scholarly journals A Conversation about Global Lives in Global History: South Korean overseas travelers and Angolan and Mozambican laborers in East Germany during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcia C. Schenck ◽  
Jiyoon Kim
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Global History ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Cold War

Transcending the Past: Singing and the Lingering Cold War in the Korean Christian Diaspora

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
HYUN KYONG HANNAH CHANG
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Vocal Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Identity And Agency ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract Protestant music in South Korea has received little attention in ethnomusicology despite the fact that Protestant Christianity was one of the most popular religions in twentieth-century Korea. This has meant a missed opportunity to consider the musical impact of a religious institution that mediated translocal experiences between South Korea and the United States during the Cold War period (1950s–1980s). This article explores the politics of music style in South Korean diasporic churches through an ethnography of a church choir in California. I document these singers’ preference for European-style choral music over neotraditional pieces that incorporate the aesthetics of suffering from certain Korean traditional genres. I argue that their musical judgement must be understood in the context of their lived and remembered experience of power inequalities between the United States and South Korea. Based on my interviews with the singers, I show that they understand hymns and related Euro-American genres as healing practices that helped them overcome a difficult past and hear traditional vocal music as sonic icons of Korea's sad past. The article outlines a pervasive South Korean/Korean diasporic historical consciousness that challenges easy conceptions of identity and agency in music studies.

Departure and Repatriation as Cold War Dissensus: Domestic Ethnography in Korean Documentary

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 433-457
Author(s):  
Jinhee Park
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
North Korea ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Given

Abstract This article examines autobiographic documentaries about families that expose “dissensus” in the mapping of transborder migration and diasporic desire that were the results of the Cold War in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan. Jae-hee Hong (dir. My Father’s Emails) and Yong-hi Yang (dir. Dear Pyongyang and Goodbye Pyongyang) document the ongoing Cold War in their fathers’ histories through their position as a “familial other,” who embodies both dissensus and intimacy. Hong reveals that anticommunism in South Korean postwar nation building reverberated in the private realm. Yang documents her Zainichi father, who sent his sons to North Korea during the Repatriation Campaign in Japan. The anticommunist father in South Korea (Hong’s) and the communist father in Japan (Yang’s) engendered family migration with contrasting motivations, departure from and return to North Korea, respectively. Juxtaposing these two opposite ideologies in family histories, as well as juxtaposing the filmmakers’ dissonance with the given ideologies in domestic space, provide the aesthetic form for “dissensus.” The politics of aesthetics in domestic ethnography manifests in that the self and the Other are inextricably interlocked because of the reciprocity of the filmmaker and the communist or anticommunist subject.

‘The Continuation of Politics by Other Means’: Britain, the Two Germanys and the Olympic Games, 1949–1972

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. GERALD HUGHES ◽  
RACHEL J. OWEN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German State ◽  
German States ◽  
British Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Sport ◽  
The Olympic Games

AbstractThis article evaluates the interplay between international sport and international politics during the cold war through an examination of the two Germanys and the Olympics from a British perspective. Germany was at the centre of Olympic and cold war politics between 1945 and the early 1970s, and the two German states competed fiercely over questions of national legitimacy. West Germany was initially successful in denying international recognition to the ‘other’ German state. East Germany countered this by developing a strategy that utilised international sport, particularly the Olympic Games, to further its claims for statehood. While recognising the flaws in the West German case against East Germany, British policy was constrained by the need to accommodate Bonn's sensibilities, given that the Federal Republic was a major ally. An examination of this ‘Olympian’ struggle from a British perspective tells us much about the West's cold war strategy and casts new light on this arena of East–West competition.

German Reunification from Three Angles

1999 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-136
Author(s):  
Robert Gerald Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
New Jersey ◽  
East Germany ◽  
German Reunification ◽  
German Unification ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
American Diplomacy ◽  
The Cold War

Robert L. Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War: An Insider’s Account of U.S. Policy in Europe, 1989-1992 (Washington, D.C. and Baltimore: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press and The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and The End of East Germany (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997)Peter E. Quint, The Imperfect Union: Constitutional Structures of German Unification (Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1997)

From Seoul to Paris

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 575-602
Author(s):  
Katri Kauhanen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
National Council ◽  
Women's Activism ◽  
Korean Literature ◽  
International Council ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Cold War

The Korean National Council of Women, a women’s organization established in 1959, has received criticism in Korean literature for its collaboration with the authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea for decades. This article, however, argues for a different kind of interpretation. The Korean National Council of Women came together to join the International Council of Women, a major international women’s organization that was looking for new affiliations in the recently decolonized parts of Asia and Africa in the midst of Cold War competition. Thus, we should view the existence of the Korean National Council of Women in the framework of transnational women’s activism and how the Cold War shaped it. After outlining the connections made between South Korean women and the International Council of Women, the article analyzes the projects proposed by the Korean National Council of Women under the anti-communist authoritarian regime. Based on archival research in South Korea and Belgium, this article argues that instead of following rules from above, the Korean National Council of Women negotiated a way to combine the advancement of women’s issues with the development of the nation. The International Council of Women, while criticizing communist women for their close relationship with the state, celebrated the achievements its South Korean affiliate made as a state-registered organization.

Destination Hong Kong: The Geopolitics of South Korean Espionage Films in the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-364
Author(s):  
Sangjoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Market Potential ◽  
James Bond ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Developmental States ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract As the apparent progeny of Cold War politics in the West, espionage films witnessed unprecedented popularity around the globe in the 1960s. With the success of Dr. No (1962) and Goldfinger (1964)—along with French, Italian, and German copycats—in Asia, film industries in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea recognized the market potential and embarked on churning out their own James Bond-mimetic espionage films in the late 1960s. Since the regional political sphere has always been multifaceted, however, each country approached genre conventions with its own interpretation. In the US-driven Cold War political, ideological, and economic sphere, developmental states in the region, particularly South Korea and Taiwan, vigorously adopted anti-communist doctrine to guard and uphold their militant dictatorships. Under this political atmosphere in the regional sphere, cultural sectors in each nation-state, including cinema, voluntarily or compulsorily served as an apparatus to strengthen the state’s ideological principles. While the Cold War politics that drive the narrative in the American and European films is conspicuously absent in Hong Kong espionage films, South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, explicitly promulgated the ideological principles of their apparent enemies, North Korea and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in their representative espionage films. This article casts a critical eye over South Korea–initiated inter-Asian coproduction of espionage films produced during the time, with particular reference to South Korea–Hong Kong coproduction of SOS Hong Kong (SOS Hongk’ong) and Special Agent X-7 (Sun’gan ŭn yŏngwŏnhi), both produced and released in 1966.

Cold War Mnemonics: History, Melancholy, and Landscape in South Korean Films of the 1960s

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 389-412
Author(s):  
Hyun Seon Park
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Trauma ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This article examines the way that cinematic mnemonics of 1960s South Korean films ciphers the heterogeneous and conflicting experiences regarding two entangled wars: the Korean War and the Cold War. In a close reading of Kim Suyong’s Mist (An’gae, 1967) and Yi Sŏnggu’s The General’s Mustache (Changgun ŭi suyŏm, 1968), the article argues for the multifaceted aesthetics of Cold War mnemonics, which illuminates a binding and unbinding technology of affective memories in which the traumatic experience of the Korean war parallels the dominant narrative of Cold War historiography. In Mist and The General’s Mustache, historical trauma and the experience of loss take up important positions in relation to melancholic landscape and mnemonic devices. Visualizing the interstice between melancholy and mourning, between memory and history, and between landscape and interiority through the devices of flashback, widescreen, montage, and metanarrative structure, the exploration of mnemonic technologies is inextricably linked with the postwar Korean subject’s dual efforts to remember historical loss and to incorporate shameful memories. While Mist shows the male protagonist’s short visit to his countryside hometown, during which he is troubled by memories of the past and, thus, his encounter with the unfinished work of mourning, The General’s Mustache, beginning with a photojournalist’s suspicious death, assembles the fragmentary pieces of modern Korean history’s secrets through multiple frames of testimony and confession. Produced during the time of Cold War turmoil as well as at the height of global modernization, these films release alternative thinking about time, memory, and history, asking us to remember what is left behind in Cold War historiography.

History, Ideology, and Human Rights

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Anthony DiFilippo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Northeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Rights Issues

This article will analyze the connection between history, countervailing ideologies, that is, the legacy of the Cold War, and the perceived identification of human rights violations as they pertain to countries with major security interests in Northeast Asia. This article will further show that the enduring nuclear-weapons problem in North Korea has been inextricably linked to human rights issues there, specifically because Washington wants to change the behavior of officials in Pyongyang so that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) becomes a state that at least remotely resembles a liberal democracy. Although supported by much of the international community, including the United States' South Korean and Japanese allies in Northeast Asia, Washington's North Korean policy has remained ineffective, as Pyongyang has continued to perform missile testing and still possesses nuclear weapons.

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