New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. xiv, 205 pp. (Figures.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-16482-5.
The Korean demilitarized zone is one of the most heavily armed borders in the world and the most well-known vestige of a war that never officially ended. Despite this (hyper)visibility, as well as a number of popular explorations of its status as a “dangerous” tourist destination and “accidental paradise” teeming with rare species, the DMZ has largely evaded a focused and comprehensive scholarly inquiry. When mentioned, the Korean borderland is usually reduced to a dramatic hook for historical or political investigations of the peninsula that it divides, as if the DMZ were not a dynamic microcosm of these same historical and political forces. Indeed, these blurbs reinforce the popular Cold War imaginary of the DMZ as an impassable borderland frozen in time, obscuring the DMZ’s complexity as a fluid, permeable and multifaceted border that not only exists in its designated location near the thirty-eighth parallel, but also extends into the hearts, minds and bodies of both Koreas as an interpellative force. This idea of the DMZ as both a contained physical space and an uncontainable imaginary lies at the centre of Suk-Young Kim’s necessary, illuminating, and moving interdisciplinary book, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship Along the Korean Border. By reframing the DMZ as a discursive constellation of separations, reunions, prohibitions, longings, warnings, remembrances, erasures, pain, pleasure, boundary-making and boundary-undoing, Kim expands and deepens the significance of what it means to cross a border that is not meant to be crossed.
Kim, a professor of theater and East Asian studies at the UC Santa Barbara and a noted expert on North Korean cultural production, draws on an impressive range of sources from both Koreas, including documentary and narrative films, theatrical productions, and museum exhibitions, to trace the ideological heft, mis/alignments, and effects of such mis/alignments in the crosser and audiences for the crossing. What these multiple border-crossings produce, suggests Kim in her introduction, is “an alternative type of citizenship based on emotional affiliation rather than a constitutional delineation” (4), or “emotional citizenship.” As a transgressive and intimate form of belonging, emotional citizenship “resists the state’s conventional right to define citizenship”—significant since both states have long mobilized their respective citizens’ bodies and emotions to see each other as a perpetual enemy—by articulating an unwieldy and embodied affective grammar. Thus, emotional citizenship carries the potential to dislodge Cold War ideological conditioning and foster shared, rather than segregated, historical and cultural affinities.
Indeed, Kim’s close reading of cultural productions seems to follow a kind of methodology of reunification, of “sameness and difference” (3). Kim threads these principles throughout the following chapters, often comparing cultural productions of the same genre from both Koreas, and noting differences in context and content while emphasizing their similar emotional registers. For example, in the first chapter, Kim offers a close reading of two plays written in 1958—Thus Flows the Han River by South Korean playwright Yu Chi-jin and Ten Years by North Korean playwright Sin Go-song—that stresses the ways in which both plays, despite the oppositional ideological contexts of their emergence, stage similar feelings of danger and frustration of crossing, or the inability to cross, physical and imaginary borders. The second chapter compares two feature films—South Korea’s The DMZ (1965) and North Korea’s The Fates of Geumhui and Eunhui (1975)—in which Kim emphasizes their shared narrative trajectory of familial sameness over a warring difference. The third chapter compares two documentaries, North Korea’s Hail to Lim Su-kyung, the Flower of Unification (1989) and South Korea’s Repatriation (2003). In the former, Kim offers a sharp gendered analysis of the ways in which the documentary, through its elevation of South Korean college student Lim Su-kyung to the status of a revolutionary hero for daring to cross into the North, rendered visible both her Christian identity and her “uninhibited” gender presentation that countered dominant North Korean notions of the ideal body. In the latter, Kim notes the film’s humble tone and first-person perspective of the director, creating an intimate relationship of kinship between himself and the viewer, and between himself and his subjects—long-time unconverted North Korean political prisoners. The fourth chapter compares the 2010 DMZ Special Exhibition at the Korean War Memorial in Seoul and the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang. Kim argues that both employ new technologies of seeing that enhance performative embodiments of memory that forge an emotional affiliation with objects on display, and thus, a transcendent kinesthetic empathy. The last chapter focuses on the odd co-existence of recreational activities, consumptive practices and indelible reminders of national trauma at Imjingak Pavilion Peace Park. Kim convincingly argues that leisure, pleasure and consumption can be understood as meaningful emotional transactions that index a history of loss within a space of limited mobility and seeing.
While impressive in its interdisciplinary acumen, archival scope, and analytical depth, certain analytical moments did not go as far as they could have, and certain claims were not as convincing as others. For example, Kim’s claim that the use of a religious framework to immortalize Lim Su-kyung “backfired” on the North Korean government because it elicited a rethinking of South Korea, disrupted the North Korean government’s grip on its people, and inspired North Koreans to defect to the South lacks substantial supporting evidence and is thus an overreach. The book also could have benefited from a thorough historicization of the DMZ’s establishment and development, which was largely absent. I wonder how a deeper consideration of the DMZ’s materiality could have enriched its cultural analyses. I also felt like the book missed an opportunity to more thoroughly think through the relationships between neoliberalism, war and tourism in her chapter on DMZ tourism. Despite these momentary gaps and generalizations, the book’s nuanced readings of a multitude of cultural productions from both Koreas, interviews with a number of officials and activists, and moving autoethnographic passages sheds enormous insight into a divided peninsula. Hopefully the book will encourage more scholars to consider the DMZ as a worthy object of analysis in its own right.
Terry K. Park
Miami University, Oxford, USA