Overview

This module pushes us to think against the Korean War as a past, singular event by exploring its ongoing deep structural impact on the social, political, and economic dimensions of people’s everyday lives on the intensely militarized Korean peninsula, within the greater region, and in the diaspora. If the key historiographical debate in Korean studies during the Cold War fixated on the Korean War’s origins, by contrast, our framing focus on reverberations shifts attention to the ends or the lived effects and consequences of unending counterrevolutionary war. This module asks what the Korean War, as a permanent war structure, has enabled. On the one hand, what is its relationship to the national security state, the empire of American bases around the globe, the military-industrial complex, and knowledge production in the U.S. academy? On the other hand, by foregrounding the past’s reverberations into the present in ways often not readily identified with war, this module delves into diaspora, kinship, and memory as arenas imprinted by the violence of imperialist war. It traces the intimate effects of hypermilitarization and partition on multiple generations across the entangled geographies of U.S. military empire. From the repercussions of peninsular division to the structural racism of militarized sexual labor to ideological battles over how to memorialize wartime violence, this module’s questions and study materials help us understand how the Korean War’s violence is reanimated or reproduced on intimate and global scales.

Reverberations is one of nine modules of the public syllabus created by the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective. It is the first module to be rolled out. Over the next few years, the remaining modules will be introduced on a website hosted by the Korea Policy Institute (“Ending the Korean War Teaching Initiative,” https://www.kpolicy.org/ending-korean-war-teaching-initiative). As a living document, the syllabus is subject to community discussion, debate, and critique, and we, the collective members, will expand and revise it as needed. This particular module comprises eight units, each of which traces one manifestation of the unending Korean War. Insofar as any one unit can open up connections to the others, they are cumulative in effect. In order to emphasize the multiple, entangled, contemporaneous dimensions of how the unending Korean War has become part of the warp and weft of our militarized everyday, this module is structured to enable you to move through the units via different entry points and combinations, not to be constrained by the linear presentation.

With this syllabus, we sought to lay out how the ongoing Korean War does not solely affect the Korean peninsula, nor is the movement to end the war located exclusively in Korea. Solidarity with other struggles against U.S. empire and violence across the globe has been part of the on-the-ground movement to end the Korean War. Our collective has been inspired by other social justice syllabus projects such as #PRSyllabus, #IslamophobiaIsRacism, #StandingRock, and #SanctuarySyllabus.