By Seo-Young Chu · Thursday, November 29, 2018 Seo-Young Chu’s “The DMZ Responds” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
Over the years the two Koreas have been repeatedly personified and anthropomorphized (in movies, journalism, and even nonfiction books) but never in a consistent manner. Are South Korea and North Korea twin siblings separated at birth? Are they fellow patients in a psychiatric ward? Are they doomed heterosexual lovers, each unaware that the other is a spy? Are they clones? Are they organ donor (South) and recipient (North)? If not separate human beings, then are the Koreas parts of what used to be a single body that was severed? Are they nation (limb) and phantomnation (phantom limb, as experienced by an amputee), as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha suggests in her 1982 work Dictee? The inconsistency of these and other characterizations ends up revealing the tragically illogical nature of the division that made such characterizations possible in the first place. The fact that the personification of the Koreas resists coherent formulation at once reflects and explains the inability of the “two Koreas” to relate to each other in a way that makes sense.
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By Haerin Shin · Monday, September 24, 2018 Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store.
 While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
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