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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the “Memory struggle” in-between the two Koreas presented in the documentary films after the April 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. The Children Gone to Poland and Shadow Flowers carry out politics of representation that create a new moment of cultural memories about borders normatively standardized by hostility and indifference. The two documentary films place the camera on the border of the Cold War, which connects the past and the present, which was either not recorded or was misrecorded by one side of the border and therefore erased off the surface of our memories. They are non-nationals in that they can be stateless or multinational, depending on the location of the border. As such, they disrupt the border as boundaries that have continued since the Cold War. On the other hand, the struggle of North Korean defectors to return home reveals the indifference and hostility of South Korean society over this fact, confirming the Red Complex, which eventually exists as a shadow of hospitality for North Korean defectors. In this way, the two texts invite us to confront history before the establishment of the border through war orphans or face the reality that the Cold War frontier has expanded infinitely through an individual of ambiguous identities, such as a North Korean defector.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 This paper is a rewrite of an earlier Routledge paper that expands and complements the ideas presented in the paper.
2 Turner, who approached research on border areas through the establishment process of the United States, defines the border area as an open space for expansion and change and a mobile place under continuous formation (Turner Citation2020).
3 In 2017, “Friendship Politics within the Socialist Camp in the Early Cold War” (Ruzsa Katalin Citation2007) and “People’s Solidarity and North Korean Aid between Socialist Countries in the Early Cold War” (Daniel Rupanov) were submitted simultaneously to the Department of East Asia at Sungkyunkwan University.
4 https://northkoreanarchives.org/about/about-archives/ (21 October 2021). This article is currently inaccessible.
5 It refers not to official agreements or diplomacy but to networks or ongoing exchanges maintained across borders between actors (Non-state actors), not between countries (Steven Vertovec Citation2009, 3: 21–26).
6 Sung-kyung Kim pays attention to the long-established transnational and national network of communities on the border between North Korea and China (Kim Citation2012).
7 Byung-ho Chung identifies North Korean defectors’ drive for migration as economic reasons and expectations for their superior position over other Korean migrant groups, including citizenship, settlement fees, residence facilities, settlement education, and employment support (Chung Citation2014).
8 E. Balibar argued for the advent of an era in which borders do not exist as a line in standardized specific areas or on a map but are mobile through examples of borders in various forms in diverse areas such as daily life, imagination, and reproduction (Balibar Citation1998).
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Woohyung CHON
Woohyung Chon is a professor at the Institute for Historical Studies. His recent English language publications include “Candlelight Documentary as the Cultural Politics of Recording and Memorizing, and the Emergence of the Candlelight Plaza” in Korea Journal (December 2018) and “The Vernacular Aesthetics of Conte Adaptations of Western Films in Late Colonial Korea” in Journal of Korean Studies (December 2015). Professor Chon’s Korean language publications include, among many others, a monograph Cine-roman in Colonial Era Choson (2014).