Suk-Young Kim. DMZ Crossing

The demilitarized zone (DMZ) that has separated the two Koreas since the end of the Korean War (1950–1953) is a 2-mile wide, 155-mile long strip of land that stands as a “monument to stalemate” (pp. 6–7). Although environmentalists have proposed turning the zone into a nature preserve for its biodiversity, as Suk-Young Kim points out, doing so could also preserve the very border over which a deadly civil war was fought, along with its attendant war traumas that continue into the present in the form of separated families and lost homes. Such multiple, conflicting attributions of the DMZ's meaning, both as defining and defying state citizenship, are the subject of this innovative study, which uses a variety of mediums, from stage plays, feature films, and documentary films, to museums and tourist sites, that in various ways perform “emotional citizenship” (Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho and George Marcus) along one of the most heavily militarized borders in the world. Instead of recapitulating the security emphasis of most studies on inter-border relations, DMZ Crossing: Performing Emotional Citizenship along the Korean Border deftly makes use of the author's expertise in performance studies to examine the border as a kind of “social dramaturgy” (Tracy C. Davis) that enacts the “performance of state authority and legitimacy” (p. 4) even while becoming an intimate affective space (p. 99). The book thus highlights the border's symbolic and emotional rather than purely material implications. In doing so, it critiques the continuation of the Cold War in Korea, not only highlighting how filmmakers and dissidents have challenged the division of the peninsula by crossing the forbidden line, but also showing how the two states have mobilized that same border to serve their own agenda of maintaining what Paik Nak-chung has termed the “‘division system’” (p. 6).

Citizenship · Computer security · DMZ · Legitimacy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Chinese history and philosophy · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies