The de/militarised frontier: the Korean demilitarised zone, the American DMZ border guard, and US liberal empire

ABSTRACT

On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later inform the USs' foreign policy towards Cold War Asia. About a decade later, after the 1950–53 Korean War and the establishment of the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the popular US Army-produced documentary TV series The Big Picture released an episode entitled ‘Korea and You.’ It starred a fictionalised American soldier stationed near the Korean DMZ. My essay reads these two texts together. In doing so, I show how NSC’s ‘Asia’ draft, which informed official US foreign policy towards Cold War Asia for decades to come, proposed a self-reflexive, transactional, and sentimental form of militarisation that would hopefully move decolonised Asia to align with the US. As I will historicise, this liberal form of militarisation found a material and discursive home just a few years later in the ‘neutral’ space of the DMZ. I call this union of the NSC’s vision of a multilateral militarisation and the DMZ’s multinational neutrality, ‘de/militarisation.’ I then use ‘de/militarisation’ as my transnational analytic to close-read the racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings produced by ‘Korea and You.’ In doing so, I argue that the perception of the US as a violent, racist, and isolated empire – alert to its enemies, yet alone in the world – was partly transformed through a shared borderland and an imperfect border guard whose sentimentalized rehabilitation by his South Korean hosts created the appearance of an alert and inclusive guardian of Cold War Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• DMZ
• border
• Korea
• militarisation
• empire

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following organizations and people for their support and feedback: the Cultural Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis, the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch of the National Archives II, the Library of Congress, the East of California Junior Faculty Workshop (particularly Min Hyoung Song and the rest of the participants in my group), the Asian American Studies Working Group at Harvard University (particularly Evyn Espiritu, Vivian Huang, and Helen Jin Kim), Sunaina Maira, Genevieve Clutario, OiYan Poon, and Sharada Balachandran. I would like to thank, in particular, Catherine Fung for her extensive editorial help, Shannon Weber for preparing my article for submission, and Elena Dahl for her love and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a complete, historically contextualized account of Operation Paul Bunyan and the larger JSA War Crisis, see Steven Lee (Lee 2013, 183–224).

2. I made multiple attempts to identify the exact production/release dates of ‘Korea and You,’ including phone calls and emails made to the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch of the National Archives II, where I first located and watched the episode. I also contacted the US Army Signal Corps Museum in Fort Gordon, Georgia, and the Army Heritage Center Foundation. The closest approximation of the episode’s production and release date was given to me via email by Robert Thompson, staff member of the National Archives’ Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Branch: ‘1950s Exact date unknown.’ However, since it is clear from the episode itself that the Korean War had passed, and American reconstruction of war-ravaged South Korea well-underway, I estimate that ‘Korea and You’ was produced and released in the late 1950s.

3. The Communists responded to this charge by arguing that the imprisonment of all captured soldiers already constituted the use of force, and therefore, immediate repatriation removed this force.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a research travel grant awarded by the Association of Asian Studies and a graduate internship award given by the UC Davis Washington Program.