On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later info... more On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later inform the USs' foreign policy towards Cold War Asia. About a decade later, after the 1950–53 Korean War and the establishment of the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the popular US Army-produced documentary TV series The Big Picture released an episode entitled ‘Korea and You.’ It starred a fictionalised American soldier stationed near the Korean DMZ. My essay reads these two texts together. In doing so, I show how NSC’s ‘Asia’ draft, which informed official US foreign policy towards Cold War Asia for decades to come, proposed a self-reflexive, transactional, and sentimental form of militarisation that would hopefully move decolonised Asia to align with the US. As I will historicise, this liberal form of militarisation found a material and discursive home just a few years later in the ‘neutral’ space of the DMZ. I call this union of the NSC’s vision of a multilateral militarisation and the DMZ’s multinational neutrality, ‘de/militarisation.’ I then use ‘de/militarisation’ as my transnational analytic to close-read the racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings produced by ‘Korea and You.’ In doing so, I argue that the perception of the US as a violent, racist, and isolated empire – alert to its enemies, yet alone in the world – was partly transformed through a shared borderland and an imperfect border guard whose sentimentalized rehabilitation by his South Korean hosts created the appearance of an alert and inclusive guardian of Cold War Asia.
In a studio apartment in New York City’s Chinatown, a naked Asian man swims in a vat of MSG. He ... more In a studio apartment in New York City’s Chinatown, a naked Asian man swims in a vat of MSG. He then crawls, walks, and runs on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the western Utah desert. Completely covered in salt, the man then quietly sits in the middle of a mountain forest in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean peninsula. A wild elk comes along and licks the salt from his body. After the animal walks away, the man leaps into the air, landing in a vat of MSG. The cycle begins again.
These are the three scenes that comprise the 1993 video Salt Transfer Cycle by Korean American installation artist Michael Joo. Using recent scholarship on Asian American studies, performance studies, racial mel- ancholia, and animal studies, as well as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest that in its form and substance(s), Salt Transfer Cycle critiques a national politics of developmental recovery and imagines otherwise a geohistorical performance of cyclical exchange.
On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later info... more On 31 August 1949, the National Security Council prepared an internal draft that would later inform the USs' foreign policy towards Cold War Asia. About a decade later, after the 1950–53 Korean War and the establishment of the Korean Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the popular US Army-produced documentary TV series The Big Picture released an episode entitled ‘Korea and You.’ It starred a fictionalised American soldier stationed near the Korean DMZ. My essay reads these two texts together. In doing so, I show how NSC’s ‘Asia’ draft, which informed official US foreign policy towards Cold War Asia for decades to come, proposed a self-reflexive, transactional, and sentimental form of militarisation that would hopefully move decolonised Asia to align with the US. As I will historicise, this liberal form of militarisation found a material and discursive home just a few years later in the ‘neutral’ space of the DMZ. I call this union of the NSC’s vision of a multilateral militarisation and the DMZ’s multinational neutrality, ‘de/militarisation.’ I then use ‘de/militarisation’ as my transnational analytic to close-read the racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings produced by ‘Korea and You.’ In doing so, I argue that the perception of the US as a violent, racist, and isolated empire – alert to its enemies, yet alone in the world – was partly transformed through a shared borderland and an imperfect border guard whose sentimentalized rehabilitation by his South Korean hosts created the appearance of an alert and inclusive guardian of Cold War Asia.
In a studio apartment in New York City’s Chinatown, a naked Asian man swims in a vat of MSG. He ... more In a studio apartment in New York City’s Chinatown, a naked Asian man swims in a vat of MSG. He then crawls, walks, and runs on the Bonneville Salt Flats in the western Utah desert. Completely covered in salt, the man then quietly sits in the middle of a mountain forest in the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides the Korean peninsula. A wild elk comes along and licks the salt from his body. After the animal walks away, the man leaps into the air, landing in a vat of MSG. The cycle begins again.
These are the three scenes that comprise the 1993 video Salt Transfer Cycle by Korean American installation artist Michael Joo. Using recent scholarship on Asian American studies, performance studies, racial mel- ancholia, and animal studies, as well as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest that in its form and substance(s), Salt Transfer Cycle critiques a national politics of developmental recovery and imagines otherwise a geohistorical performance of cyclical exchange.
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These are the three scenes that comprise the 1993 video Salt Transfer Cycle by Korean American installation artist Michael Joo. Using recent scholarship on Asian American studies, performance studies, racial mel- ancholia, and animal studies, as well as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest that in its form and substance(s), Salt Transfer Cycle critiques a national politics of developmental recovery and imagines otherwise a geohistorical performance of cyclical exchange.
These are the three scenes that comprise the 1993 video Salt Transfer Cycle by Korean American installation artist Michael Joo. Using recent scholarship on Asian American studies, performance studies, racial mel- ancholia, and animal studies, as well as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, I suggest that in its form and substance(s), Salt Transfer Cycle critiques a national politics of developmental recovery and imagines otherwise a geohistorical performance of cyclical exchange.