edited and published the literary magazine Ch’ŏngsaekchi. After the liberation of Korea from Japan in 1945, Ku worked to revitalize Korean art by experimenting with various formats and media, including traditional ink painting and newspaper illustration. His attempt at artistic revival continued, even during the turmoil of the Korean War.

“This Land Remains German”: Requisitioning, Society, and the US Army, 1945–1956

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (03) ◽  
pp. 476-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam R. Seipp
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Us Army ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article examines debates over the requisitioning of real estate by the US Army during the decade after the end of World War II. Requisitioning quickly emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the relationship between German civilians and the American occupation. American policy changed several times as the physical presence of the occupiers shrank during the postwar period then expanded again after the outbreak of the Korean War. I show that requisitioning became a key site of contestation during the early years of the Federal Republic. The right to assert authority over real property served as a visible reminder of the persistent limits of German sovereignty. By pushing back against American requisitioning policy, Germans articulated an increasingly assertive claim to sovereign rights.

The Intimacies of Complicity

2020 ◽  
pp. 241-262
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Japanese Colonialism ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Critical Methodology ◽  
Korean Christianity ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

This chapter elaborates a transnational literary critical methodology for approaching South Korean depictions of the Korean War that now circulate in the United States in translated form through an analysis of Hwang Sok-yong’s novel The Guest. This magical realist work recounts a massacre that occurred in late 1950 in which roughly thirty-five thousand residents of Sinch’on, located in what is now North Korea, were slaughtered by their friends and neighbors. This chapter situates The Guest in its domestic context, elaborating its critique of both North and South Korean nationalist narratives that tend to avoid holding Koreans themselves accountable for such atrocities, and its complex engagement with the history of Korean Christianity. Even as it does so, however, the novel also implicates Japanese colonialism and Western Christianity in the violence that erupted in Sinch’on. However, this chapter also argues that this novel in its translated form must also be read within the context of its circulation in the United States, which highlights certain aspects of it: the affinities it suggests between working-class Koreans drawn to Marxism and enslaved Africans and its critique of the bystander role adopted by the US military in relation to atrocities committed by its Korean allies.

5. Competing states, diverging societies

2020 ◽  
pp. 87-106
Author(s):  
Michael J. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Blood Culture ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Korean People ◽  
Culture History ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Korean Nation

By 1953 almost all Koreans had accepted that they belonged to a single nation united by blood, culture, history, and destiny. However, the end of the Korean War left them divided into two states. ‘Competing states, diverging societies’ explains that each state shared the same goal of creating a prosperous, modern, unified Korean nation-state that would be politically autonomous and internationally respected. The leadership of each saw the division as temporary and themselves and the state they governed as the true representative of the aspirations of the Korean people, and the legitimate successor to the pre-colonial state. While sharing many of the same goals they followed very different paths to reach them and became ever more divergent societies.

“I’ve Got a Hunch We’re Going Around in Circles”: Exceptions to American Exceptionalism in Hollywood Korean War Films

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-82
Author(s):  
Junghyun Hwang
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
War Films ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War

Hollywood Korean War films primarily aimed at integrating American citizenry into national narratives of cohesion and teleology by displacing contradictions onto the exteriority of American identity. The films dismiss the Korean War as not worth fighting for, yet simultaneously propose that fighting is the only viable option to cope with the futility of war. This paper argues that this closed rationality of we-fight-simply-because-we-fight is a symptom of cold war liberalism. And the cold war subject, caught in the circular movement of finding-while-missing the meaning, prefigures a postmodern subject of drive that transcends the fundamental lack in the process of subjectivization and finds satisfaction in the endless circular movement with no destination. Crucially, American exceptionalism functions as the state fantasy in this process of denying/displacing inconsistencies inherent to the imagined national identity. This circular rationality, which constitutes the paradigmatic subject-position of latecapitalist American culture, was constructed in the early years of the cold war, and its cultural manifestations can be traced in Hollywood films about the Korean War.

The Korean War and Its Literary Legacies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Kim
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Korean American ◽  
The Body ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Korean Diaspora ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
American Authors

Since the late 1990s, a growing number of US authors has been drawn to the Korean War, hoping to undo its status as “The Forgotten War.” The fact that it has served as the focus of novels by eminent Korean American authors like Chang-rae Lee and Susan Choi is not entirely surprising, given that they are the children of immigrants whose early lives had been shaped by the conflict. Given the extraordinarily high number of civilian deaths that resulted from the war and the many families that were fractured, the war is clearly a defining event that helped create a Korean diaspora. It has also become the focus, however, of novels by non-Korean American authors, including Toni Morrison, Rolando Hinojosa, and Ha Jin, which testifies to the fact that it was an event in which a number of domestic histories of race and transnational histories of empire converged. The body of literary works that have emerged around this event can be thought of as constituting an archive of what Michael Rothberg has termed “multidirectional memory,” one that suggests the intimacies of multiple histories involving not only Koreans and Korean Americans, but also other US racialized groups including African, Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese Americans as well as their connections to the complicated formations of empire that have shaped the relationships between Asian nations. Contending with the complexity and range of literary works that have centered on this event enables a reconsideration and expansion of what the proper subjects and objects of Asian American literary criticism are. If the field has outgrown its origins, in which the projection of a cultural nationalist vision of Asian American identity was a paramount goal, the vibrancy of these works stems from their soundings of a subject that is not univocal but multivocal. The political desires they seek to animate in their readers are not reducible to an agenda of combating domestic racism or consolidating a nativist notion of Asian American cultural identity, though they may contribute to such endeavors. More expansively, however, they articulate a multivalent range of progressive political aspirations and proliferate an array of identificatory possibilities.

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