Contentious divide: The cultural politics of the Korean demilitarized zone, 1953-2008

From the end of the Korean War to the present, the international media has portrayed the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as a site of dangerous military conflict. Indeed, the border is heavily fortified and millions of troops are entrenched on both sides of the dividing line. Democratization in the South beginning in the 1980s, however, allowed for the slow development of an alternative imaginary of the DMZ in South Korea: a peaceful space of reconciliation that emphasized understanding rather than conflict. A paradigm shift in inter-Korean reconciliation occurred between 1999 and 2008, when unprecedented levels of engagement between the two Koreas took place. This dissertation is an examination of the evolution of the DMZ from Cold War-era militarized border to a liminal space where the two Koreas engaged with and negotiated the conditions of national division.;I deconstruct the dual perceptions of the DMZ by scrutinizing the spaces where the US military and South Korean people interact with the North. Interviews with Koreans from both sides of the border and a close textual analysis of the sites where interaction took place inform my investigation. I first examine a tour the US military conducts of the "truce village" of Panmunjom. Thousands of mainly western tourists willingly take the tour in spite of the apparent hazards extant there. The majority leave with their perceptions of the DMZ as a precarious danger zone in tact. Meanwhile, between 1998 and 2008, South Korean interpretations of the DMZ evolved in a dramatically contradictory course. Unprecedented tours allowed Southerners to visit the North while observatories and parks that straddle the border widely perpetuated the DMZ as a "place of peace for the twenty-first century." These spaces of engagement act as pedagogical sites for "learning" about the North. The levels of reconciliation examined here reveal a widening cleavage between the interests of Koreans on the peninsula and the US military and government. I conclude that an increasingly vocal and widespread (across the political spectrum in both the US and the two Koreas) dissatisfaction with continued US presence, suggests the US should reconsider its role on the peninsula.