The Unending Korean War

Abstract

As an introduction to the special issue of positions: asia critique on the unending Korean War, this opening essay calls critical attention to the war's temporal contours, shifting focus from the question of the Korean War's origins that bedeviled Korean studies throughout the Cold War to the unsettling question of why the Korean War, in our ostensibly post–Cold War moment, is still not over. This introduction highlights how the image-essays, critical analyses, and interview assembled in this issue, in challenging the war's standard 1950–53 periodization, examine the war's persistence in multiple, often overlooked modalities that call for critical and innovative interpretive practice. Against the fog of received historiography on the Korean War, the essays in this collection, by variously questioning the integrity of state-sponsored accounts of the “truth” of the war, call much-needed attention to the Korean War's legacies, its undertheorized afterlives, and its oblique yet telling ongoing manifestations.

Banal Security: Queer Korea in the Time of Viruses

“…As an analytic, though, peninsular destruction embodies the tensions and historical conditions of the South Korean present-including Japanese colonization and the authoritarian decades that followed-while also gesturing toward a broader (East) Asia narrative. It is a reminder that the Korean War remains "unending" (Hong 2015). How does this unending war, and in it the potential for peninsular destruction, infiltrate state policies, national sentiment, and individual experience in the present, and what do these garrisoned discourses say about broader Asian and even global realities?…”

A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

“…I am not as quick to pronounce a “demilitarized landscape” in South Korea, for as anthropologist Andrew Bickford (2013:31) reminds us, “to demilitarize is to … unravel the structures and processes that brought about (re)armament—a military buildup and the privileging of the military in everyday life and political life—and to link the military to normative ways of being and living.” More than demobilization and disarmament, demilitarization involves addressing “the consequences of militarization and war and to attempt to ensure that militarization can be prevented” (2013:31). The difficulty of demilitarization on the peninsula is that North and South Korea are engaged in an “unending war” (Hong 2015), and thus demilitarization might not look or feel the way it does elsewhere.…”

“…More than demobilization and disarmament, demilitarization involves addressing "the consequences of militarization and war and to attempt to ensure that militarization can be prevented " (2013:31). The difficulty of demilitarization on the peninsula is that North and South Korea are engaged in an "unending war" (Hong 2015), and thus demilitarization might not look or feel the way it does elsewhere.…”