Kim, Monica

OUR SYNOPSIS: Monica Kim locates the Korean War at the center of nation-states struggling over political recognition and sovereignty to construct the post-1945 international order. She argues that “the locus of war in the ‘new’ postwar era was the interior worlds of individual people.” (4) Warfare expanded beyond nation-states to subsume the personal. Kim finds this especially evident in the Korean War interrogation room, which the U.S. attempted to transform “into a liberal, bureaucratic space” of “free will.” (8, 107) U.S. officials gave POWs a choice over repatriation, challenging the legitimacy of their nation-states by offering the opportunity to renounce them. Within these landscapes of interrogation, the U.S. built and monitored its post-1945 version of empire under the auspices of decolonization. American POWs taken by the Korean and Chinese militaries provide alternative angles on these processes. From 1945 on, the U.S. military harnessed the infrastructure of military occupation to delegitimize Korean claims to sovereignty. This continued as the occupation developed into the Korean War. Many of this war’s POWs were incarcerated at United Nations Command Camp #1 on Koje Island. She amplifies their resistance, arguing: “Korean prisoners of war—whether Communist or anti-Communist—understood and insisted that the stakes of the war revolved around the questions of sovereignty and decolonization.” (82) By behaving defiantly, “The Korean POWs were refusing the United States’ claims to a universal moralism by disallowing the fulfillment of a detaining power’s duties—and in turn, they were critiquing the United States’ professed moral reasons for its involvement in the war.” (115)