Saturday, January 3, 2009: 2:30 PM
New York Ballroom West (Sheraton New York)
On May 7, 1952, a group of Korean Communist prisoners of war “kidnapped” the U.S. camp commander of the Kojedo POW camp, the largest U.S.-controlled camp during the Korean War. The twenty-five prisoners of war demanded the cessation of repatriation screening interrogation. In turn, afterwards, the U.S. Army charged the prisoners of war with “mutiny,” and conducted the longest investigation of any case during the war. The case file, almost 500 pages in length filled with interrogation transcripts and statements, presents a singular opportunity to examine interrogation as narrative production. And as the “kidnapping” and the “mutiny” charge demonstrate, the stakes in narrating are high.
I argue that interrogation’s narrative object was the POW’s political subjectivity. To define the prisoner of war was to claim the meaning of the Korean War. Breaking out a year after the 1949 Geneva Conventions had created new “laws of war” regarding POWs, the Korean War forced the question of who would determine the legitimate interpretation of international law in the post-1945 era. The figure of the POW was the central point of controversy at the Panmunjom armistice meetings, and the May incident at Kojedo demonstrates how the Korean POWs insisted that they possessed an equal agency over the discursive construction of the prisoner of war.
This presentation examines three aspects of contestation in narrative production via this incident: 1) the strategies of protest against repatriation interrogation during the incident; 2) the narrative construction of the incident in the interrogation room; 3) the organization of the case file itself. I am reading these previously unexamined military documents as acts of narrative themselves. Rather than beginning with the written text as a finalized, closed form and the archive as a static structure, I approach both the military archive and the text as sites of struggle.
I argue that interrogation’s narrative object was the POW’s political subjectivity. To define the prisoner of war was to claim the meaning of the Korean War. Breaking out a year after the 1949 Geneva Conventions had created new “laws of war” regarding POWs, the Korean War forced the question of who would determine the legitimate interpretation of international law in the post-1945 era. The figure of the POW was the central point of controversy at the Panmunjom armistice meetings, and the May incident at Kojedo demonstrates how the Korean POWs insisted that they possessed an equal agency over the discursive construction of the prisoner of war.
This presentation examines three aspects of contestation in narrative production via this incident: 1) the strategies of protest against repatriation interrogation during the incident; 2) the narrative construction of the incident in the interrogation room; 3) the organization of the case file itself. I am reading these previously unexamined military documents as acts of narrative themselves. Rather than beginning with the written text as a finalized, closed form and the archive as a static structure, I approach both the military archive and the text as sites of struggle.
See more of: Naming War: Conflict, Remembrance, and Nostalgia in the Making and Unmaking of U.S. Hegemony
See more of: AHA Sessions
See more of: AHA Sessions
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